Navigating Interests and Cultivating Innovation in the Study of Social Movements, Conflict, and Change

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