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Data has increased currency in contemporary activism and has become an integral part of the action repertoire of today's social movements. But data and data infrastructure are not only tools to support a movement's struggle: they are constitutive parts of the environment in which movements operate, and objects of contention in their own right. These developments challenge scholars of social movements and collective action. How are movements changing under the pressure of datafication? What 'new' mechanisms, actors and tactics meet the growing demand for citizen participation in an increasingly datafied society? Is social movement scholarship 'fit' to capture and interpret this evolution? This theoretical article puts social movement studies in dialogue with critical data studies with the aim of encouraging a much-needed cross-pollination. It advances the notion of 'datafied movements' to address the novel structural condition of contentious politics in the age of datafication and to explore the socio-technical, systemic effects of data and data infrastructure on movement dynamics. It reflects on how five key social movement dynamics, and the related elements in the conceptual toolbox of social movement studies – group formation, opportunity structures, action repertoires, meaning work, and collective identity – are altered by datafication and the advance of intelligent systems in society. In so doing, this article charts the building blocks of a future-proof research program in social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2011 the Indignados traced a line of flight from austerity policies. They invented unprecedented spaces for participation, re-imagined Spanish democracy and turned their attention to forms of life as spaces for political transformation. Their practices enacted a collective sensitivity that challenged the regime of impotence blocking their lives. The global financial crisis was denying them a future, and their ability to think and act together. Ten years later, while the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the world's normal course, self-organizing neighbours updated the Indignados' sensibility and methods. This article analyses the neighborhood support networks created by the Mutual Aid Groups (GAM) in A Coruña, Spain, during the lockdown in March 2020. As the government urged people to stay at home and obey the public health directives, the GAM took care of vulnerable life and democracy, threatened today by new authoritarian drives. From the standpoint of the ethics of care and an interest in experimental social movements, we discuss the power of a caring democracy, which sustains life and renews the democratic turn of the 15-M. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 2015 and 2019, the Spanish capital, Madrid, was governed by the movement party Ahora Madrid, a novel political actor strongly connected to anti-austerity and pro-democracy movements gathered under the umbrella of the Indignados, or '15 M', movement. Against the background of the party's abundant hopes for regenerating urban democracy at the beginning of its term, our research asks how and to what extent Ahora Madrid translated the movement's democratizing practices and expectations into concrete policies. Based on our own qualitative research involving government actors and social movements, our empirical findings demonstrate that the democratic innovations implemented responded to diverging visions of how to achieve 'real democracy', defined by different imaginaries and traditions of collective action within 15 M. While demonstrating the steady interaction between Ahora Madrid policy makers and the social movements they came from, the findings also reveal the policy agenda divisions that posed a challenge for the broadening and deepening of urban democracy. These divisions concerned vertical versus horizontal political logics, the individual versus collective nature of political subjects, and digital versus on-site political participation and deliberation. In addition to the tensions emerging among the various ideational frameworks for collective action (i.e. the autonomous tradition, technopolitics, and the institutional left), this study identifies an apparent divorce between the two intertwined goals of the 15 M: to fight neoliberal austerity and to seek participatory democracy. The empirical findings lead to highlight the internal accounts of the consequences of social movements, especially concerning the conditions for institutionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement studies often focus on how the general public is mobilized to join collective contentious actions rather than on state-movement relations. Yet, institutional actors who occupy positions within the administration can employ institutional means to support a social movement. We examine how social-psychological factors and communication patterns influence institutional actors' participation, based on a survey of civil servants during the anti-extradition law amendment bill movement in Hong Kong (N = 277). The results show that both the perceived damage to reputation and collective efficacy relate positively to participation intent. Through structural equation modeling, we elaborate how news consumption on different media platforms and interpersonal discussions influence civil servants' political participation indirectly through affecting the perception of their reputation and collective efficacy. These findings suggest institutional actors are motivated to act when a social movement threatens institutional legitimacy and engenders collective efficacy through mass/interpersonal communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive research shows that emotions influence social movement