Social Movement Studies Research Articles

Prefigurative politics in action research for just cycling futures

ABSTRACT The paper proposes that action research, not as a predefined set of methods but rather as a mode of research, should be considered a key asset in creating transformative knowledge on just cycling futures. I explain, firstly, why action-oriented, experimental, and participatory research should deploy the concept of prefigurative politics – the performing of not-yet cycling futures here and now – as a theoretical, methodological and practical resource to counter hegemonic, oppressive, essentialist and authoritarian mobility rationalities. Second, I argue why prefigurative action research is most applicable when involving diverse actors across cycling governance networks into a democratic social learning process. These arguments are developed by synthesising literatures from social movement studies and mobility and transport justice, and by providing examples of four social cycling innovations among a population often marginalised from transport policy and planning – children and young people. In conclusion, the paper proposes a model for conducting prefigurative action research on cycling.

Healthy people, soils, and ecosystems: uncovering primary drivers in the adoption of regenerative agriculture by US farmers and ranchers

As regenerative agriculture grows in popularity, policy and decision-makers have become interested in its practices. Yet, little is known about those factors driving its adoption among farmers and ranchers. To better understand these drivers, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 31 farmers and ranchers across the United States (US) who self-identified as practitioners of regenerative agriculture. In doing so, we asked about relational values, which reflect one’s perspectives around the links between humans and nature. We also asked about economic and environmental drivers for adoption. In the analysis, we used qualitative coding to identify the range of values and factors driving adoption across our sample. We found that 1) improving the health of people, soils, and ecosystems - through farming practices and related social configurations - was a primary driver for adoption, 2) that relative economic privilege, particularly across two extremes - privileged idealism and less privileged necessity - correlated with most drivers for adoption, 3) that a shift away from industrial agriculture was at once a moral, economic, and environmental imperative for many practitioners, and 4) a systems view of social-ecological relationships was seen as a key to adoption and societal transitions. While our sample represents only a narrow segment of the regenerative agriculture movement in the US, our findings can serve as a useful starting point for understanding the drivers for its adoption. Our findings may also inform conversations on regenerative agriculture’s potential to support food-related sustainability transitions. The discussion situates our work amidst sustainable agriculture and social movement studies, questions of equity in food systems transitions, and the benefits of studying values in developing policy-relevant solutions.

Achieving Organizationality Through Authorship Affordances — A Communicative Episode of Telegram Polling from 2019 Hong Kong

ABSTRACT In 2019, Hong Kong activists mobilized against the proposed Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) and relied on a mobile chat-app’s polling feature to make collective decisions. To understand the chat-app’s role in the movement’s ‘backstage’ dynamics — i.e., building coalitions, making decisions, and coordinating action away from public view — I analyzed a series of Telegram polls during the Anti-ELAB movement's airport sit-in/takeover. To generate insights into social movement studies, I combined aspects of a vibrant stream of research known as Communication as Constitutive of Organizing (CCO) with a nuanced use of the affordances concept. To identify the backstage dynamics of the movement, I applied criteria from the organizationality concept to assess the extent to which the movement communicatively exhibited organizational characteristics. Therefore, I addressed how chat-app polling facilitated collective decision-making and cultivated the movement’s social address and collective identity. Recognizing chat-app polling as pivotal in transforming voiced concerns to legitimized authority, I identified three authorship affordances that fostered authority practices: anonymity, hyper-temporality, and affectivity. This study makes three contributions: (1) it extends the understanding of backstage organizational dynamics of social movements by adding two additional criteria of collective decision-making and collective actorhood to the extant criteria of collective identity, (2) it refines the affordances concept to explore how chat-apps influence data-related practices in contentious politics, and (3) it provides a novel method of analysis to isolate and investigate the processual dynamics of authority practices.

