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Young Americans are coming of age immersed in daily news and controversy about rising perils like climate change, and emerging ones like artificial intelligence. Generation Z has produced and embraced movements for climate action like the school strikes led by Greta Thunberg that connect to other social justice movements. But the threat posed by nuclear weapons remains a disconnected abstraction to many young people, even as tensions between nuclear-armed states over conflicts like the invasions of Ukraine and Gaza renew fears of a nuclear confrontation that were more common decades ago. In this personal essay, a life-long opponent of nuclear weapons raised during the Cold War reflects on intergenerational lessons about activism, and teaching college students to embrace their curiosity, and their fear, on the way to saving the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pursuing greater social equity in balance with ecosystems is one of today’s greatest challenges. Little is known about the conditions which might facilitate these objectives finding synergy. The purpose of this special issue is to understand the conditions under which concerns for social equity and care for the earth can be addressed jointly at a micro-territorial level. This introduction discusses the Latin American landscape against which the relationship between social equity and care for the earth is explored. It summarizes some linkages identified in the literature and presents the rationale for choosing the broad terms of ‘care for the earth’ and ‘social equity’ as a focus. It concludes by highlighting some of the main findings of the contributions. Namely, that the objectives of social equity and care for the earth are in synergy when they are mobilized jointly by citizens, and when concern for outcomes and inclusive processes go hand-in-hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis article contextualizes Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement that emerged in the fall of 2014. We argue that first, the Umbrella Movement was not merely about democracy but must be understood in the context of widening inequality and an ongoing housing and wage crisis; second, that it is part of a broader epoch of contention informed by, third, a distinct “rhizomatic movement logic” that is defined by a diversity of actors and struggles, use of social media, leaderless and grassroots mobilizing, distrust of institutional actors. Fueled by shifts in capital accumulation and changes in communication technologies, the currently dominant movement logic is distinct from previous movement politics. Since the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1994, it has informed movements such as Occupy, the Arab Spring, and more recently the Gilets Jaunes as well as the Umbrella Movement. To be sure, we are not claiming that all these struggles are the same. We stress the similarities exhibited by these movements’ “deep grammar,” so to speak, while recognizing that each must be understood in its particularities. We thus specify the context of Hong Kong and provide illustrations of how this logic has impacted the Umbrella Movement’s actors, organizing, and movement-building dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the largely forgotten early period of (pro-)Refugee activism in the 1980s West-Germany and the role of memory politics therein, this article explores the ambiguity in critiquing the nation-state. Drawing on original data collected in seven social movement archives in Germany, different ways in which German Nazism and the Holocaust are invoked to frame and critique the present (West-)German nation-state and its migration and asylum regime are scrutinised. Three ways in which Nazism and the Holocaust were invoked and discussed by Refugee activists and their supporters are differentiated: the past as 'reminder and warning for the present', the past as 'discrediting and incriminating the present', and explicit attempts not to draw analogies between the past and the present. Overall, the article makes two key contributions. First, the article makes a historical and empirical contribution as the focus on the 1980s sheds light on a period that has so far been largely ignored when it comes to the study of (pro-)Refugee activism. By tracing different ways in which memory politics has informed and been integral to Refugee activism and support, the article makes, second, an innovative contribution to studying the nexus of (forced) migration, national identity, and memory politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the pivotal transition in Iranian feminist activism through ‘Baraye’, a digital poem collectively written by Iranian users on Twitter during the Woman Life Freedom (WLF) movement, linked to the #MahsaAmini trend launched in September 2022. Initially sparked by tweets featuring the hashtag #MahsaAmini, this trend quickly evolved into a powerful form of digital activism, articulating widespread grievances and aspirations. Shervin Hajipour’s viral song ‘Baraye’, composed from these tweets, amplified the movement’s message and garnered international recognition, including at the Grammy Awards. As a part of the Feminist Media Activism in Transition special issue, this study highlights the relationships between social media and new forms of feminist activism, with ‘Baraye’ as an emblematic work of instapoetry that transcends geographical boundaries and fosters deep emotional and ideological connections among participants. The collective crafting of ‘Baraye’ by Iranians enabled suppressed voices, including marginalized ethnic, religious, and LGBTQIA+ communities, to express their demands and dissent. By employing digital humanities techniques to collect, curate, and analyse pertinent tweets, and drawing upon theories of performance studies, particularly Diana Taylor’s work, this research underscores this instapoem’s impact on Iranian feminist media activism and beyond. By looking at it as a performance, the work seeks to demonstrate how ‘Baraye’ blurs the line between physical presence and digital expression, marking a significant transitional moment in Iranian social movements. The essay aims to offer a different perspective on new modes of activism by examining ‘Baraye’ from the perspectives of performance and new media studies, emphasizing the role of digital platforms in fostering poetic digital activism and offering fresh insights into the interplay between technology and feminist movements in Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community organizing can play a critical role as a grassroots form of democratic activism which challenges austerity politics sweeping the globe. What is required is not only a democratization of the state through counter-hegemonic political victories, but in the US as well as the UK politicized social movements and grassroots community organizing tied to progressive and radical praxis. The Community Organisers Programme (COP) in England, which trained and hired more than 500 community organizers between 2011 and 2015, can serve as a contradictory example of manipulating the austerity state to include funding community organizing. Without connection to political victories and effective grassroots organizing, the COP remained, like the most prevalent types of training in the US in and outside of social work, a moderated form of democratization and an extension of the