participation. Scholars argue that emotions like anger and pride generally activate – i.e. increase movement participation – whereas emotions like hopelessness and sadness generally deactivate. Organizational theory complicates this research by showing that the same emotions can produce varied outcomes, although the causes of variation remain undertheorized. This article brings together these disparate literatures to ask how boredom, an emotion underexplored in the social movement literature, shapes political participation in a rape crisis center. Drawing on three years of participant observation and forty in-depth interviews, the author shows that, while most volunteer victim advocates experience boredom while answering less 'legit' hotline calls and passing time during shifts, their boredom does not necessarily deactivate. Instead, the meaning volunteers attach to their boredom – specifically through a process this article terms 'emotional attribution' – shapes activation. Volunteers who blame their boredom on organizational conditions and service provision models often decrease their participation, whereas volunteers who understand boredom individualistically remain engaged. These findings advance social movement and organization theory by disrupting assumptions about the essential 'good'-ness or 'bad'-ness of emotions, and by theorizing emotional attribution as an interactional process predictive of variation in the consequences of emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an overview of the Istanbul park forums that emerged in parallel with the Gezi events – social protest movements that took place in summer 2013. Despite the criticism that Gezi events were short-lived, impulsive, and ineffectual I argue that they have a long-lasting influence on democratic consciousness and new forms of political action. Istanbul park forums, the street and urban squares have become an important link between those who wish to transform the qualities of both democracy and the regime at large with efforts to create influence over local and national policy-making processes through engagement in political action. Drawing from the political theory of Hannah Arendt, this study assigns the capacities of 'deed and speech' to redefine 'politics'. Analyzing the politics of the park forum process through the lens and concepts of Arendt's political theory suggests an alternative way of evaluating the eventual dissolution of the Gezi events: rather than suffering from the inability to organize themselves within the conventional format of party politics, I show that the Gezi community deliberately created a new manner of engagement through political action, and thereby cast its influence as a historic landmark in the future of Turkish politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent do perceptions of public opinion effect individual support and political participation in political action? To what extent might media use moderate the role of public opinion in predicting political participation in the digital age? This study investigates these questions by analysing unique data from an experiment and a representative survey designed and conducted at the height of the summer 2011 protests in Israel. This study offers a new analytical model for studying activism by independently and simultaneously examining the direct and indirect effects of perceptions of majority support, individual support and media use on political behaviour. The experimental results suggest that perceptions of public opinion and media use did affect participation in the 2011 social movement. Specifically, increased perception of majority support for the movement led to increased rates of participation. Moreover, media use was inconsequential among those respondents who perceived that a majority of the public supported the protest. Digital media had a moderate effect on the association between perceptions and support for the protest movement, but there was no such effect with respect to mainstream media use. The findings provide new empirical insight into the effects of perceptions of public opinion and media use on political behaviour. In doing so, they help to explain the development of mass protest movements in the digital age and especially the potential effect of perceptions and media use in promoting the evolution of social movements as well as involvement in collective action in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To unlock the explanatory potential of grievance, I conceptualise it through a multidimensional and multilevel theoretical model and test it on cross-national data from European Social Survey Round 8 Data (2016). I define three forms of grievance: economic, political, and social. Such a typology assumes that inequalities are reproduced not only within the field of the economy but also structured by political and social mechanisms. I also argue that grievances have multiple dimensions of complexity. I define two dimensions of grievance, that can be captured by indicators used in cross-national survey data: conditions and cognitive perceptions. Conditions are structural components that reflect existing inequalities when cognitive perceptions indicate an individual feeling of dissatisfaction about economic, political or social issues. Furthermore, grievances may interact differently with specific forms of contentious political action. I examine three forms of protest behaviour: signing petitions, attending demonstrations, and boycotting products. While the results are consistent with the PPT showing that grievances highly intersected with the lack of income and political opportunities create constraints for protest participation, they also show that factors related to dissatisfaction with external institutions and association with a discriminated group of people could increase