Failing to Mobilize: Prosecutors’ Framing Efforts and Anticorruption Campaigns

Social movement scholars have demonstrated that activists can increase mobilizing attitudes by articulating collective action frames. However, these studies have left unresolved whether and under which conditions state officials such as prosecutors can effectively use collective action frames to trigger mobilizing attitudes. This study draws on an experiment in Brazil to test the effect of different components of collective action frames articulated by prosecutors: identity, agency, urgency, and injustice frames that highlight the material or immaterial consequences of the issue. Respondents were randomly assigned to watch videos that simulated a press conference in which prosecutors discussed a corruption investigation and called for public support using different frames. Although social movement studies would lead us to expect framing components to effectively trigger mobilizing attitudes, results revealed that none of the frames consistently and significantly affected willingness to mobilize against corruption or support for bills that strengthen or weaken prosecutors’ anticorruption efforts.

Lifestyle for social change? Exploring framing and lifestyle politics in the Chinese zero waste movement

The politicisation of everyday life and the proliferation of lifestyle movements have far-reaching consequences on processes of social change. Based on 45 in-depth interviews and virtual ethnography of lifestyle communities, this article reveals how sustainable lifestyle is interpreted and promoted in relation to pro-environmental social change in the ‘zero waste’ movement in urban China. Building on the framing perspective in social movement studies, I use ‘participant frames’ as a heuristic device to uncover bottom-up processes of meaning-making in lifestyle movements. The results reveal that frames constructed by citizen-consumers transitioned from a political and systemic diagnosis to a cultural and communal prognosis, and ultimately centre on a ‘call to action’ that emphasises individual and private actions. The ‘dissonance’ in framing, which involves promoting depoliticised actions while being motivated by political grievances and desires for systemic change, illustrates how citizens navigate structures of opportunities and constraints in China. Through deliberate depoliticisation, lifestyle activism leans towards constructive engagement with institutional actors rather than contentious confrontation and relies on the diffusion of sustainable lifestyle among the general public as the primary tactic for change. By incorporating methodological innovation and presenting new empirical findings from a non-Western context, this article advances the ongoing discussions surrounding political consumption and lifestyle politics.

*EXPLORING NIGERIA`S ENDSARS MOVEMENT THROUGH THE NEXUS OF MEMORY*

On 3 October 2020, a 22 years young man, Joshua Ambrose, was shot dead by a team of the Nigerian Police Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in Delta State, Nigeria, on the allegation that he was an Internet fraudster (Dambo et al., 2021). The SARS was established in 1992 to curb crimes. However, the SARS has been accused of gross humanrights violations (Wada, 2021). Joshua's shooting was captured in a video. The audio in the video states that the Police just shot and killed the owner of a Lexus SUV and zoomed off with his car (Agbo, 2021). In a few days, the viral video generated outrage that transformed into vast decentralised street protests in major cities in Nigeria, mainly organised through social media. EndSARS Movement continues to construct memories across time, an area dominated by Western studies (Daphi & Zamponi, 2019). Researchers (Nwakanma, 2022; Dambo et al., 2021; Nwabunnia, 2021; Ajaegbu et al., 2022) have explored the EndSARS Movement from diverse perspectives. Nonetheless, the literature is devoid of studies from the memory study perspective, a critical area in social movement studies (Smit, 2020; Merill & Lindgren, 2020). Besides, considering the online feature of the Movement, the current literature on EndSARS needs to include the novelty and methodological rigour of virtual ethnography. Consequently, this study attempts to understand how protesters use Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram Stories (Ephemeral; 24 hours $2 ) to construct a memory of the EndSARS Movement in Nigeria from 2020 until its Anniversaries in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

Populist agenda-setting

ABSTRACT Populist agenda-setting is under-theorized, in part because of the fragmentation of scholarship on populism and agenda-setting. Policy studies has concentrated on the ideas, agents, and mechanisms of mainstream agenda-setting; comparative political economy, political sociology, comparative politics have centred on the sources of populism; and party politics, social movement, and political communication studies have focused on the characteristics of the populists themselves. This article builds on all such literatures to theorise the interactive effects of populism on agenda setting when populists are on the outside, in elective office, or in government. Using the four ‘Ms’ of populists’ ‘discursive construction of discontent’ – message, messenger, medium, and milieu – the article examines how populist messages shape the policy narrative; how populist messengers frame the debate; how they use the media to captivate ‘the people;’ and why, depending on milieu, populists are able to leverage ‘the people’s’ support to upend the mainstream and/or capture power.

The Frame Analysis of Social Movements: The Illustration of A Dynamic Approach to Framing

There is a diversity of approaches to the use of frame analysis in political studies of social movements. In this study, the concept of framing is considered as an analytical tool for considering the processes associated with civic activism of social movements’ representatives and their subjective coverage of these processes within the framework of positioning themselves in social media. The study presents the so-called “dynamic approach” to framing as the most adequate to the subject of research. It is presented in application to the case of the modern Russian political movement “Future. Society” and the campaigns of its activists to protect the Bitsevsky forest from development in 2022-2023. This example describes various opportunities provided to researchers by frame-analytical optics for working with the analysis of social movements. In particular, it can deepen the understanding of the reasons for the emergence of new social movements in modern Russian public space, their gaining popularity and support among the Internet audience and the mobilization of their activists. In addition, the study suggests that researchers consider a number of new questions about the essence of frames and their connection with narratives and storytelling.

Caring for the Child, Caring for the Family: The Clash over the National Strategy for the Child (2019–2030) in Bulgaria

The article explores the different meanings behind the narratives of “family,” “childcare,” and “child protection” in public discourses against the National Strategy for the Child (NSC) 2019–2030 in Bulgaria. These meanings are seen as reflecting the intertwining and cumulative effects of transnational and local influences in the anti-gender movement. Using frame analysis as an approach in social movement studies, the aim is to analyse the main ideas of NSC opponents—conservative far-right non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and citizens who joined the discussion during the public debate on the Strategy in January 2019. We differentiate between the discourses of the NGOs and the critical citizens, paying attention to the way they use the narrative of return—return to traditional family forms and child-rearing models. The conservative NGOs declared themselves to be defenders of Bulgarian children and families against the liberal policies of the European Union (EU) and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lobbies. The citizens’ discourse is directed against the child-centred philosophy of the Strategy, seen as a threat to both the children themselves and parents’ rights, but it rarely mentions LGBT and gendering as a danger. The discussion revealed the deep distrust of citizens and parents towards the state and its institutions, which was amplified and instrumentalized by the far-right NGOs who mobilized and organized a mass social movement against the Strategy.

Performative censorship: Why some free speech conflicts should be taken seriously but not literally

In some speech-related disputes, censors do not gauge their success by whether the challenged cultural product or practice has been suppressed in accordance with their explicit demands. This article proposes a theory of performative censorship that can help explain this paradox. Building on the concepts of expressive laws and symbolic crusades from legal studies and social movement studies respectively, performative censorship disputes are defined as contentious episodes in which demands for or against speech regulation are expressed partly for the broader objective of gaining recognition for a group’s way of life, dignity or status. Case studies of two highly contentious conflicts are offered: over Confederate statues in the United States and cartoons of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed. The case studies show that movements’ goals and tactics are neither uniform nor static, making them more complex but also presenting opportunities for de-escalation.

Engaged and Reflexive Sociology for Environmental Health1

The article examines my environmental health work for nearly four decades with many environmental activists and organizations, as well as scientists and government officials. I discuss how I have merged research and advocacy, while mentoring many students and colleagues on how to do that. I discuss my efforts to conduct transdisciplinary work that crosses social sciences, environmental health science, environmental justice, social movement studies, and science and technology studies, while centering that work on community‐based participatory research. I examine my ability to do the practical work of serving public health and the broader social good, while also developing theoretical and analytical concepts along the way. I discuss the importance of continually being reflective about these many areas of work, both personal reflexivity and reflexive, evaluative discussions with collaborators.

Sacralising the secular: constructing ‘religion’ in social movement scholarship

ABSTRACT This article investigates how social movement scholars construct the category of ‘religion’ within the discipline. Using some of the conceptual tools from the critical study of religion – namely, problematising the distinction between the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ – it analyzes a sample of articles within the journals Social Movement Studies and Mobilization between 2010 and 2020 that deal with a broad range of religious, spiritual, and ‘religion-like’ or ‘secular sacred’ phenomena. I find three key trends within the data: social movements literature has a narrow construction of what constitutes ‘religion’; those things designated ‘religious’ are often instrumentalized in service to ‘political’ ends; and social movement scholars are more likely to study conservative and extreme politics where it intersects with groups considered ‘religious’ than with those considered ‘secular.’ The article invites scholars of social movements to consider how particular conceptions of both ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are naturalised within the field.

Urban social movements and local state capacity

Studies of social movements generally focus on the mechanisms through which movements affect the political will of states. Much of this research, in turn, implicitly assumes that the state has the capacity to realize the decisions adopted as a result of movement action. Focusing on local governments in young democracies, this article examines whether and how state capacities contribute to movement-initiated policy change and associated delivery in the sphere of housing and land use. It analyzes contrasting cases of local state capacities using a paired “most-similar” comparison of two megacities of the Global South, each of which underwent transitions to democracy in the past three decades: São Paulo, Brazil, and Johannesburg, South Africa. In São Paulo, state capacities facilitated policy success. These capacities were developed through interactions between movements and key bureaucratic allies. In Johannesburg, by contrast, the local bureaucracy became both impervious to movement pressure and unable to counter strategies by business elites to weaken efforts at policy reform. State capacity in this case hindered reforms. As a result, in São Paulo, sequential, reinforcing feedback loops of city-wide movement mobilization and formal policy reforms took shape. In Johannesburg, lack of openness of the state to civil society led grassroots movement organizations to refrain from city-wide policy reform efforts and to increasingly organize their activity at the neighborhood and street levels.

Unity through separation: spatial divisions and intra-movement relations in Lebanon’s October Uprising

ABSTRACT Within the field of social movement studies, scholars have devoted increasing attention to how protesters reclaim and organize public spaces. Case studies reveal that protesters often split up larger reclaimed spaces by drawing internal, sometimes invisible, boundaries. So far, however, the subdivision of protest spaces remains an under-theorized phenomenon. Through a case study of Lebanon’s 2019 October Uprising, this article contributes to disentangling how spatial subdivisions emerge and shape relations between protesters. The study relies on fieldwork observations and interviews with 51 protesters from Lebanon’s second-largest city, Tripoli, where the protest space was divided into three main zones, reflecting social, ideological, and tactical fault lines in the city’s uprising. By employing Löw’s concepts of spacing and synthesis, it analyzes how Tripoli’s protesters came to associate these three zones with diverging identities, ideologies, and tactical orientations, while also connecting them together as functional parts of the larger movement. Although the separation of Tripoli’s protest space did not alleviate disagreements and conflicts, the article finds that subdivisions facilitated a thin form of order and helped protesters make sense of their internal differences.

The Role of the Body in Pandemic Geographies of Encounter: Anti-Restriction Protesters Between Collective Action and Political Violence

This article looks at public anti-restriction protests by framing public space as a vital component of urban life. It argues that the body is rarely introduced as a scale of spatial analysis and usually plays a more prominent role in the subfields of social movement or public space studies, which often tend to focus on the transformative and emancipatory side of urban encounters. By integrating a corporeal perspective, the article aims at understanding how the body transforms political passions into individual agency and collective action. Focusing on the Covid-19-crisis-related protests, particularly the anti-restriction protests, the study examines from different angles how a socially heterogeneous group consisting of both radicals and sceptics joined together, in anger, in an atypical coalition concerning state interventions in their very personal spaces. Based on a literature review of secondary sources on anti-restriction protests and an empirical analysis of media coverage of a key event in Vienna, the study identifies a gap in the theorisation of ambivalent geographies of encounter whose impacts range between collective action and political violence. To frame our key hypothesis, considering the body as a scale in spatial analysis is needed for future socio-spatial research to grasp new and pressing urban phenomena of social change. By bridging empirical observation, methodological considerations and conceptual reflection, this article contributes to an understanding of social change through less romanticised modes of analysis of geographies of encounter with a particular take on embodied space.

Toward an integrated analysis of social movements and new religious movements research

AbstractDespite calls from researchers for intersectional studies between religion and social movements over the past few decades, scholars have not engaged in fruitful conversation about integrating the two disciplines. This article aims to facilitate such discussion by examining the topic of new religious movements (NRMs). I first review the existing literature on NRMs and discuss why NRM research has been neglected in social movement studies. Then, I explore a few research areas where both NRM studies and social movement research could intersect and benefit from a synthetic approach. Specifically, I suggest that social movement studies could advance through the examination of some relatively ignored subjects of research, such as persistent participation and disengagement, by drawing on empirical cases of NRMs. I also propose ways in which the application of social movement theories would enhance our understanding of different aspects of NRMs, such as their leadership and coalition practices. In making these arguments, I refer to one of the prominent, long‐term NRMs, the Unification Church or Movement, to help illustrate my ideas.

The lyricism of revolution: A choreographic analysis of the 2003 and 2014 protests in Hong Kong

Through the 2003 and 2014 protests in Hong Kong, this paper proposes using choreographic analysis for the study of social movements in terms of corporal movements. By looking at the organization of actions and creation of postures and gestures and all the movements driven by the mental force lyricism, choreographic analysis seeks to identify and articulate the infinite potential, realized and not, revealed in a revolution, that marks the latter as a singular moment of eternity that produces new thoughts. As the case of Hong Kong shows in the light of this method, the site of radical politics locates in the persisting colonial alienation that separates the people from the authority.

Social Movements, Power, and Mediated Visibility

This article focuses on how the anthropological study of media—through an examination of its production, circulation, and consumption—elucidates issues of social organization, political economy, and alternative visions for political futures. By bringing together the studies of visual media, social movements, and hegemonic power by anthropologists and ethnographers of media since the turn of the twenty-first century, this review article provides a critical understanding of research about our current media environment, where scholarship within anthropology is heading in these domains, and what looking at these three fields together can mean for a more robust understanding of our political, social, and cultural futures.

Challenging the Hegemony of the Grand Paradigm of Social Movement Studies: A Review of Paradigmatic Weaknesses

The study of social movements today is dominated by three grand paradigms (grand theory) in the 1980s, and even in Indonesia since the 70s. The three major paradigms of study are the "structural tension paradigm", the "resource mobilization paradigm", and the "identity-oriented paradigm", all of which have become the main sources of reference in various studies that have been developed. Through the literature review method, the critical analysis in this article aims to map, classify and categorize the grand theory and its influence on various social movement studies in Indonesia. The findings of this article show that the "structural tension" paradigm fails to consider how individuals experience dispossession as embedded in broader social structures. The "resource mobilization" paradigm places too much emphasis on collective action, which tends to be squeezed into market theory and consumerism. Placing the target achieved is only a political target, oriented towards the "economic man" (socios economiculus), which merely calculates a deterministic hedonistic calculus. While the "identity-oriented" paradigm fails when positioning the identity of new collective actors is recognized, then by themselves their expressive actions can be transformed into instrumental actions whose names can be seen clearly as a case of institutionalizing collective mobility. In conclusion, in many cases today's theorists have synthesized the insights of earlier older schools while adding dimensions that they overlooked. The overall trend, which one would like to focus on, is the clustering of large structures in favor of a concern with the micro-foundations of social and political action.

Reimagining the Istanbul Encampment of 2013

Abstract This article rests upon two kinds of deductions: first a lack of scholarly engagement within cultural constructs of religion in mainstream social movement studies; and the second, the quasi-religious aspects of occupy-like movement. These two problematics, one theoretical, and one ethnographic, are drawn together through Edith Turner’s conceptualization of communitas in light of the fieldwork findings derived from the encampment established at Istanbul’s Gezi Park in 2013.