neoliberal austerity state, intentionally or not. The voices heard here working in the field demanded a more politicized form of training. This contribution emphasizes voices from the field regarding three aspects: the limited and problematic training content in the COP, the moderated community organizing education which fit with contemporary trends in community organizing in the US, and the surprising political sophistication of those interviewed who understood the highly critical need of more effective training to help address our extraordinary contemporary challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines South Korean conglomerates’ strategies used to convey their interests as the interests of all. Their hegemonic strategy was one factor in overcoming the authority crisis triggered by bribery scandals in 2016–2017. They adopted strategies such as social contribution activities and implemented hegemonic strategies, involving (1) social movements and non-governmental organizations, (2) the media and publishing sectors, and (3) academia and the educational community. They funded pro-chaebol social movements and controlled the media through advertising and journalists. Conglomerates also used publishing companies to spread their ideas and developed think tanks. They advocated for owner management rights, tax cuts, deregulation, labour flexibility, and managed academics. They engaged in educating teachers, creating economics textbooks, and building university student networks. Although the strategies have yielded results, the resistance has not vanished. Through this study we can consider the significance of the authority crisis, hegemonic strategies, and capital-civil society relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While antiracist protest has gained increasing prominence in Europe in recent years, the lack of representative data has so far prevented an assessment of the scope and drivers of antiracist protest outside of the United States. This paper addresses this gap drawing from a unique survey (N = 5003) on racism in Germany. Building upon sociological and social psychological theories of protest, the article explores the scope and role of key demographic, cognitive, and emotional factors for protest practice and protest potential. Our data suggests that antiracist protest is supported by considerable parts of German society and finds that mediated experiences of racism and emotional reactions matter as drivers of mobilization: those with and without a personal experience of racism are more likely to protest if they were told of racist experiences by others. This effect is even more pronounced if participants are emotionally affected by personal and mediated experiences of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to recent calls to "provincialize" (Hawthorne 2019) and "pluralize" (Bledsoe and Wright 2019a) Black geographies. We do so by adopting a relational, transnational, and multiscalar approach. Drawing on ethnography with Black Lives Matter activists in Sydney, Australia, we adopt a decolonizing framework to argue that Indigenous knowledges, experiences, and actions can extend the epistemologies and cartographies of Black geographies. The mapping of Black geographies in Sydney reveals three multilayered and intersecting ways through which Black agency, place-making, and resistance are made manifest in transnational Black Lives Matter protests: (1) through invoking "stretched out" geographies, forging shared solidarities between African American high-profile cases of policing injustice and Aboriginal deaths in custody; (2) through counterhegemonic attempts to reconfigure Australia Day as Invasion Day, reclaiming colonized histories that subvert the premise of Australia as a "White nation"; and (3) through conjoining transrural cases of violence toward Aboriginal communities living in peripheral places and then strategically amplifying their concerns through place-based activisms in the global city. Finally, we conclude by arguing that further international accounts are crucial to this emerging field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the history of playgrounds in Finland and focuses on the emergence and implementation of the objectives of the international playground movement in the early twentieth century. Specifically, it examines the relations between supervised playgrounds, women's emancipation, child welfare policies, and political discussion on social class. In doing so, the article illustrates the transnational circulation and implementation of early twentieth century "child-saving" ideas, such as the playground reform. The analysis is done by cross and close reading a wealth of contemporary texts on playgrounds, such as magazines, newspapers, and archival materials. By tracing the interwoven aspects of the playground movement and the history of Finland, especially the significance of the Civil War of 1918, this article argues that supervised playgrounds were utilised in reconciling the socio-political issues of the newly independent state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the effect of attribution and approach movement of the social robot when the user wrongly perceives an error as the robot's responsibility. The robot's responsibility attribution and approach movement strategies for the error recovery were examined in a situation where the robot was functioning normally, but the user misunderstood it as robot's fault. In the experiment participants were exposed to four different verbal and movement interaction scenarios with a social robot and then responded to a survey concerning emotions and trust. Results showed that people no longer trusted the robot that approached while attributing the responsibility to the user. The implication of this study is that a powerful self-serving bias is aroused when a robot attributes the responsibility to the user, and thus, it negatively impacts user experiences even if the event took place due to the user's misunderstanding. This study suggests empirical guidance for designing a social robot's attribution strategies and movement interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this piece, which frames the special issue "Technocultural worldings," we build on previous editions of commentary and criticism in this journal. We propose a theoretically anchored way to systematically approach the dynamic, multidimensional, and heterogeneous technocultural communities that have created their own worldings and are engaged in complex dialectical dynamics within the contemporary media landscape. The technocultural communities that are part of these dialectical dynamics are constituted, on the one hand, by the complex collective sense-making of the emancipatory political programs of feminist and LGBTI+ initiatives and, on the other, by the retrogressive mobilizations of far-right and anti-gender movements. Hence, we argue that these worldings come into being due to the ability conferred by digital spaces to incorporate both material and virtual components in performances of gender and sexuality, in all their complex diversity. These issues are explored in more detail in eight articles, grouped into two discretely separate sections, one exploring emancipatory technocultural worldings, while the other describes retrogressive technocultural worldings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food has become a privileged space for analyzing different forms