ISA47 statement, 17.03.2016

(you can download here the pdf version)

Dear colleagues,

2016 is a frightening year for freedom, peace and social sciences. As I wrote you 5 weeks ago, instead of diffusing researchers’ work and publications, the role of an ISA Research Committee on social movements has suddenly become diffusing information on threats, imprisonments and now torture and assassination of our colleagues.

Things have only got worst ever since. The torture and murder of our colleague Giulio Regeni was a major alarm. Last week, we gathered hundreds of signatures to denounce the murder of activist Bertha Caceres and the threats to our colleague Gustavo Castro in Honduras.

This week, the Turkish government has jailed three of our colleagues from Academics for Peace, while the European Union negotiates with and support authoritarian and repressive governments.
Please read below the statement issued today by the Turkish committee Academics for Peace.

Here is a link with a petition started by colleagues in the UK: https://www.change.org/p/international-community-and-elected-representatives-stop-the-persecution-of-academics-for-peace-in-turkey
Researchers who work on and with activists and social movements are particularly at threat. The succession of the repression and violence against our colleagues in different countries demands urgent reactions by the academic community. We need to take concrete actions with four aims:

• It is urgent to take action where we are to denounce each case of repression and threat against our researchers, scholars and students.
• We have to offer concrete support to our colleagues victims of repression and violence.
• We also have to organize ourselves to be able to react faster and more efficiently to denounce repression and violence and to protect our colleagues and stand with them to oppose the repression they suffer and defend academic freedom.
• Social sciences and research on and with social movements is more necessary and important than ever. We need to analyse the local, national and international forces, supports and mechanisms that have made peaceful activists and social scientists have become targets of repressive regimes. We particularly welcome articles on these topics on our platform “Open Movements”.

ISA47 mailing list and Facebook page will welcome your ideas and proposals about concrete actions, analyses and other suggestions.

We ask the ISA to issue a clear statement to denounce the repression against the repression against Turkish scholars.

We demand truth and justice for Giulio Regeni and the liberation of Gustavo Castro in Honduras and  Esra Mungan, Kıvanç Ersoy and Muzaffer Kaya in Turkey.

For the ISA47 board,

Geoffrey Pleyers

University of Louvain, President of the ISA47 “Social Movements”

Academics for Peace, Turkey, 16.03.2016

Since the announcement of the declaration “We will not be a party to this crime” by the Academics for Peace, more than 60 people have been killed in two bombings at the heart of the capital of Turkey, Ankara. Meanwhile, under the name of military operations against the PKK, the state forces have killed hundreds of civilians in the southern part of the country and many more have been injured and forced to leave their homes.

Still, the academics persist in their call for peace while being repressed in various ways.

On March 14, a warrant was issued for the arrest of four academics who made a press declaration (dated, March 10) about the various consequences of oppressive acts carried out by the government since January 11 against the Academics for Peace. The academics Esra Mungan, Kıvanç Ersoy, Muzaffer Kaya and Meral Camcı, having read the text in the name of Academics for Peace – İstanbul, stated that many of the signatories were and are being dismissed from their universities, threatened to death, targeted through media, and that a judicial process would be launched against all of them. They also announced that they stood behind their declaration entitled “We will not be a party to this crime.”

Three of the four academics, Esra Mungan, Kıvanç Ersoy and Muzaffer Kaya, were taken under custody on March 14. Meral Camcı is abroad, and thus she was not. These three academics have been indicted for “promoting terrorist organization, acting upon the instructions of the organization,” and taken to the court on March 15. Upon the demand of the persecutor, they were sent to the court with a claim for arrest, and eventually, the court decided for arrest.

Moreover, Chris Stephenson, an academic at İstanbul Bilgi University, present at the court house for solidarity with those three, was taken under custody for carrying a notice of People’s Democratic Party (HDP) calling for Newroz celebrations. He is kept under custody on March 15 and deported on March 16. Stephenson, who is married with a Turkish national and have a 13 year old daughter told to Associated Press that there was “no offence, no trial, just an administrative decision to deport me after 25 years of residency in Turkey”

As warfare has escalated in the southern part of Turkey and spread to the other regions, calls for peace have been increasingly suppressed by the state. The pressure on the Academics for Peace is a clear indicator of the expanding pressure on opposition, which often results in serious human rights violations against oppositional voices.

We would like to inform you about the current developments in Turkey, and raise an urgent call for solidarity with the Academics for Peace against the oppression of the state, and we want the grounds for peace to be re-established before more killings take place in the country.

