Paul Lichterman | University of Southern California

5^th November 2025

h. 14.00-15.30
2N Room

Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Palazzo Vegni, Florence

Morality is central to social movement activity yet moral action has been sidelined in much contemporary social movements research. Dominant approaches tend to treat morality as silent motives or else strategic packaging. I propose a new conceptual approach to investigate morality in collective actions and individual activist trajectories. How and why do some activists moralize their action while others with similar goals do not? Ethnographic and interview research in several US sites shows us how white anti-racists moralize their action by cultivating new, white racial identities, altering conventional emotion rules and learning distinct language ideologies. Comparisons between sites suggest some consequences of moralized action for white anti-racist collective capacities and public appeal.