logo

Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

logo

2019 ECPR-COSMOS Summer School on Methods for the Study of Political Participation and Mobilisation

Picture description

The Call for Application is now open for the Third Edition of the Summer School on Methods for the Study of Political Participation and Mobilisation, organized by the ECPR Standing Group on Participation and Mobilization and the Centre on Social Movement Studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore.

The Summer School will take place at the Scuola Normale Superiore, in Florence, from June 3rd to June 14th 2019. 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 decade. 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); Marco Giugni (University of Geneva); Olivier Fillieule (University of Lausanne).

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:

  • surveys in political participation and mobilisation – Joost de Moor (Stockholm University);
  • ethical issues in social movement and political participation research – Stefania Milan (University of Amsterdam);
  • interviewing activists – Lorenzo Zamponi (Scuola Normale Superiore);
  • visuals in the study of social movements – Alice Mattoni (Scuola Normale Superiore);
  • ethnography and participant observation – Philip Balsiger (University of Neuchâtel);
  • protest event analysis and political claim analysis – Martin Portos (Scuola Normale Superiore);
  • discourse analysis and frame analysis in social movement research – Lasse Lindekilde (Aarhus University);
  • experimental methods in participation and mobilisation research – Lasse Lindekilde (Aarhus University);
  • historical methods – Lorenzo Bosi (Scuola Normale Superiore);
  • participatory action research – Hara Kouki (Durham University);
  • doing fieldwork during violent conflicts – Stefan Malthaner (Hamburg Institute for Social Research);
  • online tools and digital methods for the study of participation and mobilisation – Diego Ceccobelli (Scuola Normale Superiore);
  • social network analysis – Manuela Caiani (Scuola Normale Superiore);
  • big data in the study of political participation and mobilisation – Elena Pavan (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

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

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

Joost de Moor (Stockholm University, convenor of the ECPR SG on Participation and Mobilisation)

Alice Mattoni (Scuola Normale Superiore)

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.

APPLICATION

The Summer School is open to 20 graduate and master students as well as early career researchers with a specialised interest in participation and mobilization in different fields of study, including political science, political sociology, political communication, and political anthropology from throughout European and beyond.

Applicants must email a cover letter in which they explain how the Summer School would be beneficial for their research, a 250-word abstract of their proposed paper, and a curriculum vitae no later than March 17th: to pam.summerschool[AT]gmail.com

Applicants will be informed of the outcome by email as soon as possible. Those offered places must confirm their participation within 7 days, after which places may be offered to applicants on the reserve list.

REQUIREMENTS

Students will be required to write and submit a 7.000-8.000 words paper before the starting of the Summer School. The paper will be then presented and discussed during one of the afternoon sessions.

Students will be also required to complete the mandatory readings for morning lectures and method sessions and to actively participate in discussion during morning and afternoon sessions.

Successful participation in the Summer School will be fully accredited with 30 credits and a certificate of participation.

English will be the working language of the Summer School. Therefore, students are expected to have a good command of written and spoken English.

ENROLLMENT FEES

Full fees for the Summer School are €400 and cover tuition costs, academic materials, lunches, welcome aperitivo & farewell dinner, use of library, computing and internet facilities.

Fees will not cover travel and accommodation costs, but registered participants will have the opportunity to book single and double rooms in the University Residence of the Scuola Normale Superiore at a very convenient rate, pending availability.

Details of how to pay the fees and book the room will be emailed to all selected participants.

News

16/05/2023

CFP: Analyzing protest in the digital age. Challenges and opportunities in combining text and video sources

Organizers Donatella della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore Swen Hutter, Freie Universität Berlin & WZB Berlin Social Science Center Place and date WZB Berlin Social Science Center, December 7-8, 2023

22/02/2023

15 fully funded PhD positions

alt
The Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy is pleased to announce 15 PhD fellowships beginning on November 1, 2023. The deadline for applications is April 13, 2023.

16/02/2023

Applications now open! Fourth Edition of the ECPR-COSMOS Summer School on Methods for the Study of Political Participation and Mobilisation

alt
Applicants must send their application materials no later than March the 17th 2023.

10/01/2022

SNS announces 14 fully-funded PhD positions

alt
The Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy is pleased to announce 14 PhD fellowships beginning on November 1, 2022.

16/07/2021

Prof. della Porta to lead VolkswagenStiftung-funded ECSEuro project

alt
Reflecting the European challenge of transnational cooperation and multiple crises, this project asks how local political initiatives across Europe enact citizenship and solidarity and contribute to the vision of a more democratic Europe from below.