3rd ISA Forum of Sociology
July, 10-14 2016, Vienna Austria

ISA-RC 47“Social classes and social movements”

Abstract proposals should be sent to the panel coordinators and submitted before September 30th 2015 on the ISA Forum website (http://www.isa-sociology.org/forum-2016)

Joint Sessions
Opening session of RC 47 & RC 48: Contemporary Social Movements

Session Organizer(s):

Tova BENSKI, President of RC 48, tovabenski@gmail.com

Geoffrey PLEYERS, President of RC 47, Université de Louvain, Geoffrey.Pleyers@uclouvain.be

Benjamín TEJERINA, Universidad del País Vasco, Spain, b.tejerina@ehu.eus

Breno BRINGEL, Rio de Janeiro State University, Brazil, brenobringel@iesp.uerj.br

We live in a time of deep reconfigurations of democracy, social movements and activism. Five years after the start of a major global movements’ wave in 2011, the panorama for social movements and democracy in the 2010s is a contrasting one. How do new trends in social movements study help us to grasp this fast evolving situation and the changing forms and meanings of both social movements and democracy?
The decade started with a spread of emancipatory movements and democratic openings. After a phase of intense mobilizations, some of these activists have developed democratic and emancipatory practices in their daily life, while others experiment a partial shift to the institutional politics arena. By the mid-2010s, the panorama for social movements and democracy looks however far more contrasting. The democratic project has however come under serious threat. Social movements are repressed, journalists are killed, and citizens are spied by their states. Even in democratic regions, citizens seem to have little impact on major economic and political decisions. At the same time, conservative, racist and far-right movements are gaining impetus in the West and in the East, jihadism attracts thousands of young people from different regions of the world.
What have been the impacts, the challenges and the limits of emancipatory and conservative movements in the 2010s? How do the new trends in social movement studies help us to grasp these transformations and the challenges faced by social movements and democracy?
Democracy in the Squares: Global Resistance Movements and Women
Joint session RC47 / RC48 [host committee]

Session Organizer(s)

Nilufer GOLE, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), nilufer.gole@ehess.fr

Buket TURKMEN, Galatasaray University, Turkey, elizemestan@gmail.com

A new wave of protest movements has emerged everywhere in the world, ranging from the Middle East, to the European cities, as well as Brazil and Ukraine. These movements follow transnational dynamics, while the domain of politics remain at the national scale. Citizens of the world elaborate new democratic imaginaries. A new public culture of contestation appears with art becoming its intrinsic dimension. These movements that we want to examine contribute to the enactment of forms of citizenship in the public square redefining the political subject. Especially female activists’ struggles in the global resistance movements reveal the emergence of new subjectivities through the act of resistance.
While sociologists believe in the existence of a rupture between these newly emerging struggles and the heritage of the past social struggles, there are also remarkable continuities. The rupture women activists in the Tahrir Square created with patriarchy can only be understood with reference to Egyptian feminism. While Kurdish, Turkish, nationalist, leftist and Islamist female activists developed a sense of sisterhood during the Gezi movement in Istanbul, this sisterhood has been developing since the 1990s, along with the evolution of Turkey’s feminisms. Women in resistance movements experience a dual suffering and have to challenge both the authoritarian/neoliberal regimes and the patriarchy that pervaded the movement along with the society. We will try to understand the new subjectivities constructed by female activists of these global resistance movements as a mixed consequence of the experience of resistance and the feminist heritage.

Silos or Synergies? Can Labor Build Effective Alliances with Other Global Social Movements?

Joint session RC47 & RC44 Labor Movements [host committee]

Session Organizer(s)

Peter B. EVANS, University of California-Berkeley, USA, pevans@berkeley.edu

Daniele DI NUNZIO, Associazione Bruno Trentin/IRES/ISF, Italy, d.dinunzio@ires.it

On the defensive in the face of an increasingly aggressive global capital, labor needs allies. Operating in a “silo” – that is within carefully defined organizational and strategic boundaries that insulate worker organizations from other sorts of mobilization – is a formula for defeat. Alliances with communities and movements for democracy have always been crucial to labor’s success at the local and national levels. Alliances with other transnational social movements at the global have been more sporadic, usually limited to specific campaigns.

Where are the most promising opportunities for building cross-issue synergies that enhance labor’s political clout along with that of other social movements? What are the obstacles to building synergistic relationships? Few would question the contributions of movements for human rights to the quest for expanding workers rights. There is already a rich literature looking at labor’s relationships with movements prioritizing gender issues and with environmental movements. But much work needs to be done before we understand why sometimes silo approaches prevail and what conditions create possibilities for synergies. What are the complementarities between labors’ organizational and ideological strengths and those of other movements? What are the strategic contradictions that make synergies elusive?

This session seeks to bring together both work based on the analysis of specific successes and failures at building cross-movement alliances and work that seeks to offer a general analytical understanding of the foundations of synergies and silos.

The Sociology of Social Movements as a General Sociology. Around Alain Touraine
Joint session RC47 & RC48 [host committee]

Session Organizer(s)
Benjamín TEJERINA, Universidad del País Vasco, Spain, b.tejerina@ehu.eus

Kevin MCDONALD, Middlesex Univesity, United Kingdom, k.mcdonald@mdx.ac.uk

Tova BENSKI, President of RC 48, tovabenski@gmail.com

Geoffrey PLEYERS, President of RC 47, Université de Louvain, Geoffrey.Pleyers@uclouvain.be

Alain Touraine has underlined the importance of considering the sociology of social movements not as a specialized subfield but as an essential part of general sociology. This session will gather contributions that have developed this perspective in different ways and studying a range of social movements on different continents.