the chances of protest for deprived individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolvement of the 'movement of the squares' following the end of the more visible cycles of mobilization of the squares´ occupations. We argue that a crucial aspect of this evolution lies in the creation of a social infrastructure of alternative (re)productive projects in the form of commons. We call this type of outcomes 'social' in order to distinguish them from the cultural, political and biographical outcomes underlined in typologies on the consequences of social movements. Bridging social movement studies with the literature on the commons, we build a conceptual framework of their relationship. Through a comparative analysis of the movements in Athens and Barcelona, we show how the commoning practices of the square encampments gave rise to more endurable commons disseminated across cities´ social fabrics. We identify both direct and indirect mechanisms of movements´ transmutation into commons, and distinguish the former into transplantation, ideation, and breeding processes. Our second aim is to scrutinize the political dimension of these commons in relation to what has been framed as the 'post-political condition'. We maintain that the post-square commons constitute political and politicizing actions for activists and users for their effects on everyday life, for their capacity to link their practices with broader, structural dynamics of injustice, inequality and exclusion, and for their selective engagement with counter-austerity politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative research has been rare in social movement studies and scholars who embark on this path are confronted with several analytical and methodological challenges. This paper offers an avenue for developing comparative analytics using 'local spaces of protest' as path for comparison. We first situate this concept vis-à-vis other models available (field, space, arena, networks). We then define the three dimensions of 'spaces of protest': specific aim prompting collective action; particular distribution of political actions along different poles (electoral, protest, concerted and participation) and specific scales of protest (local, societal or/and global/glocal). By invoking critical geography to enhance the definition of place and scales of actions, we propose a systematic set-up for comparison. The last part of the paper shows how this notion allows for the comparison of local social forums (gatherings of activists fighting against neoliberal globalization) in two societies, France and Québec. The data presented have been gathered during extensive fieldwork and semi-structured interviews conducted between 2010 and 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the decentralisation of decision-making processes in local government. Empirically, I analyse how Brazilian housing movements are included in participatory processes by examining the ways in which participatory models integrate social movements in spaces of decision-making. I argue that the rules and focus on incremental policy-making limits the participation of social movements. Findings suggests that unequal power structures at local councils, barriers to the participation of citizens, and the lack of transparency of government decisions all prevent social movements from having a more influential voice in decision-making. Although previous studies in Brazil examined the integration of citizens in government institutions, this paper contributes to the literature in two ways: firstly, it provides new evidence on the impact of decentralisation in local government. Secondly, by examining the attitudes of housing council members towards popular political participation, it provides new insights into the limits of decentralisation and participatory governance in contemporary Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eruption of the Spanish 15M movement in 2011 was marked by a high degree of political participation and creative experimentation. The political repertoire has constantly been re-evaluated, with methods revised and evolving, from the occupation of public spaces to the recent creation of new constitutional parties. One of the key aspects of these tactical revisions has been the involvement of anarchist actors in an experimental process of engagement in electoral processes, a method of political engagement anarchists standardly oppose. Our study identifies the motivations and theoretical justifications that have recently led libertarian activists to take the electoral path. This paper stands in the small but growing tradition of works that examine the recent phenomenon of new parties built by ‘street’ activists, but uniquely concentrates on a detailed case study of the anarchist actors linked to the platformCastelló en Moviment(CsM). It thus describes the anarchist influence in recent electoral developments, identifies proponents’ justifications for engaging in these previously rejected methods and highlights some of the doubts raised about the electoral experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent economic crisis shaped a new wave of protest in Europe mobilising thousands of people. Austerity measures brought not only the ‘usual suspects’ onto the streets, they also awoke less frequent demonstrators. What brought all these people to the streets? Are their motivations the same for participation in all demonstrations? We compare participants in two types of mobilisations against austerity: those called particularistic (which are reactions to particular anti-austerity issues), and those universalistic (which address much broader issues such as questioning the political system). We also compare two typologies of participants taking into account their participation history: regular and