openMovements: What is it?
23rd Nov 2016 | By Christoph | Category: Featured, openMovements
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.
Dear Madam, Sir,
Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Sarah Anne Rennick and I am the Deputy Director for Management at the Arab Reform Initiative, a Paris-based think tank. We have recently published a series of studies about social movements in Egypt in the wake of the 2011 revolution. These social movements represented efforts by poor and working class groups who were struggling to achieve rights and recognition and used the opportunity opened up by the revolution to organize politically. These efforts, however, were curtailed by the rise of the military to power in 2013 and the closing of the public sphere.
While the studies are all related to the Egyptian context, we feel strongly that many of the conclusions of the studies – including the internal challenges to sustained mobilization and effective organization, problems related to governance and representation, and the adaptation to increasingly closed and repressive contexts – can apply to social movement organizations and networks in other contexts.
As a social movement scholar myself, I am interested in sharing this research with colleagues as I feel these case studies represent a unique effort to apply the broad conceptual framework of social movement theory to diverse cases in the Arab world, and that they afford the opportunity for interesting comparative research.
While the bulk is in Arabic, there is an abridged version in English published under the collective title “Effervescent Egypt: Venues of Mobilization and the Interrupted Legacy of 2011″ available at http://www.arab-reform.net/en/node/1222
My best regards,
Sarah Anne Rennick