Social Movements and the Future They Want

Joint session of RC07 Futures Research [host committee] and RC47 Social Classes and Social Movements

Session Organizer(s)

Markus S. Shulz, ISA Vice-president, markus.s.schulz@gmail.com

Geoffrey PLEYERS, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, Geoffrey.Pleyers@uclouvain.be

Social movement scholars can make a significant contribution to the third Forum of the ISA entitled “The Futures we Want: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World”. Social movements are major actors of our societies and contribute to shaping possible futures.

This session welcomes both concrete analysis and theoretical contributions on how progressive or conservative social movements imagine, shape and implement alternative futures. We notably welcome contributions on how social actors and social movements imagine and contribute to shape alternative lifestyles, policies and sociability in the global age, increasingly shaped by both global interdependency and the finitude of the planet.

Young Activists, Subjectivity and “the Future They Want”

Joint session RC34 Sociology of Youth and RC47 [host committee]

Session Organizer

Carmen LECCARDI, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, carmen.leccardi@unimib.it

This session welcomes contributions on how young activists imagine, shape and implement alternative futures. As framed in the third ISA Forum presentation, “Tomorrow no longer appears as pre-determined by inevitable trends but as a rather contingent outcome of complex, typically multi-scalar dynamics that vary in their intensity of contentiousness.” Young people aspire, desire, envision, expect, fear, imagine, plan, project, reject, sustain, and wage war over futures. Young activists are major actors of our societies in shaping our possible futures.

We notably welcome contributions on young activists’ perspectives on the future and how these perspectives shape their subjectivity and their personality. Young green activists and their visions of a future on a limited planet prove particularly insightful in that perspective.

However, to understand the specific potential of their vision – at the centre of which stand autonomy, self-determination, experimentation and creativity together with a high level of personal responsibility – the widespread representation of the future expressed by contemporary young people has to be considered. For the majority of them, the future is related above all with indeterminateness and uncertainty. Moreover, the imperative of choice is not flanked by their conviction that personal decisions will be effectively able to condition future biographical outcomes as well as collective environment.
Cultural Signification: Making Sense of Action in Social Movements

Session Organizers:

Dai NOMIYA, Chuo University, Japan, dainom@tamacc.chuo-u.ac.jp,

James JASPER, City University of New York, JJasper@gc.cuny.edu,

Antimo Farro, University of Rome, Italy, antimoluigi.farro@uniroma1.it,

Benjamin TEJERINA, Universidad del País Vasco, Spain, b.tejerina@ehu.eus

For many years, researchers have found that social movements contain cultural and psychological elements that guide actions in one way or another, leading eventually to movement mobilization.  Cultural attributes, such as interpretation, emotion, collective identity, and frame, as they give meanings and signification to the action, work in participants’ engagement in the action.
While long recognized as indispensable for mobilization, these cultural components have also been regarded as the elements difficult to grasp; they are difficult to detect, observe, conceptualize, and generalize.  We have come a long way to find frame and collective identity to work in a concrete movement setting.  But we have to stop and think what else we have acquired as our common cultural languages.  We know that emotions are important.  But we are not sure if we have developed and conceptualized enough to bring emotion in our thought frame as a sound analytical concept.  We are not sure further if these cultural languages can easily travel across researchers residing different continents, East and West and North and South.  We may also have different methods and methodologies to detect and observe cultural components of action.
This proposed session aims at bringing together our cultural findings in social movement research.  Proposing a new concept, new ways of doing research aiming at digging out cultural materials, rearranging current conceptualization, displaying a region/location-specific research method, etc, should help understand where we are, and which direction(s) we should move on from here.

Environmental Movements in the Age of Climate Change

Session Organizer

Christopher ROOTES, University of Kent, United Kingdom, c.a.rootes@kent.ac.uk

Environmental movements and protest appeared to be natural bed-fellows as activists struggled to mobilise an environmentally uneducated populace and to challenge the priorities of governments and parties more concerned about economic development than environmental protection. That changed as governments began to acknowledge environmental problems and, recognising the expertise of environmental NGOs, began to see NGOs as partners rather than adversaries. That relationship was consolidated as climate change rose on political agendas, as governments saw NGOs as potential mobilisers of citizens toward sustainable alternatives to the carbon-intensive economy. This created opportunities for NGOs, but, demanding more of them than they can deliver, it has created dilemmas about their identity and future action. Their dilemmas differ according to the dispositions of governments, from the EU, where governments have mostly accepted the need for action on climate change, to countries where governments have resisted action (e.g. Australia, USA, Canada). This panel will compare experiences at local, regional, national and transnational levels, to illuminate the variety of scenarios and responses of environmental movements and NGOs, and to consider the future of environmentalism in light of these developments. We shall be particularly interested in the development of new forms of environmental activism at local as well as international levels, and the emergence of activism on climate justice, including networks of NGOs, activists and experts in and around climate summits. Papers on transnational movements or multi-sited research in an international/global perspective will be especially welcome.
Far Right Movements and Social Research

