*** Apologies for cross-posting ***
Happy New Year to all of you!
This is to announce our Call for papers with eight specific sessions below. Join us in Turin for this exciting congress on Crisis, Critique and Change at the end of August.
CALL for PAPERS
ESA Research Network Social Movements
ESA 2011 General Conference
“Crisis, Critique and Change” Turin, Italy, August 28th-31th
The upcoming 11th congress of the European Sociological Association will take place in Turin this year from the 28th to 31th of August, 2013. The Social Movements Research Network (RN 25) invites abstracts to contribute to the sociology of social movements and empirical research on mobilization in various contexts of crisis, critique and change. Comparative work that connects theory, empirical analysis and interdisciplinary methods is particularly encouraged. Please note that one joint session on the role of emotions will be organized together with the network on the Sociology of Emotions. A semi-plenary session will be organized together with Political Sociology. The deadline for Abstract submission is February 1 2013. Paper givers are invited to present papers in the following eight sessions:
Specific Session I: Mobilizing knowledge. Conflicts and struggles in the sectors of immaterial production
Workers engaged in the production of knowledge and culture in its varied declinations often mobilized in recent years in order to improve their working conditions and fight against economic cuts due to the ongoing economic crisis. But also to advance the recognition of knowledge and culture as a common good to be managed collectively and outside the logic of private and public regulations. This panel aims at developing a critical discussion on conflicts and struggles in the sectors of immaterial production at the local, regional, national and transnational level. See detailed abstract below. Panel proposed by Caterina Peroni and Alice Mattoni.
Specific Session II: Typologies of Political Violence
Political violence broadly defined, including guerrilla warfare, insurgency, terrorism, rebellion, revolution, rioting and civil war, can be distinguished in several ways, by the nature of the objectives; by the targets of attacks, by the repertoire of actions; by the organizational structure of groups. This panel will develop comparisons across different types of armed actors, underlining similarities and identifying differences. It aims to query the robustness of existing typologies and to contribute to the development of new and more robust typologies of political violence.
See detailed abstract below. Panel proposed by Lorenzo Bosi.
Specific Session III: Alter-IGOs: Encounters between International Organizations and Oppositional Movements
This panel will analyze how interaction between IOs and social movements has changed in recent decades as well as the effects of recent crises and critiques from social movements. While existing research has often focussed on attempts to include civil society actors into decision-making processes, this panel has a broader perspective. Panel proposed by Thorsten Thiel. See detailed abstract below.
Specific Session IV: Crisis, Critique and Democracy in Social Movements
This session explores how cultures of organizational decision-making and knowledge production in institutions are challenged and shaped by democracy in social movements. The session also invites critical work on democracy and democratic crises within social movement groups.
Specific Session V: Social Movements & Emotions
This session will be devoted to theorizing and analyzing social movements whose emotions or emotional repertoire complex goes beyond the "shame, pride and anger"-set. Contrasts between the emotion(s) attached to the self-image and the emotion(s) attached to the public image of a movement are also of interest.
Specific Session VI: A Global Dissenting Youth? Student movements and youth activism
in the anti-austerity and anti-corporate mobilisations
When did the current cycle of global contention start? Can we consider it a single phenomenon or an articulated set of different and interrelated social facts? Which are the shared traits among episodes of collective action placed in different political contexts, cultural settings, social roots and goals? These and other questions are at the core of the contemporary debate on contentious politics, and we aim to contribute in addressing them focusing on a particular aspect that is common to most mobilisations of this cycle: the significant involvement of young people in collective action and in the politics of dissent. Our panel will focus on the student movement. See detailed abstract below. Panel proposed by Lorenzo Zamponi.
Specific Session VII: Social Movements and Climate Change Global environmental issues like global warming, the loss of biodiversity, food security are at the centre of political and public debates and mobilization. This session is devoted to explore local, transnational and multi-level forms of activism and framing on these issues. Both case studies and comparative work are welcome.
