[movimenti.bicocca] Fwd: Social Movement Studies CFP for cir…

> ·         For each new technological development – now social media, in the past, the Web or email or television – there has been a tendency to cycle through a particular kind of debate: optimists see democratizing potential, pessimists see the reconfiguration of traditional power structures in a new arena, while others seek a middle ground. That debate is often unproductive and is indicative of three related conceptual problems:

> ·         When the agency of movement actors is recognized it is typically in studies of online communication as a mobilization strategy. So far, however, such studies have tended to treat recipients of movements’ public communications as little more than a passive audience, when for mobilization to occur there must be active processes of interpretation that leads to participation. Empirical studies of such processes will need to find new ways of systematically interrogating the relationship of protest participants to ICTs.

> ·         The increasing focus on public communications has also led to neglect of the internal communications by which those involved in movements organize and strategize, debate political issues and develop collective identities. If understanding the interaction of online and offline practices is an important theoretical challenge in and of itself, then relating that to empirical studies of well-known movement processes is likely to be fruitful. Moreover, the mutually constitutive nature of online and offline life may be having an impact in breaking down boundaries between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ movement work in a milieu in which the individual’s relationship to movements cannot be simplified to roles such as ‘member’, ‘organizer’ or ‘bystander’.

> ·         Finally, the current trend in empirical studies that focus on the users of particular communication platforms tends to present a picture of surprisingly homogenous groups communicating about a relatively restricted range of political issues. This neglects the various ways in which both movements and ICT use in general are cut across by cultural differences and digital divides. Hard divisions such as those around degrees of censorship or access to the Internet are plainly important in examining transnational movements in particular, but so too are softer divisions such as the degree to which there is affinity or conflict between increasingly important technological cultures (hacker or geek culture for instance) and the various political cultures that are embedded in social movements. Comparative work in particular would help illuminate the range and heterogeneity of digital repertoires across movement networks.