Session Organizer(s)

Emanuele TOSCANO, University Guglielmo Marconi, Italy, emanuele.toscano@uniroma1.it

Chikako MORI, Hitotsubashi University, Japan, c.mori@r.hit-u.ac.jp

The rise and spread of far right, populist and nationalist movements in Europe and elsewhere in the world opened a new framework of interest for social movement studies. The study of far right is mainly addressed by political science, focusing on parties and electoral trends. Very few researches are instead leaded from the point of view of social movement studies. One explanation can be linked with the methodological issues: social movements researchers usually use qualitative techniques, such us participant observation, in-depth interviews and sociological interventions to study social movements, often creating a relation with activists based on mutual respect and common perspectives. But how can this possible with activists whose discourses are often racist oriented, or whose initiatives are violent and disrespectful?
Which methodological obstacles arise for research oriented towards analysing protest participation in far right movements? And how do we overcome them?
The panel welcomes empirical and theoretical contributions that deal with reflection on methodology in the study of movements – such as racist, populist of far right organisations – with whose discourses and practises is difficult to empathise.
Regular Session
From Indymedia to #Occupywallstreet and Anti-Austerity Protests in Europe: Three Generations of Digital Activism Logics

Session Organizer(s)

Tod WOLFSON, Rutgers University, USA, wolfsont@gmail.com

Emiliano TRERÉ, Autonomous University of Queretaro, Mexico, etrere@gmail.com

Peter FUNKE, University of South Florida, USA, pnfunke@usf.edu

Paolo GERBAUDO, King`s College London, United Kingdom, paolo.gerbaudo@kcl.ac.uk

Across the last few decades the logic of activism, and of digital activism in particular, have changed dramatically. We have experienced what could be regarded as three waves of protests from the early 1990s to the present. Each of these waves is connected both by the transformations in global capitalism and the rise of the digital age, while still displaying differences or rather developments in movement-based organizing. Together however, we can conceive these three waves as part of one broader epoch of contention. Those particular waves of contention are: Global Social Justice, Occupy/Arab Spring, Syriza/Podemos.
In this panel, we propose to look at the logics of these waves of protest (or generations of digital activism) in order to explore their similarities and differences. The goal of the panel discussion would be to mine history assuming a diachronic perspective, but more concretely to understand the strengths and weaknesses of this epoch of contention as we watch the current wave of struggle unfold.
Some of the questions that will be tackled in the panel are: how have capitalist transformations informed the emergence of the current epoch of contention and how has the activists relation to communication technologies evolved and shaped the logics of protests and mobilizations? Can we conceive of an underlying meta-logics of movement politics informing the waves of protests and how are they best conceptualized, similar as well as differently enacted? What has been the evolution of the role of alternative media in an oversaturated media environment where corporate social media are increasingly dominating the digital activism scenario? What are the challenges that social movements and their communication face when they crystallize into political parties? What lessons have we learned from the analysis of this epoch of contention and what are the future horizons of digital activism and protest?

ICTs in the Media Ecology of Protest Movements: Infrastructures, Discourses and Practices for Social Change.

Session Organizer(s):

Alice MATTONI, European University Institute, Italy, alice.mattoni@eui.eu

Ionel SAVA, University of Bucharest, Romania, insava@sas.unibuc.ro

Studies on ICTs and social movements flourished in the past few years, also due to the relevant role that social media platforms and mobile communication devices had in the 2011 protest wave. Literature on the topic, however, frequently considers ICTs independently from the context in which they are embedded resulting in a myopic look at the role of digital media in mobilizations. This flaw might be overcome through an analysis that takes into consideration the media ecology of ICTs. Starting from this assumption, the panel seeks papers that investigate ICTs in relation to: the material infrastructures that sustain ICTs used during protests, from corporate media clouds services to activist managed hardware and software; the discourses and imageries related to ICTs, including values and beliefs that activists and other political actors attach to ICTs used during protests; the (media) practices that include the use of ICTs during protests, also in combination with other media technologies and means of communication, like the live-streaming of face-to-face assemblies or the coordinated collective use of Twitter accounts. The panel welcome papers that explore the role of ICTs in recent mobilizations through qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches. We are particularly interested in papers that considers protests in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, also in a comparative perspective with protests that occurred in other parts of the world.

