Social movement activism - the business of trying to change the way the world is run - is inherently "theoretical". Even though activists sometimes detest the word "theory", they are always doing it - thinking about the underlying causes behind visible problems, developing models of how the world works in order to change it, reflecting on who to communicate with and how in order to build the kinds of movements that can make that change possible, and so on. Much of what academia treats as "theory", in fact - from liberalism and economic individualism via democratic theory and Marxism to feminism, queer studies and ecology - has been put on the agenda by social movements, and the key thinkers were often activists rather than scholars.
In recent years, the academic field of social movement studies has developed as a field of research within disciplines such as sociology, political science, history and geography - reflecting back on those movements which made subjects such as sociology possible. At times, these two ways of thinking have been in close communication with each other; at other times, activists deny that they are generating theory, and academics deny that activists have anything to teach them.
The material on this page comes from the ongoing conversation between social movements' own theorising and the work of "social movement studies" as an academic discipline. One key location for this conversation is the annual Alternative Futures and Popular Protest (AFPP) conference organised by Colin Barker, Mike Tyldesley and for a few years Rachel Dix at Manchester Metropolitan University, which is the only regular event in these islands devoted to social movements. AFPP has the great merit that participants tend to be activists as well as researchers, so that these conversations are not just dialogues of the deaf. Details about the Alternative Futures and Popular Protest conference can be found at their web site.
Another important area where this conversation takes place is within and around working-class community politics in Ireland (community development, community education, community media, community arts...) This is a very self-aware movement, often highly critical of conventional modes of thinking, and with a very developed theoretical apparatus of its own.
Finally, an important new development in this area is the Mobilised Investigation (MI) project, which brings together activist researchers involved in the anti-capitalist movement in particular. The MI website and its associated email list are well worth exploring.
I've collected a range of papers and links from these different conversations. Some of my own contributions tend to form part of a single research project on contemporary social movements, developed largely through AFPP; others are the product of work with community activists in the context of the Centre for Research on Environment and Community, the participatory research programme on social movement practice I'm involved in at Maynooth, and the Ballymun Oral History Project.
Laurence Cox
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The material in this section is focussed primarily on general questions relating to social movements as such.
The Marxist historian EP Thompson is one of the first English-language academics to write intelligently and illuminatingly about social movements. It is perhaps no accident that he was also a formidable activist in his own right, playing a key role in the formation of the British New Left along with Raymond Williams, and being centrally involved in the European Nuclear Disarmament movement in the 1980s. This paper pays an intellectual debt which was long overdue:
The paper above was originally intended for the Social Movements Research Group's conference "Making social movements: the British Marxist Historians and the study of social movements" (see the "manifesto" for this conference at this site). Some of the papers from this conference are available online:
Colin Barker and myself have been having conversations about the relationships between activist and academic theorising about social movements for several years now, coming out of our shared situation as activists who are also academic "social movements" writers. This monster paper is our first stab at making sense of the area:
This post, from the social-movements email list, discusses the relationship between "ideology" and "identity" in social movements. I wouldn't normally include it again here, but a recent correspondent apparently searched the site for the post, so here it is!
This paper summary, like the Clonmel paper below, attacks the "social movements" problematic from the standpoint of an activist, criticising how "scientific research" makes sense of the lives of people I know:
This paper, like the IRNES summary above, attacks the "social movements" problematic from the standpoint of an activist, criticising how "scientific research" makes sense of the lives of people I know:
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The material in this section relates to the "movement of movements" against neo-liberal capitalism and the US administration's strategy of permanent war. There's lots more material on this subject on this page.
Graeme Chesters and other activist / academics are working on what should be the best introductory book to the movement when it finally comes out:
Peter Waterman, of Global Solidarity Dialogue, is working on a bibliography of material related to the movement, particularly around the World Social Forum. I'll put a link here when it's online!
This paper, given to a mixed gathering of activists and radical academics in Cork, attempts to make sense of the movement from an Irish point of view and particularly to ask "what should we do?"
Peter Alexander's piece on the global inequalities that give rise to the movement and how the movement responds is well worth a look.