of citizen participation. This paper reviews typologies of political participation to determine which of them is more useful to classify the strategies of food-based engagement. We propose a taxonomy of civic and political food actions, with particular reference to Spain, integrating traditional and modern actions as well as and collective, online and offline dimensions. We applied a mixed methodology, based on primary sources – a survey of 1,0005 people and 22 in-depth interviews with different profiles of food activists- and secondary sources. The proposed taxonomy of food political participation is useful to map different forms of (non-) participation, latent participation and political participation in food issues that are currently being developed. This classification, by including civic and latent forms of involvement, can serve to guide future empirical studies about food participation that consider not only formal participation, but also factors as: showing propensity to search for information about food issues from an ethical, political, or environmental perspective; identifying with an ideology that promotes ethical, politically and socially responsible food decisions; or developing a political food lifestyle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge-making in universities is shaped by conventions that neglect and/or suppress less conventional kinds of knowledge that may hold viable solutions to society's problems. Knowledge always has political interests, and close-up research on knowledge-making can liberate marginalized ideas, by exposing how they push against and beyond conventional perspectives and mutations. African feminist theoretical ideas are used to examine three different platforms for knowledge-making: one research project and two courses that were taught. The African feminist praxis is demonstrated through two main processes – reflection and communal knowledge-making – which infuse the methodology and pedagogy of the three platforms. The article shows how they transgress the conventions to bring about inclusive and generative knowledge-making. They provide strategies for future research and teaching experiments, demonstrating ways in which African Feminist ideas can have transformative effects beyond their own margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the process of co-producing an animated film about the migration journeys of Colombian women resident in Antofagasta, Chile. It first establishes the relationship between feminist epistemologies and arts-based methodologies, which hinges on embodiment. It then turns to a detailed discussion of using film co-production as a research method for accessing and expressing embodied experiences of migration. This discussion highlights how moments of discomfort (Gokariksel, Hawkins, Neubert, and Smith, 2021) experienced by the researcher motivated the search for a more collaborative methodological approach that was better attuned to lived experience. This included striving towards more inclusive practices with respect to recruitment, anonymity, and confidentiality. Moments of discomfort also revealed how care and caring responsibilities are entangled with research, and how they gender possibilities of participation and production for community co-producers and artists, as well as for researchers. Finally, through discomfort, lessons were learned about the politics of representing experiences of migration, violence, and endurance, as well as joy. The paper concludes that, whilst by no means a panacea, collaborative arts-based research methods can offer an innovative toolset for exploring embodied experience and for navigating the relational and representational complexities attendant to research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Andhra Pradesh Zero Budget Natural Farming project was implemented by India's State of Andhra Pradesh in 2016 and renamed AP Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) in 2020. APCNF is recognised as a sucessful example of peasant-led agroecology by social movements, multilateral UN bodies, governments, and researchers. We offer more critical perspectives here, and argue that this agroecology model deepens inequality and dispossession. Despite claims to the contrary, APCNF is locked in an unchanged productivist paradigm controlled by capital in collaboration with the state. By co-opting agroecology, APCNF closes down options for a just transformation of the dominant agri-food regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examine youth activism in Poland, focusing on the University of Gdańsk occupation, the Youth Climate Strike, and Stop Bzdurom’s direct actions. Using critical pedagogy of place, they analyse how youth activists drive social change and reclaim public spaces. The study highlights reinhabitation and decolonisation of public spaces as arenas for the common good and marginalised communities’ rights. It also explores the influence of radicalism and activism on society, particularly amid an ageing population and political polarisation. Detailed case analyses contribute to understanding youth roles in social movements and change, emphasising youth activism’s significance in shaping society’s future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an original protest event dataset covering 30 European countries and the period 2000–2021, this paper studies the nature and drivers of protest mobilisation across three major crises that have hit European Member States (the Eurozone, refugee, and Covid crises). Contributing a crisis-comparative perspective to social movement research, we explore crisis mobilisation in three steps. First, looking at general protest trends throughout the past decade, we find that the overall level of protest declined significantly, and especially so after the Eurozone crisis. Second, we characterise crisis-specific protest in terms of the action forms and the actors involved. We find a high involvement of institutional actors in the Eurozone crisis, a high share of radical events in the refugee crisis, and a generally non-confrontational protest organised by civil society actors in the Covid crisis. Finally, we explain crisis-specific protest levels by examining the mobilising effect of grievances. More specifically, we study the impact of problem pressure (how hard countries were affected using economic, migration, and public health indicators) and political pressure from public opinion (the salience of crisis-specific issues) and show that both were important drivers in the three crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn this paper we explore how a Citizens’ Assembly project in Auroville – the largest intentional community in the world – sought to prefigure new practices in collective decision-making. A Citizens’ Assembly model is a democratic innovation that enacts a deliberative mode of political decision-making by everyday citizens. It has been used by diverse bodies, from social movements to nation-state governments around the world. Auroville’s 2021 Citizens’ Assembly pilot – concerning a water vision for Auroville – is a unique case study that enables us to make a distinctive contribution to the existing academic scholarship concerning Citizens’ Assemblies and prefigurative politics on two grounds. Firstly, Auroville is an intentional community shaped by specific spiritual and self-governance values – an uncommon setting for a Citizens’ Assembly that supports us to make