Genesis of the New Social Movements in the Global South

Session Organizer(s)

Simin FADAEE, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, simin.fadaee@hu-berlin.de

Breno BRINGEL, Universidade Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, brenobringel@iesp.uerj.br

The panel will be shaped around the so-called new social movements of the global South. The paradigm which emerged as a response to the ‘rights based’ and ‘quality-of-life’ movements (e.g. feminism, LGBT rights, environment, human rights, etc. ) in Europe and North America after the 1960s assumed that there is a clear distinction between these ‘identity’ movements  and the old organized ‘labor’ movements. Although many Southern societies have witnessed the emergence of rights based and quality-of-life movements, scholarship lacks systematic analysis of these movements in non-western context. The panel aims at addressing this gap by focusing on the historical origins, participants and the relation of these movements to earlier struggles.
Moving Refugees? Mobilisation and Outcomes of Refugee Movements, Solidarity Groups, and Anti-Asylum Activities

Session Organizer(s)

Ilker ATAC, ING Bank Turkey, Turkey, ilker.atac@univie.ac.at

Sieglinde ROSENBERGER, University of Vienna, Austria, sieglinde.rosenberger@univie.ac.at

The past ten years have witnessed an upsurge of mobilizations and protest activities by asylum seekers, irregular migrants and migrant rights solidarity activists and groups. With forms of collective public action they demand advocacy for human rights, a fair asylum process and access to labor markets. Furthermore, they demonstrate resistance to pending deportations. In contrast to these pro-migrant movements, we have noticed also a rise of counter-movements that take action against asylum seekers and their accommodations, mostly on a local level.
First, the panel focuses on organizational aspects, framing strategies and identities of these protest movements. Which practices, discursive alliances and mobilization strategies do they use? What are the similarities and differences among these movements? In which ways do pro-refugee and anti-refugee movements relate to each other?
Second, the panel will deal with internal effects and social and political outcomes of these movements. These movements produce cultural effects, through their framing strategies they aim to change perceptions in the society; they produce individual/biographical effects, protests against the deportation of failed asylum seekers results in some cases to legalization. However, asylum seekers may also run the risk of being deported. Reactions of governments and other state institutions may also result in repression, co-optation, and prevention.
This panel addresses refugee, solidarity and anti-asylum movements and focuses on both their different forms of mobilizations and their social, political and movement-related outcomes. Comparative papers with regard to movements, countries and political levels as well as single case studies are also welcome.

Popular Dissent in Sub-Saharan Africa

Session Organizer:

Marcelle DAWSON, University of Otago, New Zealand, marcelle.dawson@otago.ac.nz

The nature of popular resistance in sub-Saharan Africa has much in common with the waves of protest that have swept across the globe in recent years. Consequently, scholarship on protest in Africa – while it certainly must take into account the diversity on the continent – has much to offer the field of social movement studies. This session aims to attract a range of important voices that will examine the history, character and trajectory of grassroots struggles in sub-Saharan Africa but, at the same time, highlight the ways in which popular dissent in this region is connected to global patterns of protest. In particular, this session welcomes contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following issues:
–       Working class struggle in sub-Saharan Africa
–       Leadership and the role of key political thinkers in past and present sub-Saharan contexts.
–       ‘Dynamics of contention’  in sub-Saharan Africa both within and outside of the context of organized social movements.
–       The intersection between community and labour movements in sub-Saharan Africa.
–       Theoretical implications for social movement studies that draw on African cases.
Preference will be given to contributions that contextualize African struggles within the global picture of popular resistance.
Social Movements As Sites of Social Development

Session Organizer(s)

John KRINSKY, City College New York, USA, jkrinsky.ccny@gmail.com

Social movements are a crucible in which activists collectively generate which new forms of social organization as they attempt to make new subjects, worlds and histories in the context of—and in response to—the old; they may equally be moments of stymied progress where few advances are made on critical questions facing movements and the social groups they represent.  Whereas recent scholarship on social movements has emphasized their microfoundations, conceived as strategic interactions and choice-points, it has tended to play down the more macro-level, longer-lasting features of capitalist societies (including their historical encoding of class, race, gender, and nationality) and the often-contradictory nature of these features. In favor of analytic formalism, social movement studies have largely abandoned systematic social criticism.  This formalist turn also tends to play down the extent to which movements are a site of collective learning.  Reticence about social critique leads analysts to abjure judgments about whether and how collective action leads toward or away from social development.  Emerging Marxist scholarship on social movements has attempted to join the focus on on-the-ground interaction typical of formalist theories with the analyses of the larger, structured dynamics of capitalism and class; and as a body of work grounded in a theory of the “self-emancipation of the working class” (variously defined), its central concern is movement development towards more encompassing modes of social action an social identities.  This panel welcomes papers that focus on efforts to weave together theories of strategy and learning and larger-scale historical and social contradictions.

