Call for papers: “Crisis, Critique and Change”, ESA Research Network Social Movements, ESA 2011 General Conference, 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 (see detailed abstracts below):

Specific Session I: Mobilizing knowledge. Conflicts and struggles in the sectors of immaterial production (proposed by Caterina Peroni and Alice Mattoni)
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.

Specific Session II: Typologies of Political Violence (proposed by Lorenzo Bosi)
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.

Specific Session III: Alter-IGOs: Encounters between International Organizations and Oppositional Movements (proposed by Thorsten Thiel)
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.

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 (proposed by Lorenzo Zamponi)
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.

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 (proposed by Christopher Daase and 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, 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.

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.

The full CfP can be downloaded at the conference website