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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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Gary T. Marx

Visiting Scholar

is Professor Emeritus from M.I.T. He has worked in the areas of race and ethnicity, collective behaviour and social movements, law and society and surveillance studies. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. He has also taught there, at Harvard University, the University of Colorado and been a visiting professor at more than 20 other schools in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Additional information is available at  http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/bio.html  . Within the area of social movements and collective behaviour he has studied topics such as the civil rights movement, majority involvement in minority movements, police behaviour in civil disorders, agents provocateurs and issueless riots posted at www.garymarx.net  . His most recent work in the area includes: a critique introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Smelser’s Theory of Collective Behavior and the article  “Agents Provocateurs as a Type of Faux Activist”. He welcomes the chance to meet with students and colleagues to discuss topics of mutual interest. On April 22-23 he will be giving a workshop on his recently completed book Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology (University of Chicago).

 

 

Research interests: social movements, surveillance, and collective behavior

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Edited Volume - 2026

Conspiracism and Political Conflict

Manuela Caiani, Marco Solinas, Hans-Jorg Trenz

Monograph - 2025

Free download for "Contentious Politics of Global Health Movements"

Donatella Della Porta, Stella Christou

Journal Article - 2025

Communication creates partial organization: A comparative analysis of the organizing practices of two climate action movements, Youth for Climate and Fridays for Future Italy

Marco Deseriis, Lorenzo Zamponi, Diego Ceccobelli
This article focuses on a neglected aspect of the climate action movement Fridays for Future, namely, the relationship between its mediated communication practices and its early organizational processes. Drawing from a strand of organizational communication that underscores the constitutive dimension of communication to organizing processes, we analyze the significance of mediatized leadership and networked communication for the foundation and early development of two national chapters of Fridays for Future: Youth for Climate (YFC) Belgium and Fridays for Future Italy (FFFI).

Journal Article - 2025

Power resources, territory and labour conflicts in the logistic sector

Donatella Della Porta, Marco Antonelli