occasional protesters. Employing a two-by-two design defined by type of demonstration (Particularistic vs. Universalistic) and the individual’s participation history (Occasionals vs. Regulars), we found that the differences between demonstrations were smaller than those within types of protesters. Nevertheless, even in this period of hardship, motivation to participate in particularistic or universalistic protests differ depending on the perceptions of political system, ideological positioning and organisational embeddedness. Interaction analyses showed that different levels of identity, trust in institutions and satisfaction with democracy are crucial in driving people to participate in different types of demonstrations as occasionals or regulars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political opportunity theory predicts that increased access to the political system benefits social movements by disadvantaged groups. To test this prediction, this paper evaluates the impact of two elected Hmong American officials on social movement campaigns in their community during their time in office. Content analysis of newspaper reports is used to (i) create a sample of nine local, national, and transnational social movement campaigns in the community; and (ii) determine in which of four possible ways the elected officials supported the campaigns: favorable media interviews, speeches at events, event organization, and legislation initiation. Only the two transnational campaigns which mobilized the entire community received all four types of support. The paper concludes that elected officials, even former activists from an ethnic minority community, carefully select the causes they will fully support. After electoral victory, social movements must still actively engage sympathetic politicians in order to turn an opening in the political system into actual access to power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the case of theGrillinimovement and its emergence on the Italian political scene, and discusses its contribution to the growing literature on the increasing opportunities offered by the Internet for social movement participation and mobilization. My findings are that the movement is successful in both mobilizing and promoting open debate and participation because of its policies and its use of multiple, and fairly open platforms for participation and horizontal decision-making. TheGrillinihave been able to conciliate the characteristics of newly emerging, Internet-based, ‘internetworked movements’ as well as the more conventional use of the Internet on behalf of well-established social and political movements. They have been able to do so by articulating issues and mobilizing on a national scale, with an increasingly large bureaucratic elite, while retaining a vibrant, partly online- and partly offline-based public sphere and decentralized organizational forms. My conclusion is that theGrillinimovement, with its peculiar structure and commitment to participation and inclusion, is a crucial example of how the Internet can be used to aggregate new political issues and foster continuous debate while consolidating a growing electorally driven organization, which is still mostly held accountable by the movement's public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using a survey of 359 participants in the 2010 protests against the G20 in Toronto, this paper examines the effects and effectiveness of the different communication media in informing diverse participants about the protest. It finds that the communication networks that surrounded the G20 summit protest in Toronto in 2010 were dense and interconnected. Drawing on Tilly's ‘political circuits’, the survey shows that activists at the core of these networks used a combination of online and offline modes of communication, while those outside of that core were reliant on fewer channels of information about the protests. These included people of colour, people who are not part of student networks, less educated people and people less involved in existing social movements. Using logistic regression models, we demonstrate that the digital divide may be less important than the structure and means of communication that make up the political circuits of a movement. Based on these models, we argue that communication modes such as social networking sites and the mainstream media may be important tools for bridging the gap between core and peripheral participants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

First, I briefly examine the genesis of debate to define the World Social Forum (WSF) as a contributor to the global justice movement (GJM), since its emergence in Brazil in 2001. I then consider Geoffrey Pleyers' argument identifying a central tension within the WSF, and the GJM in general, between actors seeking to achieve non-domination by expressing anti-power subjectivity and those for whom the path to non-domination lay in strategising and designing counter-powers. Describing what transpired at WSF Dakar 2011and debates since, I question Pleyers' classificatory schema as leading to an unhelpful essentialism. That is, identifying a ‘two paths’ ideal-type and setting out to locate it in the world serves to legitimise one ‘tendency’ of progressive social movements. By contrast with Pleyers' evenly balanced approach—treating of each ‘path’ as possessing the same positive and negative qualities, rather than as qualitatively different moments in the practice of opposing domination—I find that what he calls ‘the path of subjectivity’ might rather be understood as the product of a certain lack of appreciation of the nature of the demands that opposing political tyranny places upon particpants in an organisation or movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars and activists have