Cosmos
The Centre on Social Movement Studies
Journal Article - 2017
Author: Alice Mattoni
The article tackles two main aspects related to the interaction between social movements and digital technologies. First, it reflects on the need to include and combine different theoretical approaches in social movement studies so as to construct more meaningful understanding of how social movement actors deals with digital technologies and with what outcomes in societies.… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Emiliano Treré, Sandra Jeppensen and Alice Mattoni
This article presents findings from an empirical study of repertoires of contention and communication engaged during anti-austerity protests by the Indignados in Spain, the precarious generation in Italy, and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece. Drawing on 60 semistructured interviews with activists and independent media producers involved in the 2011 wave of contention, we bring together social… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Loris Caruso
ITC technologies have come to comprehensively represent images and expectations of the future. Hopes of ongoing progress, economic growth, skill upgrading and possibly also democratisation are attached to new ICTs as well as fears of totalitarian control, alienation, job loss and insecurity. Currently, with the terms Industry 4.0. and ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution” (FIR), public institutions… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Lorenzo Cini
After decades of political passivity, Italian students have massively mobilized in the years 2008 and 2010 to protest the implementation of two political measures fostering a neoliberal conception of higher education. More notably, the casus belli of these mobilizations concerned the implementation of a financial measure cutting public funding for higher education in 2008, accompanied… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Andrea Felicetti
This article advances one of the most important debates in recent scholarship on democratic theory: the one on deliberative systems. In the wake of the systemic turn deliberative scholars agree that not all components of a deliberative system can or even need to be deliberative. However, there is little clarity about the role of non-deliberative… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Loris Caruso
With the worsening of the economic crisis, unemployment and social inequalities in Europe, an analogy spreads between the economic and political crisis of the Thirties and the current one. As in that period, it is argued, there is a risk that a systemic economic crisis will lead to a general crisis of the political dimension… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Lorenzo Cini and César Guzmán-Concha
Several recent episodes of massive student protests in countries in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, raise the question of whether we are witnessing to a new surge of student protests. This profile offers an interpretation of the socio-economic and political processes that have caused contentious reactions among students, paying special attention to changes in the… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Lorenzo Cini
This article assesses the strategies that the Italian student activists adopted in order to influence the revision process of the governance structure of their universities in 2011. Which kind of strategy has enabled these activists to influence more successfully this process? I argue that the joint pressure of insiders and outsiders allows student activists to… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Marco Deseriis
This article contends that technopopulism is a discursive formation that emerges from the convergence of two preexisting discourses: populism and technolibertarianism. Whereas these discourses are historically distinct the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 wave of struggles precipitated the political conditions for their intersection. Such convergence produces both tensions and possibilities. On the one hand,… moreJournal Article - 2017
Author: Manès Weisskircher
Recently, scholars have shown a growing interest in radical left parties (RLPs). In terms of electoral success, the rise of the KPÖ Graz, the Communist Party in Austria’s second biggest city, represents perhaps the most counterintuitive case in Western Europe. Adding to previous studies, the rise of the KPÖ Graz contradicts many of the claims… more08/06/2017
19/05/2017
19/05/2017
Journal Article - 2017
Journal Article - 2017