09/07/2021

SNS announces 7 fully-funded PhD positions

alt
The Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore announces 7 fully-funded PhD positions. Deadline for applications: 21 August 2021.

Publications

Journal Article - 2023

Mutual aid and solidarity politics in times of emergency: direct social action and temporality in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Lorenzo Zamponi
From the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distancing measures introduced created a series of social problems and needs that were partially addressed in Italy as well as in other countries by grassroots mutual aid initiatives. While many of these initiatives were strongly rooted in the Italian social movement and civil society landscape and the choice to engage in mutual aid activities was the result of long years of reflection and planning, the article shows how strongly the temporality of emergency affected the nature of these initiatives, their development and their outcomes, in particular with regard to the extraordinary number of people who volunteered and their relationship with politicisation processes.

Monograph - 2023

Populism and (Pop) Music

Manuela Caiani, Enrico Padoan
The book provides a detailed account of the links between production of popular culture to the rise of populism and contributes to studies on populism and popular culture in Italy, using a comparative approach and a cultural sociology perspective

Journal Article - 2023

Reflective Inclusion: Learning from Activists What Taking a Deliberative Stance Means.

Andrea Felicetti, Markus Holdo
We propose to adopt a principle we call “reflective inclusion,” which allows us to engage abductively with new actions that might expand and deepen our understanding of what deliberation may look like.

Journal Article - 2022

The mobilization for spatial justice in divided societies. Urban commons, trust reconstruction and socialist memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Chiara Milan
The article contributes to the urban studies literature and the study of social movements in divided societies by disclosing the distinctive features and mobilizing potential that the notion of urban commons retains in a war-torn society with a socialist legacy.

Journal Article - 2022

Populists in power and conspiracy theories

Andrea Pirro & Paul Taggart
Looking at three cases of populists in government – Orbán in Hungary, Trump in the United States, and Chávez in Venezuela – we examine the definition of conspiring elites (who), the circumstances under which conspiracy theories are propagated (when), and the ultimate purpose of conspiratorial framing (why).

Monograph - 2022

Resisting the Backlash: Street Protest in Italy

Donatella della Porta, Niccolò Bertuzzi, Daniela Chironi, Chiara Milan, Martín Portos & Lorenzo Zamponi
Drawing interview material, together with extensive data from the authors’ original social movement database, this book examines the development of social movements in resistance to perceived political "regression" and a growing right-wing backlash.

Journal Article - 2022

(Water) Bottles and (Street) Barricades: The Politicisation of Lifestyle-Centred Action in Youth Climate Strike Participation

Lorenzo Zamponi, Anja Corinne Baukloh, Niccolò Bertuzzi, Daniela Chironi, Donatella della Porta, Martín Portos
This article explores the forms of action adopted by participants in two Fridays For Future (FFF) strikes, focusing on the repertoires of action of (young) climate justice protesters. Drawing on protest survey data, it shows demonstrated that young protesters do not participate less in claim-based action than older cohorts. Furthermore, a process of politicisation can be seen to be unfolding that leads to increased commitment in both lifestyle and political forms of participation – at least among active milieus.

Journal Article - 2022

Performing (during) the Coronavirus crisis: The Italian populist radical right between national opposition and subnational government

Andrea Pirro
The first year of COVID-19 confirmed the standing of the populist radical right in Italy. While sitting in opposition at the national level, Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy and Matteo Salvini's League shared common criticism of the Conte II government but experienced diverging trajectories in terms of popularity. These changes can be partly attributed to the different agency of their leaderships. Overall and collectively considered, the Italian populist radical right broke even during the first year of COVID-19, but the crisis exposed the first cracks in Salvini's leadership.

Monograph - 2022

Labour conflicts in the digital age

Donatella della Porta, Riccardo Emilio Chesta, Lorenzo Cini
From Deliveroo to Amazon, digital platforms have drastically transformed the way we work. But how are these transformations being received and challenged by workers? This book provides a radical interpretation of the changing nature of worker movements in the digital age, developing an invaluable approach that combines social movement studies and industrial relations. Using case studies taken from Europe and North America, it offers a comparative perspective on the mobilizing trajectories of different platform workers and their distinct organizational forms and action repertoires.

Monograph - 2021

Migrant Protest. Interactive Dynamics in Precarious Mobilizations

Elias Steinhilper
This book explores the interactions and spaces shaping the emergence, trajectory, and fragmentation of migrant protest in unfavorable contexts of marginalization.