specific empirical offerings not seen in the literature on Citizens’ Assemblies to date. Secondly, given that Auroville’s pilot Citizens’ Assembly sought to prefigure the community’s foundational ideals of “human unity” and “unending education” in its collective decision-making practice, we connect our analysis to the academic scholarship concerning prefigurative politics. In doing so, we uniquely draw together the scholarship concerning Citizens’ Assemblies and the literature concerning prefigurative politics to explore whether such democratic innovations have a transformative effect on the political contexts they are embedded in, which we freshly consider with a focus on local scale, and the role that institutionalisation might have in terms of ensuring the reproduction, and thereby lasting impact of such experiments, or conversely their nullification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the emergence and development of a social movement community among LGBTQ population. Drawing on the case of the LGBTQ movement in South Korea between 1993 and 2019 from a longitudinal perspective, we identify the relational dynamics of how different movement groups avoid internal frictions and successfully develop a movement community. Our findings suggest that, as a response to repeated repressive external events, LGBTQ groups have formed and maintained collaborative networks based on a common identity as “sexual minorities.” By examining the networks of movement coalitions, we also identify key movement groups that played a critical role in connecting other groups with disparate sexual and gender identities within the community. These bridging actors were either the pioneering gay and lesbian groups that have collaborated since the 1990s or the new groups founded around inclusive collective identities such as “sexual minorities” or “queers.” Implications for the studies on social movements and homosexuality are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the common portrayal of White Power music as evolving from, or being an element of, Oi! punk. The paper traces the histories of White Power music and Oi!, and analyses a sample of 268 Oi! songs for racist or fascist lyrics. It shows that, while some Oi! artists and audience members were involved in far-right activism, the subculture was not itself fascist or overtly racist. Many of those involved in Oi! took action against racism and far-right movements, and almost no songs included racist lyrics. The paper proposes two arguments. First, drawing from Worley, media and scholarly portrayals of Oi! as racist or fascist may represent the demonization of the working-class. Second, that White Power co-opted elements of Oi! does not mean that White Power music emerged from Oi!. Rather it likely emerged from first-wave punk at roughly the same time as Oi!. The central argument being that the White Power music scene, and the far-right more generally, is parasitical. It feeds upon the resources of larger scenes and subcultures, often harming them in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of pluriversal politics, which encompasses the vast array of alternatives to ecologically destructive and colonial capitalism, is crucial for envisioning emancipatory futures. However, the diversity of the initiatives composing the pluriverse poses obstacles to the unity necessary to dismantle interconnected systems of oppression, thus creating an intrinsic dilemma between diversity and unity. This paper explores the navigation of this challenge within emancipatory and pluriversal projects, drawing on material from ethnographic research on the Neapolitan Commons movement. The case study illuminates how social movement actors achieve simultaneous unity and diversity through the grassroots-developed concept of ‘hegemony of non-hegemony.’ In the Neapolitan context, this framework allows diversity to thrive while maintaining essential unity, crucial for confronting economic and political powers. The findings underscore how grassroots, autonomous, and pluriversal degrowth practices can challenge capitalist growth dynamics through unity in diversity, hence suggesting the unnecessary nature of state-led, top-down, or uniformizing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Repression has long been regarded as the main response of the state when encountering contentious actions. Although recent studies point out that repression may vary by regime types and state-level concerns regarding international reputation, few analyses to date have analyzed how movement dynamics and movement targets jointly shape state responses. In this article, I analyze over 7,500 episodes of labor protests in mainland China to advance scholarship on state responses to social movements. I develop a typology of state responses, from active coercion to accommodation and even tolerance. I then explore differences in state responses based on protest tactics and whether they are against private or state-affiliated targets. My results show that state responses differ based on the tactics that movements employ. Furthermore, these effects are moderated by whether activists target state-affiliated or private entities. This research offers important insights into the dynamic relations between state and social movement, the diverse ways highly bureaucratic governments use to manage social unrest, and the conflict between maintaining legitimacy and social control in both authoritarian and democratic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies examine how LGBTQ life differs between large, cosmopolitan cities like San Francisco and other, less prominent cities. Nevertheless, most of this research is done through case studies of one or a handful of LGBTQ communities, making it unclear how unique the large hubs of LGBTQ life truly are. This study leverages nationally complete data from the U.S. Gayellow Pages, a historical listing of local LGBTQ organizations, to evaluate how the organizational response of LGBTQ communities to the AIDS crisis—arguably the most prolific era of organizational creation in LGBTQ history—differed between large hubs and other cities. Findings make clear the risks of generalizing about LGBTQ life from large hubs alone. Although AIDS stimulated the creation of health-related and social movement organizations in large hubs, AIDS was more strongly associated with organizational creation outside of rather than within large hubs. The types of organizations created due to AIDS tended to be more varied outside of rather than within large hubs as well. These differences highlight the value of decentering the large hubs of LGBTQ life as units of analysis in the study of sexuality and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community supported agriculture, ecovillages, and renewable energy cooperatives are all instances of sustainable materialism initiatives. Currently, a wealth of research assesses their prefigurative dimensions and documents their market strategies; yet there is little explanation of why such initiatives rise and fall over time. This article aims to fill this gap. To do so, I investigate the lifespans of renewable energy cooperative projects in Denmark and France. Based on a qualitative comparative analysis, I argue that the rise and fall of these projects can be explained by the evolution of one type of economic power: the power of orientation, or the ability of collective organizations to simultaneously act in and act