logo

Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

logo

2023 ECPR-COSMOS Summer School on Methods for the Study of Political Participation and Mobilisation

Picture description

The Summer School will take place at the Scuola Normale Superiore, in Florence, from June 5th to June 16th 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.

 

 

News

Publications

Journal Article - 2023

Resisting right-wing populism in power: a comparative analysis of the Facebook activities of social movements in Italy and the UK

Niccolò Pennucci
This paper aims to present a comparative study of the civil society reaction to right-wing populism in power through social media, by looking at cases in Italy and the United Kingdom.

Journal Article - 2023

Emotions in Action: the Role of Emotions in Refugee Solidarity Activism

Chiara Milan
This article investigates the different types of emotions that result from participation in refugee solidarity activism, investigating how they change over time and to what extent they explain why individuals remain involved in action in spite of unfavorable circumstances.

Journal Article - 2023

‘Love is over, this is going to be Turkey!’: cathartic resonance between the June 2013 protests in Turkey and Brazil

Batuhan Eren
This study addresses the question of why and how a protest can inspire individuals in distant countries. Taking the June 2013 protests in Turkey and Brazil as cases, it investigates the reasons why the Turkish protests were framed as one of the inspirational benchmarks by some Brazilian protesters.

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

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 - 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 - 2021

Learning from Democratic Practices: New Perspectives in Institutional Design

Andrea Felicetti
Drawing from literature on democratic practices in social movements and democratic innovations, the article illustrates three ways to advance institutional design in the wake of the systemic turn.

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.

Journal Article - 2021

Populism between voting and non-electoral participation

Andrea Pirro & Martín Portos
The article focuses on a neglected aspect of populist mobilisation, i.e. non-electoral participation (NEP), and elaborates on the extent to which populist party voters engage politically outside the polling station. While challenging common understandings of populism as inherently distrustful and apathetic, and protest as an exclusive practice of the left, the study critically places NEP at the heart of populism in general, and populist right politics in particular.