hotly debated the relationship between social media and social movement activity during the current global cycle of protest. This article investigates media practices in the Occupy movement and develops the concept of social movement media cultures: the set of tools, skills, social practices and norms that movement participants deploy to create, circulate, curate and amplify movement media across all available platforms. The article posits three key areas of inquiry into social movement media cultures, and explores them through the lens of the Occupy movement: (1) What media platforms, tools and skills are used most widely by movement participants? (Practices); (2) What role do experienced practitioners play in movement media practices? (Expertise); and (3) In what ways does the movement media culture lean toward open or participatory, and in what ways toward closed or top–down? (Open/Closed). Insight into the media culture of the Occupy movement is based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, visual research and participation in Occupy Hackathons, as well as the Occupy Research General Demographic and Political Participation Survey, a database of approximately 1200 local Occupy sites, and a dataset of more than 13 million Occupy-related tweets. The findings will be of interest to both scholars and movement participants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the contentious politics (CP) model has come to dominate the field of social movements, scholars note the paradigm's shortcomings, especially its narrow focus on movement organizations, public protest, and political action. The conceptual wall between lifestyles and social movements has created a theoretical blind spot at the intersection of private action and movement participation, personal and social change, and personal and collective identity. We suggest that lifestyle movements (LMs) consciously and actively promote a lifestyle, or way of life, as a primary means to foster social change. Drawing upon our observations of a variety of LMs, we discuss three defining aspects of LMs: lifestyle choices as tactics of social change, the central role of personal identity work, and the diffuse structure of LMs. We also explore the links between LMs and social movements, CP, and conventional politics. Finally, we demonstrate that LM, as a new conceptual category, is applicable across a range of movement activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation in conventional politics, such as elections, membership of organizations and political parties, is relatively low among young adults of ethnic minority background. Instead, engagement seems to find its way through aesthetic and other expressive channels of influence drawing on new technologies, impulses from transnational youth culture traditions, and both street riots and less conflictual actions. The aim of this article is to grasp a potential social movement in the making, by exploring the processes of articulation through which young people from immigrant families in Norway express their political engagement. The phenomenon of articulation is understood as a process comprising three steps or modes: (i) becoming conscious; (ii) generating expressions and (iii) collective action. We explore the relevance of the aesthetic dimensions in all three modes. As a point of departure, we present three ‘critical events’ that have generated resonance at both the individual and collective level. The empirical basis consists of interviews with young adults who, in terms of articulation, took part in the mobilizations that followed in the wake of these events. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Several recent studies have shown an increase in political consumerism (boycott and buycott) and a tendency towards a new 'politics in the supermarket'. These developments are usually seen as a transformation of forms of political action towards more individualized participation forms. Little attention has focused on the role of social movement activity in this transformation. In this contribution, which is based on a case study of political consumerism in the clothing sector in Switzerland, I fill this gap by analysing the ways in which political agency and mobilization shape political consumerism. I suggest taking into account the role of campaigning - that is, intentional and coordinated collective action and framing activities - as an incentive, if not a determinant, of individual political consumption. I show how different contentious performances mobilize citizens and consumers and make the consumption and production of clothing a public and political issue. I analyse the mobilizing strategies of a campaign regarding action repertoires and framing activities and ask how they contribute to provide political content to consumer products, creating a venue for political participation in the marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses an interactionist approach to propose a theory of activist disengagement processes. Over the last dozen years, the sociology of activism has been revitalized by the conception of activism as a long-lasting social activity articulated by phases of joining, commitment, and defection. This has given rise to the notion of 'activist career', drawing directly on Hughes' and Becker's concept of interactionism. Applied to political commitment, the notion of career allows us to understand how, at each biographical stage, the attitudes and behaviours of activists are determined by past attitudes and behaviours, which in turn condition the range of future possibilities, thus resituating commitment across the entire life cycle. The concept of career therefore enables us to combine questions of the predisposition to and operationalization of activism, of differentiated and variable forms of