on a policy regime to create market opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Petitioning provided a flexible repertoire for women’s political activity in the decades after 1945. Petitioning was a popular, widespread practice: aside from voting, signing a petition was one of the few political activities that engaged a majority of women. Building on a long tradition of British women as active petitioners, petitioning was used by a variety of different groups—local action groups, voluntary associations, political parties, pressure groups, and radical social movements, including those associated with the Women’s Liberation Movement. Connecting formal and informal politics, petitioning was a relatively cheap, accessible form of political activity that enabled activism. In particular, the practices associated with name-signing created informal, temporary political spaces for women. Petitioning also provided a mechanism for representation and making representative claims to authority on behalf of women. The media-friendly spectacle of presenting petitions to authority was useful for attracting publicity as a range of activists, including conservative moral campaigners like Mary Whitehouse realised. The flexibility of petitioning explain its popularity as a form of political participation for women, particularly in facilitating local, informal activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diaspora movements are campaigns launched by migrant minorities who maintain allegiance to their homelands. This article investigates the recent mobilization of the Hongkonger, Thai, Burmese, and Ukrainian diasporas in Taiwan to understand the factors behind their tactical choices. While the existing literature pays more attention to the protester-government interaction to understand how movement leaders decide on their movement strategy, we contend that certain pre-existing characteristics of the diaspora communities matter more. The use of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) leads us to conclude: (1) ethnic discrimination, migrants’ class position, and the host government’s support do not affect the tactical choices; (2) a sufficiently large community with available mobilizing networks makes it possible to recruit and collect resources entirely from ethnic compatriots (reach-in); (3) linkages to local civil society enable it to speak to a broader audience and activate local responses (reach-out). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On August 14, 2013, the Egyptian security forces raided the Rabaa and al-Nahda sit-ins, marking the largest mass killing in modern Egyptian history. The massacre, aimed at targeting the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood – henceforth MB – did not end its existence; rather, it recast it as a movement in exile striving for organisational survival. Drawing on interview materials, MB media outlets, and a process tracing of key international and regional events unfolding between 2013 and 2023, this article explores the interactive relationship between exile politics and the MB’s survival action frames from a framing perspective. By mapping four successive phases highlighting its organisational trajectories to pursue survival, the article contends that the MB’s survival action frames result from the interactive relationship between failed mobilisation tactics and changes in the MB’s hosting environment which together affected and sustained intra-movement divisions. Following shifts in exile politics and inefficient mobilisation tactics to face the post-2013 Coup, the MB’s survival action frames included the organisational recentralisation of a demobilised and inactive movement and the re-setting of the group’s priorities amid unresolved leadership strife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at discussing the involvement of "humanitarian" actors, stemming from civil society, in treatment of the issue of refugees' reception. It suggests the concept of "de-bordering solidarity," to express the political meaning of such mobilizations. With this term, it refers to various forms of support provided by activists and volunteers, through which these actors contest policies of asylum and borders in practice, even when they do not advance overt political claims. Furthermore, the article factors four types of actors involved in the reception of asylum seekers, namely NGOs, other Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), social movements and common citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to eliminate 'child, early, and forced marriage', human rights violations with a wide range of harmful consequences, have intensified in the past twenty years as part of a growing social movement toward gender equality. The compound phrase 'child, early, and forced marriage' has become the preferred rhetoric in recent years and communicates a range of potentially harmful aspects of marriage, including the timing and consensuality of the event. However, we argue that two of the three component terms in 'child, early, and forced marriage' are not uniformly understood and, as a result, have not been adequately taken up in research, policy, or programming. In this review, we describe the history of this term and how different institutions define its individual components. We demonstrate that, in practice, 'child, early, and forced marriage' is often simplified to child marriage alone because this concept has a shared definition that is readily quantifiable. We recommend that clear definitions of early and forced marriage be developed and consistently applied alongside child marriage to further progress toward the overarching aim of improving gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the dynamics of the climate movement's (CM) engagement within global civil society (GCS), focusing on how this relates to its evolving commitment to anti-colonial climate politics and the wider, ongoing tensions between actors from the Global North and South within the movement. Here, this article contributes with a theorization on how counter-hegemonic and anti-colonial social movement alliances can be forged in GCS, building from neo-Gramscian, post- and decolonial concepts. This theorization builds on a study of the COP26 Coalition's efforts in Glasgow in November 2021, exploring how the coalition strategically utilized post-apocalyptic environmentalism to amplify Southern and anti-colonial perspectives within the broader CM and to carve out a space for such perspectives within GCS. However, this study also highlights how GCS spaces are shaped by a neo-colonial global hegemony which fosters structures of Northern epistemic dominance which often function to de-legitimize, exclude, or co-opt non-Western knowledges and movements within GCS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of camera phones, the availability of photo-editing apps, and the rise of visually oriented social media platforms have made it convenient for citizens to produce and circulate visual content in contentious politics. While scholars have increasingly recognized the role of visuals in mobilizing social-mediated protests, how different types of visuals affect message engagement across different stages of protests remains underexplored. For this study, we analyzed approximately ten million tweets from Twitter for three social-mediated protests (Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate, and Women's March). We