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Contemporary social movements and organizations have increasingly embraced the notion of 'leaderfulness'. This development has the possibility of affecting the current struggles these movements face as well as the activist landscapes of the future. Due to its distinct contribution to developing an analysis of leadership, this article seeks to position Gramsci's intellectual work at the heart of understanding the ways in which these contemporary movement organizations are using organizational structures to address social objectives and the implications this has on the movement. Specifically, this article examines the Black Lives Matter Global Network, which openly advocates for leaderfulness, through documentary content analysis and 22 interviews of activists across 18 local chapters. We find that the structures for promoting leaderfulness which Gramsci had advocated for were lacking and, we argue, this was the reason why the development of leaderfulness was limited. This article helps to shed light on the difficulties of social movement momentum and proposes a solution drawn from Gramsci's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using in-depth interview data of young adults who participated in the University of Kent student occupation, this paper (1) explores the process by which young people enter into and engage in high-intensity mobilisation and (2) seeks to understand how this mobilisation (and prior engagement) impacts future political trajectories of these youth activists as they grow into adulthood. Recruitment and initial engagement in high-intensity mobilisation correspond to concepts used to explain civic engagement in Verba, Schlozman and Brady's ([1995]. Voice and equality: Civic voluntarism in American politics. Cambridge: Mass: Harvard University Press) civic voluntarism model. Political trajectories following high-intensity engagement appeared to correspond with engagement prior to participation in the occupation, with those who had lower levels of prior engagement able to sustain their activism well beyond the initial high-intensity engagement. Those with greater activist experiences prior to the occupation and earlier in their youth reduced their engagement following the high-intensity mobilisation. While patterns of trajectories from young adulthood to adulthood appeared, the causal mechanisms varied significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social movement literature in Western Europe and North America has oriented much of its theoretical work towards micro-, meso-, and macro-level examinations of its subject of study but has rarely integrated these levels of analysis. This review article broadly documents the leading theoretical perspectives on social movements, while highlighting the contributions made in recent years with regard to the wave of protests across the globe – typified by the Occupy Movement and the ‘Arab Spring’ – and grievances that are relatively novel in qualitative or quantitative form such as austerity, precarity, and a sense of democratic deficiency. While these novel social processes have invigorated the specialized arena of ‘social movement studies’ and generated a resurgence of work on social movements beyond the field, this article argues for the need to interconnect levels of analysis in order to develop a more insightful account of contemporary contentious politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hollywood film has become a force of cultural globalization and the image of women in popular Hollywood films may have an important impact on cultural ideas of gender, sexuality and the role of women in the public and private spheres. I examine the top box office films from the 1990s to the present and explore the characteristics women characters have in the film and look at the potential impact of that representation in the context of cultural globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Genoa G8 Summit of 2001 was marred by violence and conflicts between police and activists. Afterwards, these different groups constructed clashing discourses about the events. In turn, these discourses sustained different types of social representations about the nature of the conflict. Earlier analyses of hegemonic social representations examining the Italian press suggested that non-violent activists were subject to processes of delegitimisation and that they were identified with black bloc activists (Cristante, 2003; Juris, 2005; Zamperini & Botticini, 2006). Conversely, in this study we analyze activists' accounts of the protest and of the violent police repression. We examine a collection of published texts (N= 223) posted on a 'cyber-wall' online as part of a collaborative project from three Italian media outlets: Il Manifesto, Radio Popolare, Carta. These texts represent a form of 'counter-narrative' produced by a stigmatized group to contest the dominant discourse, creating a tripartite of relations between non-violent activists, police and the black bloc. The analysis of these texts shows that activists represent the protest as a battle between two groups. Activists describe police as coercive, incompetent, and as the enemy. While the black bloc was perceived to have damaged the protest, they were not depicted as the enemy. Cognitive, emotive and behavioural factors associated with these representations are highlighted and discussed, together with the implications for future intergroup relations between activists and the police. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]