engagement over time, of the multiplicity of engagements across the life cycle, and of the withdrawal and extension of commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining recent and foundational work in cultural theory in social movement research and cognitive psychology, this paper presents a synthetic model of cognitive processes in the context of political contention. Despite broad interest in the intersection between culture and cognition, and in the cultural dynamics of social movements, there has been little systematic effort to understand the cognitive processes of change in social movement settings. The paper constructs and illustrates a model of cognitive change with reference to a case study of opposition to workfare in New York City, where the legal and political construction of workfare workers has been marked by considerable ambiguity. In tracing the ways in which activists changed their minds about strategy and definitions, the paper integrates environmental, cognitive, and relational dynamics in explanations of political contention to advance a non-individualist, broadly materialist and pragmatist theory of cognitive development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on how culture and ritual in social movements can be forms of protest or conduits to contentious politics. Based on the Montreal cases of the anglophone women's performance scene in the 1990s and the 2000 World March of Women campaign, we argue that the context in which culture is produced and consumed affects its political character and potential. Networks among activists and organizations in social movement communities affect the extent to which participants interpret and use cultural productions and rituals to support political change. Movement campaigns play an important role in giving political meaning to cultural rituals and providing opportunities for participants in cultural activities to become involved in contentious political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a rapidly expanding literature has pointed to the emergence of cross-border activism, only rarely focusing on the mechanisms whereby a transnational agenda might lead to actual mobilization. By comparing national campaigns, one can gain a greater feel for domestic political settings and how congenial these are to the birth or spread of transnational protest. Drawing from the political opportunity approach, this article assesses the relative merit of explanations based on institutional access, changing political environments, past or concomitant social movement activity and multilevel political opportunities in accounting for differences in the scope, timing and dynamics of the Jubilee 2000 campaign in three creditor countries. While all four aspects of the political opportunity structure contributed to the scope of the domestic mobilizations, we find that only a combination of shifting domestic political environment and international events can explain their timing. The imprint of past or parallel campaigns further played a critical role in ensuring (or not) their longevity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of ‘emergent ties’ is often used to refer to the role of social networks in activating social movements. Yet pre-existing network ties were usually not a factor in initiating decisions of 50,000 draft-age American youth to migrate to Canada during the American Vietnam War. These youth often learned about the possibility of migrating to Canada through the news media and a widely distributed draft resistance manual. Once in Canada, they often became involved in networks that directed and sustained their movement activity. This suggests that the emergence and persistence of activism may often be distinct. This paper argues that a transformation process that leads to activism is often a life stage specific process, usually in late adolescence or early adulthood, whose explanation requires detailed attention to everyday behavioral activity; while the evolution and persistence of activism is often a life course persistent process that covers a longer period and involves the influence of more generically structured network ties. These patterns are demonstrated in a fuzzy set analysis (FSA) of early and longer term political activism in the lives of Americans who migrated to Toronto during the Vietnam War. We find that for both men and women, helping others was a necessary experience in transforming the resistance involved in this migration into collectively organized anti-war activism, and that a longer term tendency of the women who migrated to Canada to remain more involved than men in social movements is a product of their continuing contacts with the persons involved in their earlier activism. The results of our research underline the importance of distinguishing life stage specific and life course persistent processes in the study of social movements, and more generally that the study of social movements and the life course have much to contribute to one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant American social movement scholarship has become detached from the concerns of actual social movements. But the dramatic growth of social movement activity in recent years, especially the global justice movement, is creating the conditions for an emerging new direction in social movement scholarship which prioritizes the relevance of such work to the movements themselves. A problem in the current social movement literature is that the different schools of thought tend to overemphasize particular variables and pit them against one another. Rather than simply seeking to emphasize a different variable in the lifecycle of a social movement, a movement-relevant approach has the potential to transcend these schisms (such as structure versus culture). At the same