Specific Session VIII: Integrating Perspectives on Radicalization
Despite major advances in the last decade in social movement and terrorism research, we still know little about the pathways of radicalisation and de-radicalisation. While psychologists have mainly focused on individual-level factors, political scientists have attended principally to state and interstate-level factors. What is missing, however, is a systematic exploration of the linkages between micro-, meso- and macro-level factors. The panel addresses this shortcoming by inviting papers that tackle different processes of radicalization in social movements that explicitly combine these different perspectives. See detailed abstract below. Panel proposed by Christopher Daase and Nicole Deitelhoff.
Find below Panel proposals with the following detailed abstracts by chairs:
Detailed Abstract Panel I: Mobilizing knowledge. Conflicts and struggles in the sectors of immaterial production
Chair: Caterina Peroni, University of Milan
Discussant: Alice Mattoni, University of Pittsburgh
In the recent decades the immaterial sectors of production became a relevant site of conflicts and struggles both in the Global North and in the Global South. Workers engaged in the production of knowledge and culture in its varied declinations often mobilized in recent years in order to improve their working conditions and fight against economic cuts due to the ongoing economic crisis. But also to advance the recognition of knowledge and culture as a common good to be managed collectively and outside the logic of private and public regulations. Publishing houses, cinema productions, theatrical companies, public universities are just some of the spaces in which conflicts emerged in recent years, often at the local level of the urban environments. Frequently involving precarious workers, conflicts and struggles in the sectors of immaterial productions increasingly involve other social and economic categories that are positioned at the fluid margins of the labour markets: trainees, apprentices, free lances, and temporary workers amongst other. This panel aims at developing a critical discussion on conflicts and struggles in the sectors of immaterial production at the local, regional, national and transnational level. We encourage the submissions of papers grounded in empirical investigations that explore some of the following critical areas, when it comes to mobilizations involving knowledge and cultural workers: the meanings and imageries related to 'work' and 'labour' elaborated in the context of struggles; the use of specialized knowledge and skills acquired as knowledge and cultural workers to produce struggles; the elaboration of alternative imageries and the subversion of common meanings associated to some of the key terms in the sectors of immaterial productions - like for instance 'meritocracy', 'autonomy', 'freedom' ,‘cooperation’, 'creativity' - and, finally, the main features that characterize the struggles in the sectors of immaterial production, including discussions related to newforms of contention, their limitations and potentialities. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are welcome.
Detailed Abstract Specific Session II: Typologies of Political Violence
Chair: Lorenzo Bosi (EUI) and Niall O’Dochartaigh (National University of Ireland, Galway)
Discussant: Stefan Malthaner (EUI)
Political violence broadly defined, including guerrilla warfare, insurgency, terrorism, rebellion, revolution, rioting and civil war, can be distinguished in several ways, by the nature of the objectives; by the targets of attacks, by the repertoire of actions; by the organizational structure of groups. This panel will develop comparisons across different types of armed actors, underlining similarities and identifying differences. It aims to query the robustness of existing typologies and to contribute to the development of new and more robust typologies of political violence.
For these reasons we welcome papers that address three main issues: (1) conceptual and theoretical thinking about political violence, including refining existing definitions and typologies; (2) methodological reflections about how to deal with the subject matter and how to avoid the obstacles that have hindered previous research, from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective; (3) empirical comparative studies encompassing different types of conflicts and/or countries. We welcome submissions that deal with actor groups such as social and protest movements, terrorist groups, insurgencies and other non-state armed formations, and radicalizing state institutions.
Detailed Abstract Specific Session III:
Alter-IGOs: Encounters between International Organizations and Oppositional Movements
Panel Chair: Thorsten Thiel (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Discussant: Matthias Ecker-Erhardt, WZB Berlin), matthias.ecker-ehrhardt@???
