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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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Archive

Donagh Davis

My doctoral research involves a historical-sociological analysis of contentious politics in early twentieth-century Ireland. Theoretically, I am interested in long-running debates about the relationship between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ in the causation of revolutions and other episodes of political contention. My dissertation asks how such dynamics played out in Ireland – an ‘awkward’ case lying between […]

Claudius Wagemann

Claudius Wagemann is full professor for qualitative social science methods at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Before, he had been working at the   Istituto italiano di scienze umane   (SUM) in Florence, at the European University Institute and at the study abroad program of New York University. Among others, he has published a textbook on QCA and […]

Mate Nikola Tokic

Mate Nikola Tokic is assistant professor of modern European and East European history at The American University in Cairo. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (2007), MA from the London School of Economics (1996) and BA from Goucher College (1995). Before coming to the AUC, Tokic was a postdoctoral fellow in the […]

Julien Talpin

Julien Talpin is a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France), member of the Research Center onAdministration, Politics and Society (CERAPS/University Lille 2). He received his PhD from the European University Institute (Florence), wherehe completed a dissertation on the individual and collective consequences of engagement in participatory democracy institutions. Comparing […]

Federico M. Rossi

Federico M. Rossi was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After completing his Bachelor in Political Science at the Universidad de Buenos Aires he went to Florence. In Italy he obtained at the European University Institute a Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences in 2011. His research interests have included national and transnational social movements, protest, […]

Anja Röcke

Anja Röcke is assistant professor (“wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter”) at the Institute for Social Sciences at Humboldt-University, Berlin. After her studies in social sciences in Berlin and Paris, she wrote her Ph.D. on “Frames of citizen participation. Participatory budgeting in France, Germany and the United Kingdom” (forthcoming 2013) at the European University Institute, Florence. She has published […]

Sonia Pires

Post-doc fellow and lecturer at Centre for Geography Studies, Lisbon University Research interests : migration studies, political mobilization and participation

Grzegorz Piotrowski

I graduated from social anthropology and philosophy at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. I wrote my doctoral dissertation at the European University Institute in Florence Italy. The thesis, entitled “Alterglobalism in Postsocialism. A Study of Central and Eastern European Activists” was supervised by prof. Donatella della Porta and was defended in July 2011. […]

Daniela R. Piccio

Daniela R. Piccio is Research Fellow at the University of Turin. She received her PhD at the European University Institute of Florence and worked as a Research Associate at Leiden Universityon in the context of the ERC-project ‘Reconceptualizing Party Democracy’ directed by Prof. I. van Biezen. Here, she has been focusing on party (finance) regulation […]

Timothy Peace

Timothy Peace is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Stirling. He completed his PhD at the European University Institute (EUI) in 2010 with a thesis examining the involvement of British and French Muslims in social movements. He then held research fellowships at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and the University of […]

Lorenzo Mosca

Lorenzo Mosca is Associate Professor at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Scuola Normale Superiore. His research interests are focused on political communication, online politics, political participation and social movements. On these topics he has been involved in several national and European research projects such as “Europub.Com – The Transformation of Political Mobilisation […]

Mayo Fuster Morell

Mayo Fuster Morell concluded her PhD thesis entitle “Governance of online creation communities. Provision of infrastructure for the building of digital commons” at the European University Institute in 2010. She is currently a fellow at the Berkman center for Internet and society (Harvard University), and a researcher at the Institute of Government and Public Policies […]

Pierre Monforte

I completed my PhD in Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute in 2008. From 2008 to 2011, I was a post-doctoral fellow and part-time lecturer at the Université de Montréal. Since 2011, I am a lecturer at the University of Leicester, in the Department of Sociology. My research interests relate to social […]

Raffaele Marchetti

Raffaele Marchetti (Laurea, Rome; PhD, London) is assistant professor in International Relations  at LUISS where he holds a Jean Monnet European Module on   EU’s Engagement with Civil Society  . His research interest concerns global politics and governance, transnational civil society, and democracy. He was scientific coordinator of FP6 project  SHUR. Human Rights in Conflicts: The […]

Stefania Milan

Stefania Milan is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the founding director of the Data J Lab dedicated to ‘Big Data’ analytics (currently relocating from Tilburg University to Amsterdam).Before joining the University of Amsterdam, she was an Assistant Prof. of Data Journalism at Tilburg […]

News

22/02/2023

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.

16/02/2023

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

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

10/01/2022

SNS announces 14 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 14 PhD fellowships beginning on November 1, 2022.

16/07/2021

Prof. della Porta to lead VolkswagenStiftung-funded ECSEuro project

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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

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

28/09/2020

Four post-doctoral research positions on the pandemic

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The Scuola Normale Superiore announces four post-doctoral positions to be activated as part of the research project “After the coronavirus pandemic: The effects of the health emergency on society and knowledge.” 

Publications

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.

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

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).

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

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.

Journal Article - 2021

Far-right protest mobilisation in Europe: Grievances, opportunities and resources

Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Caterina Froio & Andrea Pirro
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.

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.

Edited Volume - 2021

Contentious Migrant Solidarity. Shrinking Spaces and Civil Society Contestation

Donatella della Porta & Elias Steinhilper
Building upon social movement and migration studies, this book maps the two sides of ‘contentious solidarity’: a shrinking civic space and its contestation by civil society.

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.