Mobilizing Memory: Bolivia's Enduring Social Movements

In Bolivia, the most indigenous of South American countries, powerful social movements have drawn on collective memory to build effective coalitions across significant differences in ethnic identity and awareness, class consciousness, generations and regions. We contend that this deployment of memory to strengthen protest identities is reinforced by pervasive indigenous cultural practices. Deeply rooted in oral storytelling, perceptions of time, place and a reverence for ancestors, collective memories help bring the past into the present, and create responsibilities to those who came before. The result is a mutually constituting relationship between memory and activism, where an instrumental construction of collective memories serves to provide shared meanings to divergent movements. We suggest that scholars of social movements could deepen their analysis by interrogating rather than normalizing the cultural backdrops that movements operate within.     

The Makings of Political Art

Sociological work on how cultural objects are produced tends to neglect the politcal context of such production, whereas work on social movements and art neglects how movement artwork acquires its form and content. This article aims to fill these lacunae by analyzing the protest art of shantytown women against Pinochet. Artists, movement organizers, movement sponsors, and buyers interact to shape political art. The national and international political and economic contexts also play a part in that shaping. Ethnographic data from Chile and Europe, as well as a study of the art forms themselves, form the basis for the article's claims.     

The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions In and Around Social Movements

The recent explosion of cultural work on social movements has been highly cognitive in its orientation, as though researchers were still reluctant to admit that strong emotions accompany protest. But such emotions do not render protestors irrational; emotions accompany all social action, providing both motivation and goals. Social movements are affected by transitory, context-specific emotions, usually reactions to information and events, as well as by more stable affective bonds and loyalties. Some emotions exist or arise in individuals before they join protest groups; others are formed or reinforced in collective action itself. The latter type can be further divided into shared and reciprocal emotions, the latter being feelings that protestors have toward each other.     

Contending Stories: Narrative in Social Movements

Study of stories and storytelling in social movements can contribute to our understanding of recruitment that takes place outside formal movement organizations; social movement organizations' ability to withstand strategic setbacks; and movements' impacts on mainstream politics. This paper draws on several cases to illuminate the yields of such study and to provide alternatives to the overbroad, uncritical, and astructural understandings of narrative evident in some recent writings. It also urges attention to the role of literary devices in sociological analyses of collective action.     

Toward a Class-Cultural Theory of Social Movements: Reinterpreting New Social Movements

This paper examines the relationship between social class and social mobilization through reviewing the case of new social movements. The middle-class membership of new social movements is well documented but poorly explained by current New Class, New Social Movement, and Cultural Shift theories. These theories fail to recognize the interdependence between interests, values, and expressed ideas. Class culture provides an alternative framework for interpreting the complex relationships between class interests and consciousness in these movements. Through a comparison of working- and middle-class cultures, it is proposed that social class orders consciousness and shapes the interpretation of interests. Class cultures produce distinct class forms of political and organizational behavior while not defining any particular content of movement issues or politics. In particular, the middle-class membership of new social movements is explained by the cultural form of these movements which is distinctly middle class.     

Social Movement,Action and Change: The Influence of Women's Movements on City Government in Mumbai and London

This article reports on a research investigation into gender and local government in Mumbai in India and London in England. In both these cities female representation at the political level stands at around one third, achieved in London slowly in recent years and in Mumbai more rapidly through the adoption of a quota, or seat reservation system, implemented in 1992. In considering the experience of the women concerned it is argued that their presence and aspirations have been influenced through the networks of their respective women's movements, operating through civil society and the local state. In considering the ways in which they organize and manage the duties of office and their gendered identities, as well as in their focus on the most disadvantaged in their communities and in their dealings with others, the part played by social movements in influencing change is examined.     

The Importance of Social Movements

This discussion was conducted with Professor Alain Touraine by Tim Jordan on 20 September in Paris. The discussion has been divided into headings that correspond to the areas of questions that were asked. The social context for the discussion is important in understanding Professor Touraine's comments because the discussion occurred 9 days after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks but before the bombing of Afghanistan began and with no chance of knowing what would follow.     