The Alter-Globalization Movement and its successors have radically questioned the legitimacy of international institutions and proposed alternative ways to organize world politics. International organizations have responded diversely to this challenge. Some have tried to redesign their political processes, others have sought to evade the protesters or have attempted to rebrand their activities. This panel will analyze how interaction between IOs and social movements has changed in recent decades as well as the effects of recent crises and critiques from social movements. While existing research has often focussed on attempts to include civil society actors into decision-making processes, this panel has a broader perspective. We welcome papers investigating the interaction between social movements and international political institutions, including such matters as attempts by IOs to avoid inclusion or to depoliticize decisions; the critique, aims and potential of social movements with regard to international political institutions; what IOs do and why; how to account for the variety of their responses; whether and how these responses are coordinated and affected by the actions of other institutions; and what meta-trends are identifiable in the treatment of social movements. Contributions combining empirical research with theoretical and normative considerations are particularily welcome.
Detailed Abstract Specific Session VI: A Global Dissenting Youth?
Student movements and youth activism
in the anti-austerity and anti-corporate mobilisations: relevance, role, strategies and effects
Chair: Lorenzo Zamponi
European University Institute
lorenzo.zamponi@???
Co-Chair: Joseba Fernández González
Universidad del País Vasco
josebafergon@???
Discussant: Eduardo Romanos Fraile
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
eduardo.romanos@???
When did the current cycle of global contention start? Can we consider it a single phenomenon or an articulated set of different and interrelated social facts? Which are the shared traits among episodes of collective action placed in different political contexts, cultural settings, social roots and goals? These and other questions are at the core of the contemporary debate on contentious politics, and we aim to contribute in addressing them focusing on a particular aspect that is common to most mobilisations of this cycle: the significant involvement of young people in collective action and in the politics of dissent. Our panel will focus on the student movement, as a social actor which has been active in different countries in the last years, and on youth activism, as a wide set of experiences and practises of contention which have played a relevant role in many different conflicts, contaminating and disseminating contents and forms of mobilisation. The wave of student mobilisation against the corporatisation of education and knowledge and the increasing precarity of work, in fact, is the immediate antecedent of the current wave of protests in Europe, and it might me argued that the contemporary anti-austerity movement discourse has been developing in that context. Furthermore, some scholars have already underlined the role of university campuses as a space for mobilisation and of student loans as a fundamental topic in the Occupy movement in the USA. But generational cleavages are visible also out of the education system, and youth activism has been considered relevant in all the indignados mobilisations, involving the so-called “generation of digital natives”. We invite empirical-oriented papers and interpretive analyses, aiming at building, through the lens of youth activism, a genealogy of the contemporary wave of mobilisation and to contribute to a better understanding of it.
Detailed Abstract Specific Session VIII: Integrating Perspectives on Radicalization
Chairs: Christopher Daase / Nicole Deitelhoff, Goethe-University Frankfurt
daase@??? nicole.deitelhoff@???
Despite major advances in the last decade in social movement and terrorism research, we still know little about the pathways of radicalisation and de-radicalisation. While psychologists have mainly focused on individual-level factors, such as social milieus, sociologists have analysed group-level aspects, such as movement dynamics. Political scientists have attended principally to state and interstate-level factors, such as the vulnerability of particular political institutions and political opportunity structures in general. These different perspectives have generated valuable insights into different levels of radicalization, from the micro- through the meso- and to the macro-level. What is missing, however, is a systematic exploration of the linkages between micro-, meso- and macro-level factors in order to understand the processes of radicalisation. The panel addresses this shortcoming by inviting papers that tackle different processes of radicalization in social movements that explicitly combine these different perspectives.
Contacts
For any additional information on the conference, please make contact Nicole Doerr (Mount Holyoke College), Marianne van de Steeg (FU Berlin)nand/or Alice Mattoni (European University Institute): esasocialmovements@???
For specific questions on panels proposed as listed above please directly contact panel chairs. Note, however, that all papers ultimately have to be submitted to the ESA’s electronic abstract proposal system until February 1.
All the best,
Nicole
____________________
Alice Mattoni
www.alicemattoni.com
New Book! Media Practices and Protest Politics. How Precarious Workers Mobilise.
www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409426783