time, this approach does not categorically reject earlier theoretical perspectives, but instead seeks to glean what is most useful for movements from these earlier works. Likewise, this emergent direction entails a dynamic engagement with the research and theorizing already being done by movement participants. In this paper, we explore this growing convergence of movement-relevant scholarship, identifying the academic work being used by movement participants as well as the analysis taking place within the movements themselves, with a particular focus on the global justice movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short paper examines the way in which the electronic repertoire of contention for online social movements is being built, and the means by which it will continue to evolve. Drawing on the work of Tilly and Tarrow, a number of possible explanations are examined for innovation within the online activist space, and for the diffusion of that innovation. Analysis suggests that several of the current approaches to understanding repertoire innovation are useful in describing the developing online repertoire. A hybrid model is proposed, integrating several of these approaches to provide a holistic description of electronic repertoire innovation and diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Tilly, this paper argues that a social movement is what it does as much as why it does it. This approach is particularly important in the case of the animal rights movement, which is often demonized as extremist and violent. Critics of the movement claim that animal activists use letter bombs, arson attacks and threats to intimidate those they see as animal abusers and that violent direct action of this kind is typical of the movement as a whole. The present paper argues that the mainstream animal movement -- in the USA, the UK and Australia -- is overwhelmingly non-violent and that its core strategies and tactics have two broad aims, namely to gain publicity for the movement and to challenge conventional thinking about how we treat nonhuman animals. This is achieved primarily by the deployment of the key tactical mechanisms of persuasion, protest, non-cooperation and intervention. These tactics may be deployed collectively or as DIY (Do-It-Yourself) activism which many grassroots animal activists -- 'caring sleuths' to use Shapiro's apt term -- seem to prefer. The paper focuses on demonstrations and pamphleteering as examples of publicity strategies or liberal governance strategies as well as critical governance strategies or interference strategies such as the hunger strike, ethical vegetarianism and undercover surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of communication in social movement theory is well observed. Considerably less attention has been given to the question of whether or not media reform efforts constitute social movements in and of themselves. In an effort to consider the efficacy of media reform initiatives and to evaluate their relevance to social movement studies, this essay examines the evolution of a so-called 'free radio' station in the city of Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The essay situates a discussion of 'free radio' in relation to the unprecedented consolidation of commercial radio and the attendant diminution of public service broadcasting in the USA. The lessons learned from Allston-Brighton Free Radio help to illuminate the local and particular dynamics of a global movement for communicative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological sabotage (ecotage) has been a feature of the more radical parts of the environmental movement in the Western world for several decades. While it may be perceived as being the preserve of underground cells of 'eco-terrorists', in the UK those who carry out small-scale acts of sabotage are also often engaged in relatively conventional political activity; view sabotage as a complement to other action, not as an end in itself; and are committed to avoiding physical harm to people. Drawing on ethnographic data from research with British activists, this article seeks to define ecotage and to explain its place in the repertoires of the environmental direct action movement in the UK. It is argued that the self-limiting form of ecotage in the UK has its roots in cross-movement debates that have developed over several decades and that national traditions remain important in understanding the development of social movement repertoires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article 1 consider the opportunities and constraints faced by feminists organizing in extra-feminist settings. Women remain systematically disadvantaged vis-a-vis men, and feminists both express this disadvantage and the need for remedying it by activism in extra-feminist settings. Organizing by feminists in these settings generates contradictions, such that the advantages gained by feminist organizing are undercut by constraints. I use case studies of feminists working in extra-feminist settings to explore the impact of organizational structure, specifically the degree of institutionalization, and organizational culture, that is, an organization's openness to feminism, on feminist activism. I argue that feminists face endemic challenges that are shaped by organizational structure and organizational culture: the marginalization of feminists and their political agendas; the structural 'fading' of feminist politics; the costs associated with exiting organizations; and the compartmentalization of work on feminist issues. I conclude that what is needed for the continued success of feminist politics in extra-feminist settings is constant attention to the dynamics of gender subordination within and outside of specific organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade we have seen the emergence of new forms of ethnic minority political mobilization. In this paper we explore one aspect of this transformation, namely the emergence of organizations such as the National Civil Rights Movement (NCRM) and the National Assembly Against Racism (NAAR). We argue that such organizations are part of a transitional public sphere within ethnic minority politics that seeks to provide links between mainstream and alternative forms of minority political activism. Such organizations have grown partly as a result of the need to construct new channels of political involvement and engagement for minority communities. In this sense they represent a break from the dominant forms of ethnic minority politics and highlight the ways in which minority political networks have become interlinked with wider policy networks within national and local state institutions, the legal system and civil society more generally. They represent an arena of political participation that is likely to grow in importance in the coming period as ethnic minority communities exert pressure for greater influence within both national and local political institutions. Drawing on original research among a number of organizations, this paper provides an analysis of the evolution and likely impact of this sphere of minority political life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1990s, the feminist movement in Latin America experienced a split between two activist logics, a politically oriented 'transnational IGO-advocacy logic' emphasizing political work and a culturally oriented 'internationalist identity-solidarity' logic focusing on identity construction (S. Alvarez, Meridians: A Journal of Feminisms, Race, Transnationalism, 1(1): 29--67, 2000). While many studies have explored feminist groups' political work, few have examined their more inward-focused identity work. This gap in our understanding of Latin American feminist activism owes in large part to the lack of analytical tools necessary for studying collective identity formation. Recent studies, however, have shown narrative analysis to be a fruitful approach for studying social movements' solidarity work. This article explores the role of storytelling in the creation of feminist collective identities in Latin America by conducting a narrative analysis of 'stories of activism' from fem, a feminist journal published in Mexico City. The analysis finds that narrative is vital to group identity, as well as research on collective action, in a number of ways. For one, storytelling serves as a process through which activists construct their own histories, giving meaning to their experiences and creating a distinct group identity. Second, the experiences related by these activists contradict many deep-seated ideas that scholars hold concerning Latin American feminist identity, social movements' framing work, and women's motivations for organizing, all of which underscore the importance of using narratives to give voice to research subjects. Finally, we find that narration represents a key form of feminist text and practice. Through narration, women reproduce and transmit to supporters and the public alike key feminist principles, while shaping their groups into unique collective spaces in which they can express themselves as individuals. In this sense, narration figures... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies social network analysis to three case study social movement organizations based in the north of England: a local Labour Party branch, an environmental group, and a conservation group. Using a postal survey of members, we chart the extent of ties between members of these three groups, indicating how each group has its own internal social dynamics and characteristics that are related to the nature of the movement organizations themselves. We explore how the network structures interrelate with the socio-demographic structure of the membership of the three organizations, and we show there are important differences in the way that core members of the three organizations are recruited compared to those who are either peripheral or isolated. Our paper is the first to analyse the networks of whole populations of case study organizations in the UK, and can therefore be read as developing the potential of social network analysis for case study research and for understanding social movements. Analytically we argue it is important to distinguish two different types of ways that networks are important. They can be seen as offering resources for mobilization, or they can be seen as providing a means of integrating particular types of individuals into organizations. It is this latter sense that offers a more fundamental role for network analysis, and we argue that it offers an important way of developing insights from resource mobilization theory by relating them to Bourdieu's provocative arguments regarding the exclusiveness of the political field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the term reclamation activism to refer to the processes by which social movements make claims based upon a real or imagined status quo ante during a period of transition. The motivation for a reclamation stance is the perception that a social good—such as some combination of social, economic or political privileges or cultural dominance—is being threatened. The notion is applied to the analysis of a modern social movement, the parents' movement against drug use in the USA. Based upon content analysis of movement literature, the claim is made that the movement is organized in opposition to its image of a 'pro-drug culture' rather than actual patterns of drug use. This oppositional stance is shown to have advantages for the movement over other claims-making strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]