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Science is under attack and scientists are becoming more involved in efforts to defend it. The rise in science advocacy raises important questions regarding how science mobilization can both defend science and promote its use for the public good while also including the communities that benefit from science. This article begins with a discussion of the relevance of science advocacy. It then reviews research pointing to how scientists can sustain, diversify, and increase the political impact of their mobilization. Scientists, we argue, can build and maintain politically impactful coalitions by engaging with and addressing social group differences and diversity instead of suppressing them. The article concludes with a reflection on how the study of science-related mobilization would benefit from further research.

Disciplined academic study of social movements should help us make sense of the movements and politics of our time, but social science often leads us astray. Particularly, the ideal of limiting the frame of analysis in terms of independent and dependent variables and in terms of time routinely neglects the disparate causes and effects of social protest. These challenges are particularly acute when considering contemporaneous campaigns, that is, analysis on the fly. Using the case of the first Women’s March, staged the day after Donald Trump became president of the United States, I elaborate the false steps that social science analysis encourages by identifying patterned errors of exclusion: applying misplaced models; producing unduly narrow fields of action; the difficulty of evaluating practical possibilities; the challenge of assessing institutionalization; and the necessity of truncating time. I conclude with suggestions for continuing to engage in analysis of contemporary movements and ways to avoid egregious errors while doing so.

William A. Gamson's career was nothing less than remarkable. A prolific scholar, Gamson wrote at least eight books and more than a hundred articles from 1961 to 2014. And he bequeathed social movement studies substantial theoretical contributions and methodological innovations in numerous areas including coalitions, resource mobilization, political opportunities, framing, and culture. His legacy also includes pioneering simulation games both for teaching and for use by social movements, novel pedagogies (in part inspired by his wife, sociologist, Zelda Gamson), and a well-articulated scholar-activist model that has-- and will continue--to inspire. This article discusses his extraordinary career and his legacy for social movements, academia, and beyond. Keywords: coalitions, framing, public sociology, resource mobilization, scholar activist, simulation games, social movements, William Gamson, One of us first encountered William Gamson as a name on a book, The Strategy of Social Protest ([1975] 1990). Strategy sought to answer the questions that activists usually ask: [...]

This article explains the sudden and strong emergence of a movement in resistance to the presidency of Donald Trump as a counter-movement to the long-term "movementization" of the Republican Party in the wake of civil rights, the Nixon "southern strategy", and the emergence of white nativism. It identifies the Resistance as posing three distinct challenges for both citizens and scholars of participation and conflict: the political opportunity challenge, the coalitional challenge, and the radicalization/ institutionalization challenge. The article situates the Resistance in a historical and comparative context, high-lights its dilemmas as it faces the focal point of a populist/nativist President, and asks if it is an effective countermovement to the white nativist movement that supports him.

This paper explores how a global health crisis affects the causes and consequences of social movements. Drawing on media coverage, press releases, emails, and other available primary data sources, we examine how the pandemic changed the opportunities and conditions for activists on the right and left and those they challenge. We begin by considering the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and the concomitant government response, which alters the structure of political opportunities activists face. We then look at the development of a range of protest campaigns that have emerged in response, assessing changes in opportunities for activists to reach and mobilize target constituencies, the construction of grievances, nature of alliances, as well as innovation in tactics and organization. Finally, we consider the potential outcomes of these protests during the pandemic and extending afterward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revisiting the concept of the social movement society, we see the development of new media and datafication creating unanticipated challenges and constraints, in effect, new and different opportunities. The wired world reduces the costs of spreading information and mobilizing action, but also creates additional risks. I review the premises and blindspots of the 'social movement society' hypothesis, initially offered by David S. Meyer and Sidney Tarrow,' and then consider how new technologies affect strategies and possibilities for activists, as well as stakes and targets of activists. The conclusion raises issues of inequality and representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements must find ways to intensify their efforts to maintain political relevance—and potential influence. But escalation comes with risks in the potential reactions from authorities, supporters, potential supporters, and opponents. I argue that recognizing two elements of escalation can help. First, we need to acknowledge that movements are not unitary actors and that a large movement cannot always stop putative allies from escalating in risky ways. Second, I argue that scholars and activists can do better in making sense of the dynamics of escalation by disaggregating three dimensions of aggression by tactics, claims, and venues, assessing the range of responses to escalation on each of these dimensions. Social movement organizers face continual pressure to find ways to escalate, but responses from authorities and allies can provide a brake on escalation. I illustrate my arguments with reference to contemporary movements of the left and right in the United States and conclude by discussing the importance (and danger) of certain government responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements must find ways to intensify their efforts to maintain political relevance—and potential influence. But escalation comes with risks in the potential reactions from authorities, supporters, potential supporters, and opponents. I argue that recognizing two elements of escalation can help. First, we need to acknowledge that movements are not unitary actors and that a large movement cannot always stop putative allies from escalating in risky ways. Second, I argue that scholars and activists can do better in making sense of the dynamics of escalation by disaggregating three dimensions of aggression by tactics, claims, and venues, assessing the range of responses to escalation on each of these dimensions. Social movement organizers face continual pressure to find ways to escalate, but responses from authorities and allies can provide a brake on escalation. I illustrate my arguments with reference to contemporary movements of the left and right in the United States and conclude by discussing the importance (and danger) of certain government responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protest, now ubiquitous in advanced industrialized societies, has become a useful window for examining all sorts of broader political phenomena. Using event data from newspaper reports, we trace protest by Vietnamese Americans over the past 26 years as a means to assess political incorporation. By looking at the issues, tactics, and development of protest within the Vietnamese American community, we get a sense of the development and incorporation of that community. We find that protest, particularly in the form of demonstrations, is a common form of making claims among Vietnamese-Americans, and that the issues expressed are primarily about foreign policy, directed toward the old homeland, rather than domestic political concerns. It is not clear whether mobilization on homeland issues provides a foundation for subsequent political mobilization on domestic issues, or whether it serves as a distraction from it.

The content and the process of making policy serve as both stimuli and outcomes of social movements. Understanding these relationships, that is, how policy and citizen movements affect each other, is essential to understanding the functioning of contemporary democratic politics and indeed, the democratic process more broadly. Although scholars of both social movements and of public policy have acknowledged the importance of the others' work, they have not gone much beyond acknowledgment. Unfortunately, this leaves fundamental issues in the study of political participation and influence underdeveloped theoretically and understudied empirically. In this paper, I offer a dialogic model of the mutual influence of protest and policy, which emphasizes the interaction of activist efforts and the policy process, and the dynamics of political coalitions inside and outside established political institutions. Focused attention to the theoretical and practical problems of understanding the relationship between policy and movements.

This paper is about the politics of claiming credit. Effectively taking the credit for some desirable outcome is an essential element of politics. In tightly controlled, closed, polities, both mythic and real, leaders control the mass media in order to present a coherent, consistent, self-serving and state-serving narrative that ascribes responsibility and blame. This paper explores the disparities in success at claiming credit, with the intent of explaining why some challengers end up deriving credit both in the short and long term for their efforts, while others do not. I begin by looking at the question of the outcomes of social movements, briefly reviewing the relevant literature, which focuses predominantly on public policy. I move to the literature on public policy, examining the difficulties in assessing success or failure of policies. I then identify a number of variables, including goals, political positioning, coalition politics, and constituencies, that explain why some movements have a harder time claiming credit than others. I conclude by suggesting that the positioning of institutional actors, and the degree of their identification with a social movement, is critical to the movement's capacity to claim success.