found that posts with images and videos generally attracted more audience engagement than their textual counterparts. Unpacking the role of visual media across different modalities and stages of social-mediated protests, we found that the superior effects of visuals were generally more pronounced during the ignition phase of the protest than the periods before and after. By applying unsupervised image clustering on millions of protest visuals, we systematically established four common visual content categories: crowd-based protest photos, non-crowd-protest human photos, non-human photos, and non-photograph visuals. We revealed heterogeneous effects on audience engagement across content categories and protests, and explored these categories through qualitative analysis of most-engaged visuals. These findings enrich our understanding of the mobilizing power of visual media in social movements and shed light on effective communication strategies regarding social inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the role of digital media in contentious politics? On the one hand, digital media plays a central role in informing the public and organizing political movements. On the other hand, it has become a valuable tool for digital repression in authoritarian states. This study concentrates on the patterns of digital media use by pro-government actors in times of nationwide protests in autocracies. It analyzes how pro-government actors establish control over political discourse and information flow online compared to pro-opposition and neutral actors. I argue that, following the increased use of social media by opposition actors during social movements, the state will seek to establish its presence online, attempt to reach larger audiences, and endeavor to frame political issues in a beneficial light to reinforce political control. I use the cases of the 2020–21 protests in Belarus and the 2022 anti-war protests in Russia and employ text-as-data computational methods to analyze communication patterns on public Telegram channels. The results show that pro-government channels in Belarus and Russia followed the protest paradigm and framed protests as illegal, unauthorized activities that cause chaos and disorder. The pro-opposition Telegram channels in Belarus reached a larger audience than pro-state or neutral channels. In contrast, pro-government and neutral channels in Russia dominated the Telegramsphere. These contrasting patterns of Telegram channel activity and popularity suggest that the Russian pro-government online actors are more sophisticated in controlling and manipulating the communication space than Belarusian pro-state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the dynamics of father-children relationships in conflict management during and after the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement in Hong Kong. In-depth interviews with 17 fathers and 21 activists revealed how authoritarian approaches to fatherhood influence family conflict outcomes against the backdrop of social upheaval during and after the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. A conceptual framework of intimacy and face (mianzi or lian) enriches the discussion of fatherhood roles, father-children conflict management, and how participation in social movements affects their relationships. The construct of fatherhood is variable, changing, and relational, and it involves intimacy and face for father-son/daughter relationships to remain healthy during political conflicts. Hong Kong presents a unique case of evolving fatherhood, parent-child relationships, and family dynamics where the link between gender and social movement participation is extended beyond political-economic processes. This article contributes to the literature on the intergenerational dialogue between fathers and their activist children outside a Western context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future – as a theme, research orientation, and mode of framing societal challenges – is becoming important in the social sciences. Yet the absence of collective action in many such accounts makes clear the potential contribution of social movement studies. In social movement studies, meanwhile, the future has been discussed directly and indirectly. Assumptions about timing, activist orientations towards the future, and causation are embedded in understandings of strategy, agency, mobilisation, tactical choice, consequences, and in concepts of waves, cycles and diffusion. Conceptual developments around temporalities, real utopias and grassroots initiatives, imagination, and prefiguration offer some alternative perspectives and promising new directions. Foregrounding social movement futures also has implications for protesters themselves: ideas and emotions relating to the future are central to activist debates about goals, winning, utopia, hope and burnout. This introduction reviews the societal and academic context for the renewed interest in futures that are relevant for social movement studies, before outlining three major movement areas or debates where futures are implicated, and which need to form part of future research. These areas, and the subdiscipline as a whole, it is argued, may also benefit from a more direct analysis of movement futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement fights to build an alternate future characterized by racial equality and justice, a priority is studying this projected image of what society could look like and how oppressed groups and activists who fight on their behalf feel this might be achieved. This article integrates knowledge from social movement studies, critical race theory, and futures research to add to this critical discussion. Specifically, I use the concept of social movement prospectus to investigate perspectives on future social change in relation to racial justice activism. Through analysis of interviews with 36 U.S. Black millennials about BLM and its potential impact on race relations in the United States, I examine the varied conceptualizations within this group of what success would look like for this movement and whether that success is likely to occur. Broadly, I find that Black millennials are skeptical about BLM's ability to effect social change, but are more optimistic when change is viewed in terms of cultural outcomes than structural ones. I consider the implications of these perspectives for the future of the movement, as well as for scholarship that investigates how social movements produce social change and shape the future of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with the question of coordinating action during transitional and politically volatile times, in high-stakes situations. More specifically, I look at a local assembly that was established to campaign for the 'no' vote against regime change in the 2017 constitutional referendum in Turkey, and how it disintegrated at a time when coordinated action was perceived as the only viable strategy by the participants. Based on participant-observation and ethnographic interviews, I argue that instead of framing or strategy, differences in temporal frameworks eroded the basis on which activists usually coordinated their next steps, leading to an unresolvable mismatch in their anticipation of future events, and therefore, in action. I characterize the temporal dynamics of political contestation in such contexts as a 'politics of anticipation,' where