Social Networks and Individual Perceptions: Explaining Differential Participation in Social Movements

This paper seeks to explain differential participation in social movements. It does so by attempting to bridge structural-level and individual-level explanations. We test a number of hypotheses drawn from the social networks and the rationalist perspectives on individual engagement by means of survey data on members of a major organization of the Swiss solidarity movement. Both perspectives find empirical support: the intensity of participation depends both on the embeddedness in social networks and on the individual perceptions of participation, that is, the evaluation of a number of cognitive parameters related to engagement. In particular, to be recruited by an activist and the perceived effectiveness of one's own potential contribution are the best predictors of differential participation. We specify the role of networks for social movements by looking at the nature and content of networks and by distinguishing between three basic functions of networks: structurally connecting prospective participants to an opportunity to participate, socializing them to a protest issue, and shaping their decision to become involved. The latter function implies that the embeddedness in social networks significantly affects the individual perceptions of participation.     

Bourdieu and Social Movements: Considering Identity Movements in Terms of Field,Capital and Habitus

This article examines the explanatory capacity of Pierre Bourdieu's work in relation to social movements and, in particular, identity movements. It aims to provide a theoretical framework drawing on Bourdieu's central concepts of field, capital and habitus. These concepts are viewed as providing a theoretical toolkit that can be applied to convincingly explain aspects of social movements that social movement theories, such as political process theory, resource mobilization theory and framing, acknowledge, but are not able to explain within a single theoretical framework. Identity movements are approached here in a way that relates them to the position agents/movements occupy in social spaces, resources and cultural competence. This enables us to consider identity movements from a new perspective that explains, for instance, the interrelatedness of class and identity movements.     

Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research

Feminist social scientists have developed distinctive principles of inquiry that depart from the positivist ideal of the detached, value-free scientist and are consistent with the feminist goal of rendering women's experiences visible and challenging gender inequality. In this article, I show how my research on the postpartum depression self-help movement illustrates five features of feminist methodology: a gender perspective, accentuation of women's experiences, reflexivity, participatory methods, and social action. My intent is to demonstrate how attention to the epistemological and methodological questions posed by feminist researchers produces new standards of evidence that allow us to recognize the gendering of social movement processes and theory.     

Protest,Cyberactivism and New Social Movements: The Reemergence of the Peace Movement Post 9/11

This paper examines ways in which the Internet and alternative forms of media have enhanced the global, yet grassroots, political mobilization in the anti-war effort in the post 9/11 environment. An examination of the role of cyberactivism in the peace movement enhances our understanding of social movements and contentious politics by analyzing how contemporary social movements are using advanced forms of technology and mass communication as a mobilizing tool and a conduit to alternative forms of media. These serve as both a means and target of protest action and have played a critical role in the organization and success of internal political mobilizing.     

Music in Movement: Cultural Politics and Old and New Social Movements

After a period of interdisciplinary openness, contemporary sociology has only recently rediscovered culture. This is especially true of political sociology, where institutional and network analyses, as well as rational choice models, have dominated. This article will offer another approach by focusing on the role of music and the visual arts in relation to the formation of collective identity, collective memory and collective action. Drawing on my own research on the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the memory of slavery in the formation of African-American identity, and its opposite, the place of white power music in contemporary neo-fascist movements, I will outline a model of culture as more than a mobilization resource and of the arts as political mediators.     

Using Social Network Analysis to Explore Social Movements: A Relational Approach

This paper uses a ‘relational’ approach to network analysis to demonstrate the linkages between different types of environmental organizations in London. A ‘relational’ approach was used to avoid problems associated with ‘positional’ approaches such as structural determinism, subjectively defined and misleadingly labelled blocks of ‘approximately’ equivalent actors, and reification of the action/issue basis of networks. The paper also explores definitions of social/environmental movements. Whilst broadly agreeing with Diani's consensual definition of a social movement, it argues that we need to be much more precise about the type and intensity of networking required; it must be more than informal or cursory, and should bind individuals and organizations into collaborative networks. Evidence from a survey of 149 environmental organizations and qualitative interviews with key campaigners suggests that whilst many organizations might share information, it is often stockpiled or ignored, hardly creating the kinds of network links that might lead to shared movement identity. The kinds of links that do bind movements are collaborative. In practice, in the environmental movement in London, conservationists tend neither to share information nor to engage in the collective action events of reformist or radical organizations, suggesting that conservationists should perhaps not be considered part of the movement.     

