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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

05/12/2018

Manuela Caiani - Populism and Popular Music

COSMOS Share

5pm - Aula Simone del Pollaiolo, Palazzo Strozzi, Scuola Normale Superiore

23/10/2018

Laurent Thévenot - Closeness in Politics: Renewing Analytical Tools

COSMOS Talk

11am - Aula Simone del Pollaiolo, Scuola Normale Superiore, Firenze

17/10/2018

Gianpaolo Baiocchi - We, The Sovereign: Radical Democracy for Dark Times

COSMOS Talk

5pm - Aula Simone del Pollaiolo, Scuola Normale Superiore, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze

03/10/2018

Eduardo Georjão Fernandes - Controlling dissent: new surveillance technologies and the policing of social movements in Brazil

COSMOS Share

5pm Aula Simone del Pollaiolo, Scuola Normale Superiore, Palazzo Strozzi

All events

Publications

Journal Article - 2018

Movement parties of the far right: The organization and strategies of nativist collective actors
Andrea Pirro, Pietro Castelli Gattinara
Despite theoretical commonalities, very little empirical research has focused on far-right “movement parties” as collective actors operating both in the protest and the electoral arenas. The article redresses this inconsistency by exploring the organizational and strategic configuration of two far-right collective actors—the Hungarian Jobbik and the Italian CasaPound.

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

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.

Journal Article - 2018

Politics, Participation and Big Data. Introductory Reflections on the Ontological, Epistemological, and Methodological Aspects of a Complex Relationship
Alice Mattoni, Elena Pavan
The article defines big data as an inherently political object and then briefly discusses its ontological, epistemological, and methodological implications in the realm of politics, political participation and political mobilization.
All publications

News

14/09/2018

Andrea Pirro appointed as new editor of East European Politics

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Andrea Pirro has been recently appointed as new editor of the journal East European Politics published by Taylor and Francis.

31/08/2018

Volkswagen foundation Grant 2018 for Manuela Caiani

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Manuela Caiani has been awarded the Volkswagen Grant 2018 for the research project Popular Music as a Medium for the Mainstreaming of Populist Ideologies in Europe, that will be directed by Mario Dunkel (University Carl von Ossietzky of Oldenburg, Germany).

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.

All news

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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