Social Movements in Latin America: Contributing to a North-South Dialogue

Session Organizer(s)

Renata MOTTA, Free University Berlin, Germany, renata.motta@fu-berlin.de

Pablo LAPEGNA, University of Georgia, USA, pablo.lapegna@gmail.com

Ilan BIZBERG, El Colegio de México, Mexico, ilan@colmex.mx
Session in Spanish and English

Social movements from the global South are usually investigated by applying theories developed by and for the global North. But what happens when theories travel across diverse social contexts? Can theories and concepts developed in the global North fully capture the complexities of social movements and societies that have followed different historical trajectories? For instance, nationalism, “populism,” and socialism, or key institutions like the state or labor unions cannot be assumed to have universal importance and meaning. To what degree theories and practices from the global South inform social movements and studies developed in the global North? How do situated cultures and meaning-making practices require a re-elaboration of social movement theories and concepts?
We would welcome papers that establish a dialogue between theories and movements from the global South and the global North, with a special focus on Latin America. Papers may contribute to this collective enterprise in various ways, for instance, looking at (1) the social and organizational basis of activism and collective identities; (2) how different cultural and historical contexts require new ways of thinking about contentious repertoires, “frames” and the mobilization of resources; (3) the links between social movements, governments, and institutional politics (e.g. the relevance of “patronage politics” in Latin America); and (4) the convergences, influences, and tensions between the global North and global South (e.g. the influence of the Bolivian process of social change in the actions and ideas of Podemos in Spain).

Social Movements in the Arab World

Session Organizer(s):

Maha ABDELRAHMAN, University of Cambridge, Egypt, mma49@cam.ac.uk

The approaching fifth anniversary of the Arab Uprisings which started in Tunisia and spread like wild fire across many countries of the region is a sober reminder of the challenges faced by social movements. The demand for ‘Bread, Freedom and Social Justice’ was able to mobilise millions of people who came out to the streets to protest against a political and economic order based on policies of dispossession and exclusion. This order has long sustained its hegemony through means of political repression and inflated security apparatuses at the national level. A wide range of movements created new types of activism and mobilisation strategies from workers to students to small farmers, slum residents, professionals, the unemployed and the retired. They crossed regional, gender, class and often ideological divides. The panel aims to explore the trajectories of these movements and how they have unfolded in the aftermath of their peak in 2011. It also hopes to locate them within a comparative perspective with social movements with similar features and histories across the world. We especially welcome papers that explore how these movements have evolved, disappeared, were coopted/ integrated into the political process or completely repressed after 2011. We also encourage papers which examine mainstream theoretical tools in studying social movements in light of the experience of these movements. Comparative research which examines social movements in the Arab region with similar movements in other parts of the world including countries of both the global North and South are also highly welcomed.

Social Movements, Sociology and Climate Change

Session Organizer(s):

Jackie SMITH, Pittsburg University, USA, jgsmith@pitt.edu

Esin ILERI, École Hautes Études Sciences Sociales, France, esinileri@gmail.com

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated that we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to near zero by 2050 to avoid more devastating climate change scenarios than are already underway. As government negotiations continue to fail to generate meaningful action in this regard, social movements have been developing concrete projects to enact practices that move in the direction of a low-carbon society.
This panel welcomes contributions on two main axes. • Analyses and case studies about grassroots social movements who promote worldviews, behaviors and policies more compatible with the reality and constraints of the limited nature of the planet and about how these studies provide us with empirical data for grasping some features of the global age and its consequences on life, democracy and society. How do they imagine, implement and contribute to shape alternative futures, starting in daily life and personal experience or contesting actual policies.
• Can our work as sociologists and with social movements help us find ways to achieve a seemingly impossible goal of radical social transformation? What lessons can be learned from these movements? What movements are or should be happening among academic professionals to both reduce our own carbon footprint while also helping advance the movements responding to the climate crisis?

What’s Left of 2011? Continuities and Outcomes of the 2011 Protests

Session Organizer(s)

Lorenzo ZAMPONI, European University Institute, Italy, lorenzo.zamponi@eui.eu

Priska DAPHI, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany, p.daphi@gmx.de

Though large protests often surprise observers, they hardly start from scratch. Mostly, they are rooted in previous mobilisations. And often they produce outcomes that in turn will influence future mobilisation. The panel explores continuities and outcomes of social movements in the context of the wave of protests for social justice starting in 2011 – including the Arab Spring, the European anti-austerity mobilisations and the Occupy movement. This perspective allows looking at protests not as isolated events, but as part of a historical trajectory, considering both antecedents and legacies. How did previous mobilisations affect this wave of protest? How did the 2011 wave of protests influence more recent mobilisations? What are the consequences of the 2011 protests for politics more generally?
This panel hence will focus on movement continuities and outcomes, before and after the 2011 protests. On the one hand, we are interested in the contents of continuities and the role organisations, submerged networks, abeyance structures, free spaces and other actors and mechanisms play in ensuring this continuity. On the other hand, we aim to shed light on outcomes both with respect to policy-making and political representation as well as the effects on activists’ life-courses and movements’ internal organization.

You can download it here

The University of Bucharest organized on May 11-12, 2015 the International Sociological Association regional conference “Social Movements in Central and Eastern Europe” with the support of Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Romania. The Research Committee 47 (ISA 47) intended to evaluate the current status of research on collective action in the former communist countries to asses the capacities of research centers to generate valid knowledge in an highly competitive European and global environment and to encourage young scholars to make research on the new forms of social participation in Central and Eastern Europe.

As stated by the ISA 47 President, professor Geoffrey Pleyers, the social movements are important triggers for consolidating democracy and market economy in the region. As such, new forms of social participation shall be developed in the next period of time.

