A response to Aslanidis (2016) “Populist Social Movements of the Great Recession”, Mobilization 21(3):301-321 (following discussion in the movements@manchester reading group 25th April 2017) Populism is the big news of the 2010s. We’ve had the rise of Trump and Bernie...
Category: The Blog
Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Movement: Losing Hope
A 500,000 person demonstration, a referendum for universal suffrage, a 79-day Occupy Movement……efforts to fight for democracy in Hong Kong over the past decade or so have not yet paid off. The election for the Chief Executive of Hong Kong held on March 26, 2017...
What might formal modelling tell us about the spread of radical behaviours?
A brief reflection on: Törnberg, A., & Törnberg, P. (2017). Modelling free social spaces and the diffusion of social mobilization. Social Movement Studies, 16(2), 182–202. Social Movement Studies have recently published an interesting article making use of formal...
Report on The Digital Activism Conference
What is ‘digital activism’? Towards the end of a full day conference discussing the social impact of new technologies, one attendee asked the panel of contributing speakers a question concerning the social role of technical expertise. In the face of rapid...
Against Borders for Children: the expanding border and the family
Three times a year, schools in England must complete a census of their students, providing the government with basic information with a view to informing future policy. This year, for the first time, the government is asking schools to provide country of birth and...
What do we know about the police infiltration of protest movements in Britain?
How much will the public be told about Britain’s undercover police spying on political activists? Lord Justice Pitchford, who chairs the public inquiry into undercover policing, is due to make his ruling on the disclosure of evidence and protection of identity in...
Some Trends in Social Movement Scholarship over Four Decades
Having recently discovered that Scopus offers some useful tools for analysing large sets of search results, I decided to try to use them to get an overview of social movement scholarship over the last four decades. This is something of a ‘quick and dirty’ analysis,...
Voices from the Dark: The Academics’ ‘Peace Petition’ and the Remnants of Opposition in Turkey*
One month since the éclat about the ‘peace petition’ in Turkey, the overwhelming majority of both state and private universities have started internal inquiries against the signatories; 17 academics have been fired so far, four signatories were forced to resign, while...
Should we be doing more to link the issues in the struggle for reproductive justice?
The Labour Party last year assented to the Conservatives’ longstanding desire to cap child benefits at the white middle-class standard of two children. In desperation, a petition is currently calling on the government to at least abandon plans to force women to prove...
Notes on The Politics of Everyday Life
This seminar was initially motivated by discussions among members of movements@manchester about the ways in which political activity is integrated into the rhythms and routines of everyday life. Despite the occurrence of a number of relevant concepts within social...
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