The Summer School will take place at the Scuola Normale Superiore, in Florence, from June 5^th to June 16^th 2023. Participants School will focus on how to analyse present and past forms of grassroots participation activated by social movement and civil society actors at the local, regional and transnational level.

More in general, it aims at disseminating knowledge on how to investigate processes and mechanisms that sustain the active citizens’ participation and mobilisation in the realm of politics. Grassroots participation and radical democracy have been at the centre of the public and political debate in the last two decades. Massive popular protests and new populist challengers have deeply impacted European politics both in the streets and in representative institutions. Furthermore, digital technologies are reshaping the mechanisms of political socialisation, organisation and participation. The emergence of new protest movements and the changing dynamics of political participation require scholars to reflect on the research strategies and methodologies that are employed to study grassroots participation and radical democracy. Although there is a considerable amount of research done both on how social movements and civil society actors mobilise and on the radical innovations in political participation, specialised literature on how to actually investigate these phenomena is rare, although increasingly necessary. The Summer School will address this gap discussing how to apply the most common methods in the social sciences to investigate political participation and mobilisation.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS AND ACADEMIC PROGRAMME

The Summer School will include three keynote speeches on social movements and research methods. Confirmed keynote speakers are: Donatella della Porta (Scuola Normale Superiore); Mario Diani (Università di Trento); Swen Hutter (Freie Universität Berlin).

The Summer School will last 10 teaching days for a total of 60 hours of didactic activities. The Summer School will cover the following topics (the names of the instructors will be published in the next few days):

• surveys in political participation and mobilisation (Joost de Moor, Sciences Po Paris);
• ethical issues in social movement and political participation research (Alice Mattoni, Università di Bologna);
• interviewing activists (Lorenzo Bosi, Scuola Normale Superiore);
• focus groups and group interviews (Felix Butzlaff, Central European University);
• visuals in the study of social movements (Nicole Doerr, University of Copenhagen);
• ethnography and participant observation (Stefan Malthaner, Hamburg Institute for Social Research);
• protest event analysis and political claim analysis (Martín Portos, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) ;
• discourse analysis and frame analysis in social movement research (Lorenzo Zamponi, Scuola Normale Superiore);
• experimental methods in participation and mobilisation research (Lasse Lindekilde, Aarhus Universitet);
• historical methods (Kostis Kornetis, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid);
• online tools and digital methods for the study of participation and mobilisation (Diego Ceccobelli and Massimo Rotunno, Università di Milano);
• big data in the study of political participation and mobilisation (Stefania Milan, University of Amsterdam);
• social network analysis (Katia Pilati, Università di Trento).

LOCATION

The Summer School will take place at Palazzo Strozzi, that hosts the Scuola Normale Superiore, in Florence, Italy.

CONTACTS

Email contact for questions and clarifications about the Summer School: pam.summerschool[AT]gmail.com

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Felix Butzlaff (Central European University, convenor of the ECPR SG on Participation and Mobilisation)

Donatella della Porta (Scuola Normale Superiore, director of COSMOS)

Lorenzo Zamponi (Scuola Normale Superiore, member of the steering committee of the ECPR SG on Participation and Mobilisation)

FINANCIAL AND LOGISTIC SUPPORT

The Summer School is kindly supported by:

• European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), Standing Group on Participation and Mobilisation
• Scuola Normale Superiore, Department of Social and Political Sciences.