Abstract The refugee agency is an important factor in understanding holistically, as it has economic and social components and complexities. In the context of dialogue, agency is both necessary to overcome barriers to contact and to engage meaningfully in deep listening and community planning. The authors examine three avenues of investigation into one neighborhood hosting refugee resettlement through community-driven research. Following their resettlement, economic agency of refugees—in the form of entrepreneurship—has resulted in political scrutiny and pressure on refugees. Despite the positive economic changes, the social status of refugees is contentious, especially in the absence of meaningful contact with the host society. This paper examines the economic development of refugees, a Listening Project where refugees and other community members serve together as interviewers of their neighbors and finally a Community Dialogue. Overall, the authors find that this wider context helps us examine patterns, including the throughline of agency in the success of the contact-based dialogue process.
Abstract Grassroots movements and mass protests have historically served as foundational forces shaping global political landscapes. A growing body of research agrees that digital platforms have profoundly reshaped contemporary activism and the mobilization of collective efforts. Yet scholarly conclusions remain divided and contradictory about social media’s role in civic mobilization, debating whether it merely amplifies existing dynamics or introduces a transformative impact on how dissent is organized and sustained. Furthermore, comparative empirical studies are strikingly scarce across both Western and Global South democracies, with democratic Sub-Saharan Africa representing a critical blind spot. In these regions, minimal insight exists into the cultural and structural drivers of protests, their strategic framing, organizational logics, and tactical outcomes—leaving gaps in understanding how collective action succeeds or falters in distinct sociopolitical contexts. This study contributes to the research on how culture influences the use of new media in social activism and democratic civic protest. Comparing some of the largest protests in Cabo Verde and the United States suggests the need to reconsider the full impact of the cultural shift in the intersection of social media and politics when mobilizing for collective action. Specifically, the strategic framing of protests based on national identity narratives challenged the existing social and racial inequality in both countries by replacing memories of painful pasts with a sense of legal entitlement.
Abstract The alliance between neoliberal states states and service providers—especially those engaged in issues related to gender, sex, or human trafficking—is most often described by scholars and human rights activists as a one-way street in which social workers, health care professionals, and other service providers become tools of a carceral state. These carceral humanitarian projects often lead to increased state intervention and control with dubious outcomes in terms of addressing or preventing social problems. Yet, given the literature that increasingly problematizes the state-activist binary, it is likely that service providers who partner with state actors may be more than complicit or willing collaborators. In this project, I use the concept of “institutional activism” to understand how service providers leverage their professional and moral resources to push back against or resist state actors and aims they view as problematic. I examine a wide sample of service providers in US anti-trafficking efforts through content analysis, participant observation and interviews. Since the service providers I observe neither universally support nor universally reject the aims of state carceral humanitarianism, I offer the term “Quasi-institutional Activism” to describe their position relative to the alleged binary between state carceral actors and outside opposition. I describe four interrelated ways they employ this quasi-institutional activism: deference, storytelling, professionalism and problem-solving.
Abstract Technological advancements in eco-friendly domains have increased social awareness, making community participation essential. Disruptive innovations, as noted by Bower and Christensen, can transform sectors, but their success depends on public understanding and acceptance. Overcoming skepticism requires engaging communities early in awareness and adoption. Ramirez emphasized social networks in agricultural technology uptake, while Rose and Chilvers called for inclusive, responsible innovation in smart farming. With rising energy and climate challenges, broad societal engagement—especially for solutions like agriphotovoltaics—is urgent. The Horizon Europe REGACE Project tackles this need by creating participatory models that involve farmers directly in the development of agri-photovoltaic technologies. Through interviews, open space methods, and world cafés, it ensures co-design and co-development with future users. This participatory process transforms innovation into a shared, reflective practice, enhancing environmental sustainability awareness as noted by Antonucci and alii. Spanaki et al. confirm that such approaches strengthen understanding and equitable value distribution in agriculture. In a global context shaped by political contention over farming policies, this chapter presents early outcomes from farmer participation in five partner countries of REGACE. It examines the opportunities and risks of socio-technological collaboration in agriphotovoltaics, emphasizing the transformative impact of early-stage co-design. Initial findings highlight how bottom-up participation is vital for the successful, just, and sustainable adoption of agricultural innovations.
