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The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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Building from elsewhere. Platformization and the continuing struggle for political change – Keynote Speech, Prof. Nick Couldry (LSE)

In the framework of the Summer School on Media in Political Participation and Mobilization, Prof. Nick Couldry (LSE) will give a keynote speech on the paradoxes and challenges of political mobilization in commercial social media platforms.

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On the 29th of June 2017, from 5:30pm to 7:00pm, Prof. Nick Couldry (LSE) will give the closing keynote speech of the Summer School on Media in Political Participation and Mobilization. The keynote is open to the whole SNS community and COSMOS members.

Abstract

This lecture will reflect on the paradox that, in the era of social media, new forms of political mobilization are emerging with bewildering speed, yet one of the deepest, if least appreciated, political issues of our times is precisely the corporatization of social space itself, including many spaces of political mobilization. This paradox is driven by the dynamics of a commercial internet, whose core business model is the continuous extraction of value by harvesting data through surveillance of newly constructed spaces for social life itself. How to think through then the changing politics of struggles for social and economic change?

The lecture will propose a dialectical response. First, we must take as our starting-point the historically unprecedented corporate ambition to construct the very spaces of social life, which transforms the premises of all debate about political mobilization, including that aimed at social progress. Second, we must recognise the power of various false antitheses offered to that starting-point. There is the obfuscation provided by ‘the myth of us’ (Couldry 2014) which suggests that social media, whatever their corporate origins, literally provide the space where ‘we’, some politically meaningful ‘community’, come together (Mark Zuckerberg’s February 16 2017 manifesto being a classic example of that myth). There are also many over-literal readings of the ‘reality’ of political mobilization via social media (eg Castells and others).

Somehow, in response, a third move in the dialectic must be forged, but how? The lecture will conclude with a double suggestion: an insistence on a more deeply sociological reading of ‘what goes on’ on platforms, but contextualized within a reformulation of the underlying social and political values at stake in not accepting corporate-owned platforms as the necessary spaces of political life. The resulting attempt to defend the value, for example, of autonomy in the face of the corporate reconstruction of the social domain offers, perhaps, a first move towards building a model of social change ‘from elsewhere’, that is, from a different conception of the political ‘now’ and ‘here’.

News

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15 fully funded PhD positions

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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.

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

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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.

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

Populists in power and conspiracy theories

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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).

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

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

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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

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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.

Journal Article - 2021

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In this article, we bridge previous research on the far right and social movements to advance hypotheses on the drivers of far-right protest mobilisation based on grievances, opportunities and resource mobilisation models. We use an original dataset combining novel data on 4,845 far-right protest events in 11 East and West European countries (2008–2018), with existing measures accounting for the (political, economic and cultural) context of mobilisation.

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Journal Article - 2021

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