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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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Alba Arenales Lope

Research Fellow

Alba is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore. Her research examines how actors with limited power and resources manage to mobilise and organise, focusing on their strategic and tactical choices. She works across social movement studies and labour sociology, combining qualitative methods with comparative analysis.

Her current project explores how workers and unions use different strategies and tactics to improve working conditions and build organisation in hospitality across Britain and the Spanish State. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Queen’s University Belfast, with a dissertation that analysed riots as a form of collective action during the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland (1969–1998). Her work is published in The Sociological Review, Partecipazione e Conflitto, and Civil Wars.

She is a member of MOVICON (UCM, Madrid) and the Centre on Social Movements Research (SNS), and serves as Secretary of the Social Movements Research Committee of the Spanish Sociology Association (FES).

Research interests: social movements, labour mobilization, collective action, precarious labor, political violence, and qualitative methods

News

Publications

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