There were registered 96 scholars that represented some 25 countries. Additionally, some other 40 Romanian researchers and students took part in or assisted to specific panels or plenaries. 21 panels, 4 semi-plenaries, 2 plenaries and a concluding plenary were organized during the two days of workings. A group of well known scholars supervised these sessions. (Among them professors Jim M Jasper from the City University of New York, Kerstin Jacobsson from Gothenburg University, Sweden, A. Ishkanian from London School of Economics, Tova Benski, the ISA 48 President from Tel Aviv, Israel, Carine Clement from Russia. The keynote speakers were the well-known French sociologists Alain Touraine and Michel Wieviorka.)

An e-Book is published by the University of Bucharest Publishing House. Many thanks to volunteers Georgiana Popescu, Ana Popa, Cristian Chira, Sergiu Velesniuc and Adelina Nedelcu.

You can download it here

Table of Contents:

I.   Insightful approaches to social movements
II.  A democratic, accountable, more decentralized and convivial RC
III. Publications
IV. RC 47 Conferences and meetings
V.   Collaborative research

I. Insightful approaches to social movements

Bringing together social scientists from all continents, the ISA Research Committee 47 provides a unique platform to share and develop perspectives on and analyses of current, recent and past social movements around the world, as much the ones that strike mainstream media headlines as those that discreetly transform politics or daily life.

RC 47 was founded with the conviction that the study of social movements provides elements for a better understanding of both specific social actors and society as a whole. As Melucci (1996:28) stated, social movements “show glimpses of possible futures, and are, in some respects, the vehicles of realization of these very futures”. Therefore, RC 47 has a particular interest in connecting the sociology of social movements with general sociology, developing approaches that avoid the traps of both “professional” sociologists’ hyper-specialization and of movements’ organic intellectuals.

Since its beginning, RC 47 has also paid a particular attention to cultural approaches to social movements and social transformations, developing or referring to concepts such as identity, meanings, emotions, cultural change, lifestyle change, experience, subjectivity, and personal dimensions of activism. Other RC 47 members have connected social movement studies and general sociology with approaches based on social classes or transnational networks. The coexistence of these multiple approaches makes RC 47 an open and lively arena of exchange. RC 47 aims at fostering a vibrant and constructive dialogue among different perspectives from the South and from the North of the planet. A better gender and continental/regional balance at the RC 47 activities is particularly important.

To foster a sociology that is properly global is another core feature of RC 47. It requires analyzing social movements, society and social transformations both beyond national and regional borders, and from the scale of the individual subject to the planet. The challenge is to avoid both methodological nationalism and methodological globalism by combining global issues with multi-site empirical fieldwork. Young sociologists, including PhD students, have a major role to play in dealing with this challenge, bringing strong empirical contributions and fresh analytical perspectives.

We aim at developing research and analyses beyond borders and to fully include sociologists from all regions of the world. Therefore, we need to pay a special attention to the inclusion of scholars from Asia and from the Global South, and particularly from countries where social sciences have limited resources and access to international meetings and publications. To promote a better integration of sociologists from the Global South and a more global and inclusive dialogue is RC 47’s main challenge and could be its main contribution to social movement studies.

II. A democratic, accountable, more decentralized and convivial RC

As social movement scholars, we particularly value internal democracy and the consistency between the values we promote (democracy, horizontality, openness, transparency) and the way we act.

More generally, we would like to encourage a more decentralized way of working. RC 47 aims at supporting its members’ initiatives whenever these contribute to an international, open and insightful perspective on social movements. The role of the chair and executive board of the RC is to promote and coordinate initiatives by RC 47 members, whether they are members of the board or not. In addition to financial support when it is possible, RC 47 may provide support by promoting and diffusing initiatives, co-organizing conferences or contributing to the publication of its results. A concrete example of such a support is the fact that RC 47 co-organizes conferences, which helps both organizers and participants to get funds and travel grants when applying to their university and to national and international research agencies.

The decentralization dynamic will also result in the creation of RC 47 working groups on specific topics (see below). Within the new project we would also like to develop closer working relationships between RC 47 and national and regional research committees on social movements. Various national and regional sociological associations have very lively committees on social movements (e.g. ASA, ALAS, French Sociological Association etc.). Encouraging new collaborations with these research committees will allow for a better combination of national and global perspectives on social movements.

RC 47’s convivial atmosphere is important not only because it is pleasant, but also because it is a condition of productive collegial relationships, in a space where critical reading of each other’s work leads to constructive criticisms rather than to personal criticisms. It should thus be open to debate, disagreements and critical discussion. The convivial aspect is particularly important for newcomers and PhD students, who may feel isolated at their first ISA conference. Pre-conferences at each ISA forum and congress will allow RC 47 members to get to know each other and start informal conversations and new collaborations.