Protest Movements and Citizen Discontent: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party

Why do citizens indicate support for protest movements such as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street? There have been two general sets of explanations. One set emphasizes that support comes from those for whom the existing party system, and the ideological differentiation that corresponds to party divisions, are irrelevant. The second set takes the opposite tack, and emphasizes that the only thing that supporters of protests movements find lacking in the party system is extremity. Using some underexplored data, we present evidence that both accounts are incorrect for the case of these recent movements (Occupy and the Tea Party): what provokes support for protest movements is not ideology itself but a fundamental rejection of the current state of the party system, which we call disgruntlement. What ideology does for supporters is provide a sense of political friends and enemies (or near and far), which then can channel the direction that this disgruntlement takes. Further, ideologues with more education are more resistant to the appeal of the protest movement associated with the other political camp.     

Challenging Ethno-National Division: New Social Movements in Belfast

Literature on social movements in societies undergoing violent ethno-national conflict between two ‘warring factions’ has typically concentrated on civil rights, ethnic revivalists, peace and women's groups. This paper concentrates on two loose groupings – lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender, and ‘ban-the-bomb’ – that have been ignored. I argue that in the context of a ‘divided city’ like Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, these collective actors can be analysed as New Social Movements. Specifically, I look at how these new social movements have sought to experiment with forms of intercultural dialogue, expressive pluralistic communities which embrace unity through diversity and cosmopolitan, global identities which challenges the competitive, monolithic and divisive nationalisms which contribute to the sedimentation of violence and segregation of Irish Nationalists and British Unionists in the city.     

Empowering Alliances in Pursuit of Social Justice: Social Workers Supporting Psychiatric-Survivor Movements

This article reviews historical and current examples of harmful and forced treatments as well as scientific discrimination that have been applied to people diagnosed with mental illness. It discusses anti-psychiatric social action in North America from 1970 to the present. A review of social work's foundations in social justice, empowerment, and person-in-the-environment perspectives highlights the congruencies and communal benefits for both the social work profession and psychiatric-survivor movements. Through this discussion, it is apparent that the professed values of the social work profession are actually more compatible with psychiatric-survivor movements than with any allegiances to the biomedical model of psychiatry.     

Decriminalizing Abortion in Uruguay: Women’s Movements,Secularism, and Political Allies

In 2012 Uruguay became the second country in Latin America to decriminalize abortion during the first trimester. Drawing on original field research, this article explains the success of abortion reform based on the existence of a strong campaign for decriminalization. The women’s movement used frames that resonated within civil society, gathered support from key social actors, and collaborated closely with sympathetic legislators. In addition, three contextual factors ensured both the availability and success of these strategies: a weak presence of the Catholic Church, a president not opposed to abortion reform, and a highly institutionalized party system with a strong leftist coalition.     

The Uses and Misuses of Globalization in the Study of Social Movements

On a general level this article seeks to improve our understanding of the relationship between the concepts of globalization and transnational mobilization; a question that is surprisingly rarely addressed in an explicit manner in the already extensive (and still growing) body of literature on these issues. The article proceeds from the assumption that globalization does not necessarily lead to transnational mobilization. The missing link between globalization and transnational mobilization is a process of social construction that seeks to link the local, the national and the global. Globalization, in this perspective, is both an objective process involving certain structural transformations and a subjective process intimately related to the way social actors interpret these changes and give them meaning. Proceeding from a critique of mono-causal and political economic approaches to transnational mobilization the main objective of this article is to outline an analytical framework able to encompass both of these dimensions; a task achieved by combining insights from the globalization literature and the social constructionist framing approach to social movements. This integration is captured in the concept of transnational framing.     

The Double Challenge of Market and Social Incorporation: Progress and Bottlenecks in Latin America

Has the past decade of sustained economic growth and political transformations reversed Latin America's historical failure to secure market and social incorporation? To address this question this article draws on the experiences of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay by distinguishing between short‐term outcomes – which may depend on benign international conditions – and policy changes, which are more important for long‐term performance. It highlights the overall success of both Brazil and Uruguay and shows that the other countries have made more progress in terms of social than market incorporation.     

The Liminal Effects of Social Movements: Red Guards and the Transformation of Identity

Social movements transform participants' identities. Why they do so is an unresolved puzzle. I argue that for participants, social movements are liminal phenomena characterized by varying degrees of freedom, egalitarianism, communion, and creativity. As such, the transformative power of social movements depends on their degree of liminality. Those that approximate most to the pure type of the liminal offer to the participants high degrees of freedom, egalitarianism, communion, and creativity. They transform identities most powerfully. In the 1960s, China's Red Guards experienced a profoundly liminal movement. As a result, an age-cohort that was coming of age began to recreate itself. The personal transformations of the Red Guards would persistently bear on Chinese politics and society up to the 1989 Chinese student movement.