Abstract This paper explores the causality nexus and state interventionist policies on conflicts within chieftaincy institutions using Ogun State as a case study. A qualitative survey was carried out in the State, focusing on a limited number of chieftaincy cases in Omu-Ijebu and Ijebu-Ode towns. Qualitative data were collected and analyzed using the content analysis method. This paper reveals the causal factors of conflicts in chieftaincy institutions that include the succession process to a vacant stool, misuse of stool revenue, economic greed or self-interest, clashes of traditional beliefs, and state interference. The intervention of the State government in the resolution of chieftaincy conflicts has not yielded significant results due to poor levels of education, religious beliefs, and heavy reliance on traditional powers among the concerned individuals and groups in the State. This paper, therefore, concludes that local stakeholders should demonstrate a high sense of morality and refrain from exploiting sentiments for chieftaincy favors. While also recommending that state interventionist policies should emphasize non-formal approaches as desirable for solving chieftaincy conflicts.
Social movement organizations are concerned and cognizant of their public image and typically need to maintain positive public perception to gain and sustain support. White supremacist organizations believe that they are highly stigmatized, reviled, and surveilled groups and go to great lengths to protect their desired self-representation. Through a qualitative analysis of close to 2 million Discord chat messages from white supremacist organizations, I find that white nationalist groups attempt to cater their public appearances through three primary axes: organizational, activism, and individual/membership. This chapter uses concepts from Goffmanian sociology, such as Stigma, Impression Management, and Frontstage/Backstage, to highlight how political movements discuss, argue, and debate the public image they wish to deploy. Studies on right-wing movements tend to be "externalist" in the sense that they look at publicly available documents which privilege the views of leadership. This chapter uses a dataset which delves into the social movement "backstage," enabling us to view white supremacists' private conversations, their impression management strategies, and how they wish to appear on the "frontstage."
One of the longest running protests in recent American history was a Sing-Along in the Wisconsin State Capitol Building. This daily informal gathering to sing protest songs began in 2011, then prompted a sudden wave of arrests beginning in 2013. Instead of dwindling, the protest grew in response as participants celebrated resistance, treating arrest as a local in-group status symbol. This chapter uses extended participant observation, a methodological approach rarely found in the social movement literature on repression, to study the attempted repression of this Solidarity Sing-Along. To a remarkable extent, arrests and court prosecutions were ineptly executed. This ineptitude had consequences for the protest's development. This repression was also generally mild. Examining mild repression, less often studied than severe forms, helps elaborate the range of repression's potential consequences. By showing mild repression in ethnographic detail, this chapter reveals an underappreciated messiness on the part of both repressors and repressed. The movement evolved in a messy way in response to messy repression, an evolution that is not well captured with dichotomous categories of increase versus decrease or failure versus success.
This chapter examines how groups' tactical selection shapes social movement mobilization and survival. I focus on 35 Indivisible groups founded in 10 American cities immediately after the 2017 Women's March. I analyze the descriptions of over 8,000 events on group Facebook pages from 2017-2019 and conduct 25 interviews with group members. These data allow me to assess how the type, diversity, and flexibility of tactics shape group mobilization and survival. I find that groups that use more protest and electoral tactics and those that use a diversity of tactics host more events and are more likely to survive over time. Being consistent in tactics was successful when groups used political tactics, particularly protest and electoral activities. Groups that engaged in a variety of tactics could also be successful, particularly in smaller and more conservative settings. This research illuminates the complex and situational ways that tactical choices matter for social movement longevity.
Scholars typically assume that rights-based movements have generalizable impacts upon social inequalities; yet inequality reduction may be unequally distributed across space. By focusing on the American civil rights movement a movement oriented toward achieving equal opportunity for people of color, especially Black Americans in the US South - this research evaluates whether reductions in racial inequality were contingent upon an active local movement presence or if all areas benefited equally. Census data from periods before and after the civil rights movement (1950 and 1980) are utilized to construct a measure of racial inequality change, focused upon high school graduation and management occupation employment rates. The presence of "the Big Four" civil rights organizations (the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE], the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP], the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC], and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC]) in Southern counties helps to explain this change in racial inequality. Counties which had certain civil rights organizations were more likely to experience a greater reduction in racial inequality than counties that didn't have such organizations. Education equity improved in counties that were less Black, more urban, had HBCUs, and CORE or SNCC organizational presence.
This study examines the barriers and drivers to student-led mobilization for sustainability in higher education institutions (HEIs) across Canada. Findings indicate that the most common barrier to student mobilization was a lack of political opportunities and social capital. In response, the findings indicate that the primary drivers that student-led sustainability groups used to overcome barriers included: sharing framing perspectives to inspire and motivate action across campuses, using social networks to borrow and leverage social capital from other stakeholders, and impacting campus stakeholder behaviors resulting in the creation of a culture of sustainability. Social movement theories have been applied to the barriers and drivers to student-led action in order to provide a deeper understanding of how students mobilize on campuses. The findings suggest that while students may struggle to elicit policy changes across HEIs due to common barriers, their efforts can successfully shift the campus culture of sustainability. This study addresses an identified need for more literature investigating sustainability activism in higher education more broadly and more specifically fills a gap in our understanding of how student activism may contribute to social change.