Our mailing list “social-movements-research@listes.uclouvain.be” has been launched and will be promoted as an efficient way to share information on our research committee and social movement studies in general. RC 47 will also use social media to strengthen internal communication and the dissemination of information, for example with #RC47, a social media page and a common affiliation on Academia.edu. A range of media will be used to announce events and publications, but also to share questions (e.g. on social movements in a specific country, missing references on a specific point etc.).  The newsletter and mailing list also need a new impetus to make RC 47 a lively exchange and information network. The RC 47 seminar will be live-streamed on a dedicated Youtube channel and will be made available on our website. More broadly, we intend to set up a hub around RC 47, to exchange information, publications, teaching materials etc.

III. Publications

To disseminate the publications and projects of each of the members and to provide them with an avenue to publish the outcome of their research in international journals and publishing houses is a major objective of the RC. In addition to journal special issues and collective books, the new board has established the bases for two major publication projects: a public sociology platform on Open Democracy and a new journal.

Open Movements: The RC47 platform on www.opendemocracy.net

Editors in charge: Breno Bringel, University of Rio de Janeiro & Geoffrey Pleyers, University of Louvain.

While publishing in scholarly journals and books is indispensable, as social movement scholars we also aim at contributing to a high quality public debate on major issues. The UK-based website “Open Democracy” has been one of the most successful initiatives in providing a global platform for progressive and quality contributions. The articles they publish are very well distributed, and most of them get reproduced and translated by a wide range of progressive websites.

“Open Movements” will start in January 2015. We will publish 10 texts in the first week and then a weekly paper, gathering texts from different continents.

A new journal: “Social movements and change”

“Social Movements and Change” is RC 47’s new journal. It aims at publishing innovative articles that connect empirical fieldwork with major questions in sociology and social movement studies.  It will be run by post-doctoral researchers, assistant professors and researchers who are about to complete their PhDs.

The first call for paper will be published in December 2014.

Other publications & publication projects:

IV. RC 47 Conferences and meetings

Regular conferences and seminars are an indispensable tool to foster strong and convivial collaborations in an international network. All these events should focus more on the quality of the contributions and discussion than on the number of participants. This objective may notably be reached by assigning a discussant to each panel at conferences and congresses. This will ensure that each participant will receive a couple of good questions and concrete proposals to improve her/his paper.

Regional and thematic meetings

As stated above, RC 47 will support its members’ initiative to organize regional or international conferences, whether on specific topics, or as regional/continental encounters. While the RC 47 potential financial contribution is limited, its support may help conference organizers and participants in their applications for funding to organize the conference or to travel to the conference location.

Forthcoming RC 47 regional conferences:

• “Social movements in Central and Eastern Europe”, University of Bucharest, May 11^th-13^th 2015.
• Social movements in Latin America, RC plenary sessions and workshop at the ALAS conference in San José, Costa Rica, November 2015.
• Two RC 47 meetings will take place at the World Social Forums in Tunis (2015) and Quebec (2016).

RC 47 international seminar: “Social movements in the global age”

The seminar will give us an opportunity to learn about social movements in different regions of the world and to discuss theoretical and analytical approaches to the sociology of social movements and in particular to the perspective of the sociology of social movements as a general sociology by scholars based in different continents.

All the sessions will be live-streamed on the ISA-RC 47 YouTube channel  and live-streamed at various universities (please contact us if you want to distribute it at your university).

This year, 5 sessions will be organized in partnership with the “Collège d’Etudes Mondiales”, in Paris. The other 5 sessions will be held in Mexico, Tunis (during the World Social Forum), Bogota, Bucharest and St-Petersburg. The sessions will be held in English, Spanish or French (the 3 ISA languages), with a translation whenever possible.

V. Collaborative research

Thematic working groups

Working group general coordination: Priska Daphi & Geoffrey Pleyers

• Gender & Social Movements. Coordination: Amana Matos, State University of Rio de Janeiro, amanamattos@gmail.com
• Conservative and racist movements. Coordination: Emanuele Toscano, University of Rome, emanuele.toscano@uniroma1.it

RC 47 as a platform for international research project

In addition to these classic missions of any RC, we have to find innovative ways to promote collective applications to international research grants among our members.

An increasing number of research funding applications requires a network of international researchers. It is particularly the case at the European level, but also in Latin America.

RC 47 working groups will provide new ways to connect people who work on similar topics and support their joint application to international research agencies and foundations.

RC 47 2014-2018 Board

President:

Geoffrey Pleyers, University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium. Geoffrey.Pleyers@uclouvain.be

Vice-President:

Marcelle Dawson, University of Otago, New Zealand & University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Secretary/Treasurer:

Paolo Gerbaudo, Kings College London, Italy & UK.

Board members:

Breno Bringel, IESP, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil & Spain.

Renata Campos Motta, Freie Universität Berlin, Brazil & Germany

Priska Daphi, University of Frankfurt (Main), Germany

Maria da Gloria Gohn, State University of Campinas

Jeff Goodwin, New York University, USA

Eiji Hamanishi, Notre-Dame Seishin University, Japan

Christoph Haug, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Rajesh Misra, University of Delhi, India

Sergio Tamayo, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico