The openMovements platform is aimed at the general public by providing critical and empirically based articles on social movements and new expressions of social and cultural transformations. It covers not only events and phenomena that that strike mainstream media headlines but also those that discreetly transform daily life and/or politics at the local and global scales. Drawing on the extensive network of scholars of the International Sociological Association and beyond, it provides perspectives from the South and from the North of the planet.

For a detailed account of openMovements and it’s mission, see the editorial entitled “openMovements: social movements, global outlooks and public sociologists” by Breno Bringel and Geoffrey Pleyers.

The openMovements Editors are:

Breno Bringel, Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Social and Political Studies at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Geoffrey Pleyers, FNRS researcher and Professor of Sociology at the Université de Louvain, Belgium
Armine Ishkanian, Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics, UK.

openMovements was launched in 2015 by RC47 in collaboration with openDemocracy.net. During the first 18 months of its existence, openMovements published 105 articles. If you would like to contribute please follow our submission guidelines and send your article proposal to openmovements@iesp.uerj.br.

This initiative has three main aims. First, as social movement scholars, reclaiming the justice for our colleagues is a duty. We will diffuse information about repressions and threats on social scientists and social movement scholars in particular and will issue calls and statements to denounce repression. Secondly, this initiative will promote research able to provide a better understanding of the local, national and international forces and mechanisms that have produced a world in which social scientists have become targets of repression. Finally, being aware of the importance of collective actions and mobilizations, we hope this initiative contributes to a more active, efficient and visible mobilization of the academic community.

For now, we have three concrete suggestions to move forward:

1. We would like to organize panels and sessions on this topic during the conferences organized/co-organized by RC 47 and for the XIXI ISA World Congress of Sociology in Toronto;
2. We will dedicate a specific section on our website and the newsletter to this initiative;
3. Depending on the urgency of the case and the potential efficacy of our act we would publish statements and sign petitions in support of our colleagues. We plan to do this in collaboration with ISA committee on Human Rights.

This initiative can only be successful as a collective project. Therefore, we would like to invite you to send us any proposals you have in mind with regard to organization of panels and sessions. Moreover, we need your collaboration to be able to receive timely news on multiple forms of repression on academics you witness or are aware of in your surrounding e.g. your universities, cities and countries. Only in this way we could publicize the news in an effective way. We also would like to invite you to write short pieces of about 300-400 words for the newsletter. Eventually these panels, sessions and short articles could come together and make an interesting series for Open Movements. Finally, if you have any suggestions which could contribute to this initiative in any way, please let us know.