Social movements are not monolithic entities. Activists and organizations disagree about the goals of the movement and the tactics to achieve these goals, including their framing tactics. Cultural sociologists have questioned the idea that tactical choice is rationally and strategically oriented, arguing that tactics are morally and emotionally grounded in the activists' lives. We follow this insight, though suggesting that activists make constant efforts to experience their action as rational, claiming a strategic status and a sense of efficacy for their lines of action. By studying framing resonance disputes in interactions between animal rights activists and mass media in south Brazil, we found that, to make their tactics accountable and justifiable, activists mobilize different folk theories on social transformation which allow their actions to be experienced as the best means to achieve the movement's ends.
Knowledge of how social movements move, diffuse, and expand collective action events is central to movement scholarship and activist practice. Our purpose is to extend sociological knowledge about how movements (sometimes) diffuse and amplify insurgent actions, that is, how movements move. We extend movement diffusion theory by drawing a conceptual analogue with military theory and practice applied to the case of the organized and highly disciplined nonviolent Nashville civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We emphasize emplacement in a base-mission extension model whereby a movement base is built in a community establishing a social movement school for inculcating discipline and performative training in cadre who engage in insurgent operations extended from that base to outlying events and campaigns. Our data are drawn from secondary sources and semi-structured interviews conducted with participants of the Nashville civil rights movement. The analytic strategy employs a variant of the "extended case method," where extension is constituted by movement agents following paths from base to outlying campaigns or events. Evidence shows that the Nashville movement established an exemplary local movement base that led to important changes in that city but also spawned traveling movement cadre who moved movement actions in an extensive series of pathways linking the Nashville base to events and campaigns across the southern theater of the civil rights movement. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications.
Scholarship on social movements, conflict, and change employs an array of methods and poses multiple methodological challenges.Bearing this in mind, when we wrote the call for papers for this special issue of Research in Social Movements, Conflict & Change (RSMCC), we identified a variety of potential topics that might fit the theme and included an open invitation to look beyond the topics we identified.The papers we received reflect the openness of the call, covering an exciting range of topics that engage qualitative and quantitative data, speak to issues related to data collection, coding, and analysis, and employ archival research, interviews, ethnography, and computational methods.We believe that these contributions reflect the breadth and diversity of scholarship in this field.The research in this volume, however, also consistently speaks to one particular methodological challenge that scholars of social movements, conflict, and change grapple with regardless of our methodological, theoretical, or substantive orientation-namely, the interests represented by our data sources.This thematic coherence was not expected, but, in retrospect, it is also not surprising.The questions of who generated data, how data were generated, the nature of sources' orientation toward the topic at hand, and the interests that sources represent are present to some degree in all research on social movements, conflict, and change.As reflected in the papers in this volume, most data sources on social movements, conflict, or other forms of contentious politics have some stake in, or take on, the issues they are used to explore.Whether our data come from news outlets, activists' social media posts, or individual ethnographers, researchers must account for the positionalities and perspectives embedded in their data as they
Under which conditions do social movements receive extensive attention from the mainstream news media? We develop an institutional mediation model that argues that combinations of the news-heightening characteristics of movements, including their disruptive capacities, organizational resources, and political orientation, and political contexts, including partisan regimes and benefiting from national policies, bring extensive attention to movements. It also holds that investigations will draw extensive media attention to movements, and those that have achieved prominence in the news will remain prominent under specific conditions. We appraise these combinational arguments by examining 29 social movements across 100 years in four national newspapers using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Researchers typically use QCA to study the consequences of movements when they hypothesize outcomes to result from multiple combinations of conditions. This raises our second main question: How should scholars best address combinational hypotheses using QCA? Here we employ Venn diagrams to identify and illustrate key analytical issues and anomalies, including constrained diversity in observational data, empirical instances when combinations of conditions do not produce the expected outcome, and instances when unexpected combinations of conditions produce a consistent result. We also demonstrate the value of broad comparisons across movements and over time in these analyses.
Social movements are made up of organized groups and individuals working together to accomplish shared objectives. Under what circumstances do active groups build and break their coalitions? Five conditions have been identified in the literature as influencing coalition formation: common identity, resources, organizational structure, historical connection, and institutional setting. Whereas coalition dynamics within a movement wave are best understood in terms of institutional opportunities and threats, further research is needed to determine how and to what extent these contextual elements influence coalitions. This chapter examines how threats posed by indiscriminate and selective repression affect the shape and structure of interorganizational coalitions during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests in Hong Kong. The analysis relies on an original political event dataset and an organization-event network dataset. These datasets were produced utilizing syntactic event coding techniques based on Telegram posts, which Hong Kong protesters used to distribute information, plan future actions, and crowdsource news. Furthermore, Telegram provides detailed information about state activities, event-level coalitions, and violent groups, which is difficult to access from other sources. This study investigates the coalition networks across the movement's four stages, each of which was marked by a particular type and degree of repression. The findings indicate that indiscriminate and selective repression have varied effects on coalition networks. A wide coalition disintegrates as a result of indiscriminate repression. Selective repression, however, leads to the formation of coalitions around activist groups targeted by repression.
We are long overdue for a conversation about ethical treatment of student researchers. Ethical treatment of research participants has been carefully defined through decades of public conversation, and ethical practices have been institutionalized through mechanisms like mandatory ethics trainings and Institutional Review Boards. Student researchers deserve the same level of consideration. While there are many types of ethical violations of student labor in research projects, there are two that are of particular concern to social movements researchers: use of volunteer labor without clear academic or professional benefits, and failure to ensure the safety of student researchers. The first of these ethical violations is especially common in social movements research because of the emergent nature of protests: new rounds of protests begin and researchers seek to rapidly collect data on a tight timeframe, making grant funding to pay student researchers challenging. The second situation emerges when faculty researchers do not consider the ways students' race, gender identity, or other characteristics, or the nature of the protests themselves might create potential risks for students.In this paper, I propose using the Belmont Report principles to create guidelines for ethical treatment of student researchers. While these principles were developed for the purposes of protecting research participants, the principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice help us to clarify the risks and benefits for student researchers, to find ways to maximize the benefits of student research participation, and to understand and address the inequalities that plague graduate student training.
Satellite images can be a powerful source of data for analyses of conflict dynamics and social movements, but sociology has been slow to develop methods and metadata standards for transforming those images into data. We ask: How can satellite images become useful data? What are the key methodological and ethical considerations for incorporating high-resolution satellite images into conflict research? Why are metadata important in this work? We begin with a review of recent developments in satellite-based social scientific work on conflict, then discuss the technical and epistemological issues raised by machine processing of satellite information into user-ready images. We argue that high-resolution images can be useful analytical tools provided they are used with full awareness of their ethical and technical parameters. To support our analysis, we draw on two novel studies of satellite data research practices during the Syrian war. We conclude with a discussion of specific methodological procedures tried and tested in our ongoing work.
Social movement scholars use protest events as a way to quantify social movements, and have most often used large, national newspapers to identify those events. This has introduced known and unknown biases into our measurement of social movements. We know that national newspapers tend to cover larger and more contentious events and organizations. Protest events are furthermore a small part of what social movements actually do. Without other readily available options to quantify social movements, however, big-N studies have continued to focus on protest events via a few large newspapers. With advances in digitized data and computational methods, we now no longer have to rely on large newspapers or focus only on protests to quantify important aspects of social movements. In this paper we use the environmental movement as a case study, analyzing data from a wide range of local, regional, and national newspapers in the United States to quantify multiple facets of social movements. We argue that the incorporation of more data and new methods to quantify information in text has the potential to transform the way we both conceive of and measure social movements in three ways: (1) the type of focal social movement organization included, (2) the type of tactics and issues covered, and (3) the ability to go beyond protest events as the primary unit of analysis. In addition to demonstrating ways that the focus on counting protest events has introduced specific biases in the type of tactics, issues, and organizations covered in social movement research, we argue that computational methods can help us extract and count meaningful aspects of social movements well beyond event counts. In short, the infusion of new data and methods into social movements, peace, and conflict studies could lead us to a substantial shift in the way we quantify social movements, from protest events to everything that occurs outside of them.
This paper discusses data-collection strategies that use digitized historical newspaper archives to study social conflicts and social movements from a global and historical perspective focusing on nationalist movements. I present an analysis of State-Seeking Nationalist Movements (SSNMs) dataset I, which includes news articles reporting on state-seeking activities throughout the world from 1804 to 2013 using the New York Times and the Guardian/Observer. In discussing this new source of data and its relative value, I explain the various benefits and challenges involved with using digitized historical newspaper archives for world-historical analysis of social movements. I also introduce strategies that can be used to detect and minimize some potential sources of bias. I demonstrate the utility of the strategies introduced in this paper by assessing the reliability of the SSNM dataset I and by comparing it to alternative datasets. The analysis presented in the paper also compares the labor-intensive manual data-coding strategies to automated approaches. In doing so, it explains why labor-intensive manual coding strategies will continue to be an invaluable tool for world-historical sociologists in a world of big data.