futurity and temporality themselves become subjects of political contention. As such, this article contributes to the study of anti-authoritarian social movements, studies of time and temporality, and to the sociology of time and the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to analyse how social movements build alternative futures, this article explores the relationship between prefigurative politics and utopianism. A case study of the 'Indigenous Women's Movement for Buen Vivir' in Argentina will reveal how movement members shape alternative futures, while taking into account how everyday life influences their approaches to the future. Empirical data collected in 2019 shows that members define the present day as a crises-ridden dystopian age, exemplified by the conflicts they face which emerge from the resource-based development model of global capitalism. Extractivist activities are understood as destroyers of the planet and therefore are viewed as an imminent threat to human existence. Hence, the members aim to make the future possible by (re)constructing a reciprocity with nature as well as one between humans and other-than-human beings, in short, to realize Buen Vivir. To unravel how prefigurative practices and utopian imaginations intersect and co-constitute each other, I focus on how Buen Vivir is experienced in the movement through horizontality, spirituality, and autonomy. These experiences are framed by the actors as pre-colonial practices that are reconstructed in the present, as they seek to decolonise capitalist modernity 'so that there is a future'. This understanding reflects a cyclical temporality that inspires a processual, non-linear view of social change, which accompanies the indigenous women's 'prefigurative walking'. Thus, the linking of prefiguration with utopianism helps us in grasping the role of imagination, hopes, and visions for future transformations in the process of building alternative futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do social movements respond to geopolitical uncertainties and mobilize aspirations and imagined futures for progressive social change? Building on scholarship on social movements and imagined futures, this article provides an empirical analysis of Taiwan's marriage equality movement as it navigated the shifting horizon of the nation's future. With the economic and diplomatic rise of mainland China, Taiwan has confronted with an increasing international isolation due to the nation's lack of widespread external legitimacy as a nation-state. Given this geopolitical context, Taiwan's marriage equality movement not simply drew on the globalized notion of equal rights for same-sex couples. Instead, it rearticulated the meaning of 'equality' of sexual minorities in parallel to Taiwan's aspirational equal status as a nation-state in the global sphere. Through the intimate entanglement of LGBT rights claims and sovereign aspirations, the marriage equality movement became a powerful emblem of the national vision that differentiated Taiwan from mainland China. This article thus provides new insights for scholarship on social movements and imagined futures, geopolitics, and gender and sexual rights movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protest, Hong Kong protesters invented, adapted, and deployed a variety of decentralized grassroots tactics of resistance. While understudied, the proliferation of protest zines during the Anti-ELAB movement contributed to an affective community among movement supporters and protesters, allowing them to engage in self- and communal care as they resisted state violence. We argue that protest zines foregrounded a grassroots community of care that encourages political change in the following ways: expand the emotional habitus among protesters and movement supporters to accommodate debilitating bad feelings; promote self-care and embodied emotional reflection as a form of resistance against state violence; contribute to voluntary kinship among protesters beyond the state-sanctioned nuclear family model; and articulate nuclear familial relations as a site of political resistance. By examining how protest zines articulate voluntary kinship among movement supporters, we illustrate how the zines challenge dominant paternalistic institutions to reimagine a more open political future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to present a comparative study of the civil society reaction to right-wing populism in power through social media, by looking at cases in Italy and the United Kingdom. The research question is how social movements are implementing a process of reactive political identity construction – i.e. political identification – and a political counter-strategy by opposing right-wing populism in power through their Facebook official accounts. It implements a mixed-method research design with in-depth semi-structured interviews and a two-step quantitative text analysis based on Topic Model and Dictionary Method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores interactions between traditional parties and movement parties on social media. The longitudinal analysis (2010–2021) is based on data from eighteen parties' official social media accounts in six European countries. Conceptually bridging cycles of contention, social movement lifecycles, and party lifespans, this research identifies regularities in referencing patterns between traditional party families; and by adding a temporal layer, outlines three trajectories of movement parties in the polity arena. The results contribute to conceptualizing movement parties as hybrid organizations and suggest a common logic of movement in positioning in the polity arena as drivers of party-to-party interactions moderated by country-specific contextual factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the EU-US (TTIP) and EU–Canada (CETA) free trade negotiations, large coalitions of civil society organisations were active not only across borders but also within European member states. In several countries, coalitions saw the opportunity to transform their issue-specific group into a general coalition on EU trade policy in order to achieve more sustained engagement. However, in hindsight, only some of the transformed coalitions remained active and visible with the same organisations, while others experienced a decline in visibility, activities, and membership. This study aims to explore the factors contributing to this divergence in coalition transformation, drawing on the literature from social movement and interest group studies. Based on interviews with trade activists in Belgium and the Netherlands, the analysis points to differences in perception of political and discursive opportunities, resource mobilisation, the degree of ideological and cultural overlap between the coalition's actors, and organisational structure as important factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Descriptions of social movement factionalism are often based on the dichotomous conception of lawful moderates and violent radicals. In this article, we nuance this distinction by illustrating the complexity of radical flanks through an empirically grounded analysis of protest tactics, in which we ask under what conditions radical flanks are likely to use violent protest tactics. Exploring dominant explanations of political violence, the article shows the necessity of understanding the use of violent protest tactics as