Drawing on research on the counter culture, this paper is an experiment with the theoretical and political possibilities of connecting social movement research to the choices activists have to make. It argues for a strategic approach to movement-building:
This was a talk given as editor of An Caorthann to a get-together of Irish environmental activists, trying to state as clearly as possible some of the problems we were (and are) facing. It argues that a developed alternative media is a necessary part of a sustainable social movement:
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The phenomenon of community development as a bottom-up form of social organising (as opposed to activities of the same name organised by the state) is one which Ireland shares with much of the majority world, particularly Latin America and South Asia, and with minority ethnic communities in countries like the USA. In Ireland, working-class community politics, including activities such as community education, community media and community arts, is one of the largest and most radical forms of social movement activity.
The activists on the Waterford IT community education degree invited me down to run a day seminar on social movements geared to their needs and interests. These introductory notes cover general social movement theory but also the specific issues relevant to community politics in Ireland, drawing particularly on the other work archived below:
Martin Geoghegan and myself developed this paper out of our shared experiences between activism and academia and our scepticism about the dominant academic modes of thinking about activism. It critiques the academic categories of "social movements" and "voluntary sector" and contrasts them to how community activists think about the world:
Caitríona Mullan and myself have been talking about the politics of community development and grass-roots organisation in Ireland for a long time, coming out of our different involvements in the area. We finally put pen to paper to produce joint papers for the Marxism 2000 conference in Amherst and the ISA / BSA social movements conference in Manchester. The general theme is a socialist-feminist analysis of working-class community politics in Ireland
The Ballymun oral history project was a major community-based research project which has since developed into the community-controlled Ballymun Oral History Association:
Abstract only: planning the Ballymun oral history project involved presenting a paper to AFPP on the project, looking for ideas and advice (we found some excellent sources of both!)
Ballymun Community Action Programme commmissioned a fascinating piece of research from Nexus on the difference between what community groups mean by "participation" and what state and private organisations mean by the same thing. It's available from their website below.
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Since the late 1960s, a "counter culture" has developed in most northern societies combining a range of oppositional political movements, a variety of autonomous projects for working, living, and communicating, and a whole spectrum of alternative ways of life. Without this counter culture, the current "movement of movements" might never have got off the ground.
Alex Plows' PhD, grounded in ethnographic research in the British environmental direct action movement, explores the mobilising structures and collective identity of the movement, and relates the movement to the "anti-globalisation" movements of the turn of the millennium:
The Shifting Ground collective is involved in a wide range of different projects around this area. Well worth a look:
I spent much of the time from around 1989 to 1999 working on a doctoral research project trying to untangle the roots of contemporary social movements, exploring the counter culture, the alternative movement "scene" in Germany and the legacy of the 1960s. The research concluded that there was a lot of convergence between these movements, and argued that there should be more - just in time for Seattle:
This paper looks at the "local rationalities" of counter cultures in terms of "reflexivity" (and its different meanings). It looks at how "ordinary activists" manage to "do" their lives in ways that have important effects on the movements they are part of:
This paper tries to challenge the prevailing political reductionism of the social movements literature (which sees movements from the point of view of the state) and argues that the question of how participants see themselves might be a more appropriate starting point:
This paper is a first attempt at stating the need for a general theory of counter cultures. Something like half a decade later I started to manage to fulfil something of the programme suggested here:
I had a first (undergrad) shot at researching the counter-culture on the micro-scale of a history of ideas approach to conflicts within the German Green Party:
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Research on social movements is not a neutral matter. In a world where taking part in the wrong movement at the wrong time in history can get you killed, jailed, tortured or sacked, the question of "information for whom?" is sometimes a really important one. The question of researcher accountability is raised not just by this, but also by questions of how the movement is represented, how what researchers write about movements feeds back into the movements themselves, and about the power relations involved in research.
I'm involved in a programme of participatory research on social movement practice, working with movement activists doing postgrad research on and for their own movements. This draws on the concerns and experiences mentioned above to provide a tool to help activists who want to reflect on and research their own practice:
Alex Plows' MA thesis on the methodological implications of doing insider research in social movements is a really useful starting point for thinking about this subject:
This paper attempts to (re)think what a Marxist theory of social movements might look like, and what its research methodology would involve. It argues for a close parallel between researching and organising strategies. The Wexford overheads above move the ideas on a bit:
These notes are just a sketch which takes the ideas developed in the Gramsci paper above one step further:
Gerhard Kleining is a dedicated theorist of the importance of qualitative research methodology within the distinctly positivist confines of German sociology. His discussion circle was immensely useful to me while I was carrying out qualitative research on the counter culture in Hamburg; when I returned to Ireland, I wrote this piece to outline some of his work:
See this page and this one for more material (in German) on the approaches pioneered by Gerhard Kleining.
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