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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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CRY-OUT

The project aims at mapping collective experiences by young people pursuing a just and sustainable European society in selected European countries in order to explore youth participation and attitude to engage in different political domains.

DEMOS

The focus of this project is on civil society’s alternative visions and practices of Europe. As trust in the European Union (EU) is dramatically falling amongst its citizens, research on alternative visions of Europe ‘from below’ appear all the more relevant.

PICME

PiCME – Political participation in Complex Media Environments investigates political participation in complex media environments. It does so by looking at how mechanisms and processes of political participation evolve in complex media environments and the consequences within the political sphere at large and in relation to political actors in particular.

EURYKA

EURYKA is a cross-national research project which provides systematic and practice-related knowledge about how inequalities mediate youth political participation.

MAKERS

MAKERS aims at fostering and exploring the virtuous encounter between two vibrant research strands that have hitherto developed quite independently one from the other: movements as spaces for knowledge production and learning and the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) within collective action dynamics

Shifting Forms of Political Violence

Starting from the observation that armed groups shift in their forms of political violence across time and space, the project will seek to identify the continuous shifts and investigate those socio-spatial relations between armed groups and their constituencies that drive these trajectories from one type of violence to the other.

Cosmos events

17/07/2018 - 22/07/2018

Summer School on Youth Political Participation in Times of Inequalities

Summer School

Florence

25/06/2018 - 29/06/2018

Summer School on Concepts and Methods for Research on Far-Right Politics

Summer School

Scuola Normale Superiore, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

08/06/2018

The Direct Parliament: The Impact of Digital Democracy on Political Representation

Other

Department of Political and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, , Room Altana, h. 9.30am-7pm

06/06/2018

African youth on the move. The 2011 Senegalese uprising and other protest movements against ‘Presidents for Life'

Movimenti del Mondo

Scuola Normale Superiore, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Conference Hall “l’Altana” - 3.30 p.m. - 6.30 p.m.

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Publications

Journal Article - 2018

Comparing hybrid media systems in the digital age: A theoretical framework for analysis
Alice Mattoni and Diego Ceccobelli
The relationship between media and politics today is deeply entrenched in the wide use of information and communication technologies to the point that scholars speak about the emergence of hybrid media systems in which older and newer media logics combine. However, it is still unclear how the configuration of hybrid media systems changes across countries today, especially with regard to the interconnection between media and politics. The article develops a theoretical framework to capture such national differences.

Journal Article - 2018

New Technologies as a Neglected Social Movement Outcome: The Case of Activism against Animal Experimentation
Manès Weisskircher
Based on novel empirical research, this paper analyzes a crucial and understudied case of a movement pushing for new technologies: the animal rights movement and its efforts to push for alternatives to animal experimentation.

Journal Article - 2018

The far right as social movement
Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Andrea Pirro
By putting forward a three-part metric to analyse mobilisation factors at the macro, meso, and micro levels, this piece and the Special Issue it introduces bring the (inter-)relations between far-right parties, movements, and subcultures frontstage, and elaborate on nativist collective action across different arenas of contention.

Journal Article - 2018

Mobilizing in transnational contentious spaces: linking relations, emotions and space in migrant activism
Elias Steinhilper
The article illustrates how the transnational spaces most migrants inhabit can be politicized and transformed into particular social formations, for which the term ‘transnational contentious spaces’ is suggested.
All publications

News

30/07/2018

ERC Starting Grant 2018 for Alice Mattoni

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Alice Mattoni, Research Fellow at COSMOS and Assistant Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the Scuola Normale Superiore, has been awarded the ERC Starting Grant 2018 for the research project BIT-ACT: Bottom-up initiative and anti-corruption technologies: how citizens use ICTs to fight corruption.

16/06/2018

Martin Portos wins the Juan J. Linz Prize to the Best thesis in Political Science 2017

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Martin Portos was just awarded with the Juan J. Linz Prize to the Best thesis in Political Science 2017 with his tesis “Voicing outrage, contending with austerity. Mobilization in Spain under the Great Recession”, realized under the supervision of prof. Donatella della Porta.

18/05/2018

Donatella della Porta at the Belleuve Forum in Berlin - May 23, 2018

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On May 23rd, 2018, the Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier talks with Donatella della Porta, Christoph Möllers and David Van Reybrouck about anti-politics, anti-establishment and the dangers of indifference to the political to address the 2018 topic of the Forum "Society without Politics - Testing Liberal Democracies".

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The Centre on Social Movement Studies (Cosmos) is a network located at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence.

It focuses on social movements as part of broader contentious politics. It promotes theoretically-driven empirical analyses on forms, dimensions, causes and impacts of social movements, in established democracies as well as authoritarian regimes. Particular attention is given to social movements as promoters of democratization processes.
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Department of Political and Social Sciences Scuola Normale Superiore Palazzo Strozzi Piazza degli Strozzi 50123 Firenze Italy
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