part of cognitive and relational processes. The use of violent tactics varies greatly across frames and protest issues, pointing to how different logics of protest are tied to different frames. Also, the use of violence is affected by the presence or absence of moderate allies; the likelihood of violence clearly decreases when radicals and moderates form coalitions when organising protests. The analysis is based on a protest event data set covering over 3,900 nonviolent and violent events by the Radical Left-Libertarian Movement in Sweden, 1997–2016. Notably, the results hold over this entire twenty-year period, suggesting that they are robust and provide a better explanation than historically contingent causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This original teaching idea is designed for a course unit on protest communication. It consists of a performed protest speech, dubbed the "fantastical speech," and a post-speech reflective analysis. Students utilize the subversive genre of fanfiction to compose a protest speech in which, as a fictional character, they convince their fictional audience to change the canonical plot of their fictional universe. Students will leave the activity with an understanding of protest communication and the ability to convey their own protest messages effectively. Courses:Persuasion, Social Movements, Introduction to Rhetoric, Argumentation, Public Advocacy, Civic Engagement, Political Communication, Public Speaking. Objectives:This unit activity invites students to change the canonical plot of one of their favorite fictional universes by taking on the persona of a fictional character and engaging other members of that universe to make a dramatic, noncanonical change. By the end of this unit activity, students will: (1) understand the purpose, place, and other generic features of protest communication; (2) name, define, and utilize specific communication strategies to convey their own protest message effectively; (3) perform their own preprepared protest speech; and (4) concisely reflect on their invention and delivery processes using communicative theories of activism, advocacy, and social protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We examined the Supreme Court's workplace and educational gender-discrimination cases from the 1970s to the present, assessing how they discuss women, their status, and workplace and educational experiences. Our study is situated in scholarship on status hierarchies, gendered cultural frameworks, and sociolegal understandings of the role of justice ideology and social movement influences on court decision making. We used a novel method for assessing court opinions, a combination of computerized text and qualitative analysis, to distill distinct vocabulary and meanings articulated in opinions decided in favor of and against the original female plaintiffs. We found pronounced differences in the court's discourse, with women centered in pro-plaintiff opinions, where decisions rely on an egalitarian gender framework, and decentered in pro-opponent opinions that draw on a traditional framework. These gender ideological frameworks remain largely stable over time, albeit with some changes, revealing an ongoing discursive struggle over women's status in the court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe social movements of the last few years have highlighted the continued institutional inequities that exist in the United States. They have reinvigorated policy and administrative practices and programs that support DEIJ. They have also reawakened in earnest a battle that has been waged since colonial America, one in which people in power work to pass policies and promote institutions that undo social equity and uphold oppression. As public administration scholars and teachers, it is critical for us to give our students the tools, language, and skills necessary to fight against oppression. In this dialogue, I present advice from social equity scholars on how to accomplish this by highlighting conversations from a roundtable discussion held at PATNet 2023. Themes include overall feelings about teaching social equity, discussing positionality, incorporating interdisciplinary theory, linking theory to practice, and teaching under censorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on an exploratory study of jeevanshalas, a network of ‘schools for life’ run by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), an anti-dam movement in the Indian states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra that did not succeed in its mission of stopping the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. Based on participant observation and conversations with movement leaders, teachers, administrators, parents and community volunteers, and on participatory research with children living in the localities of Jeevan Nagar and Trishul, Maharashtra, this article illuminates how the NBA reinvented itself through education. It argues that the jeevanshalas offer a model of long-term sustainability for social movements whose aim is not necessarily to grow the movement’s membership but to catalyse wider societal change that might eliminate the need for the movement. The findings suggest that the NBA’s understanding of the social purpose of education reflects a view of young people as political agents whose voices shape the community’s collective future, in marked contrast with India’s state-run depoliticising education system. The jeevanshalas thus represent a previously under-researched model of social movement led education whose explicit aim is not to train movement agents but to leverage the transformative potential of education to address underlying patterns of oppression. The article theorises this rearticulation of the concept of ‘social movement schools’ through Spivak’s notion of ‘infrastructural followup’, which parallels recent debates about the nature of prefigurative politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the relationship between repertoires of action and collective memory by exploring the re-emergence of feminist self-managed health centers in Italy. These were a key form of action of 1970s feminism in the country, which rapidly disappeared after the institution of state-based Family Health Centers. In the last decades, feminist and transfeminist self-managed health centers have resurfaced in several Italian cities. The present article investigates the mnemonic dynamics underpinning the re-adoption of a form of action from the past in subsequent cycles of mobilization. Social movement scholars have stressed the relatively stable and repetitive character of the repertoire of collective action over time, considering it as part of an implicit memory. The article examines a case in which the discontinuous adoption of a form of action makes its retrieval by subsequent activists the result of active memory work. While the study of social movements and collective memory has grown considerably in the last decades, the study of repertoires remains largely under-researched in this field. Filling this gap, this study shows how, by adopting a symbolically and historically meaningful repertoire, activists re-elaborate their collective identity in the present and establish a relationship with previous cycles. It suggests that further research should investigate the relationship between collective memory and repertoires of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]