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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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Events

Protesting Crises: Progressive Social movements in the Face of Authoritarian Backlash

Date: 23/10/2025 - 24/10/2025

Place: Aula Altana, Scuola Normale Superiore, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Category: COSMOS Conference

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Three FIREworks fall seminars

Date: 22/10/2025 - 10/12/2025

Place: Palazzo Strozzi

Category: COSMOS Seminar

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These seminars are a space for the presentation and discussion of ongoing research at the intersection of gender, social movements, feminist theory, and intersectionality

 

The US and the world: right-wing radicalisation and progressive alternatives

Date: 13/10/2025

Place: Aula Altana, Scuola Normale Superiore, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Category: COSMOS Roundtable

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The Weaponisation of Antisemitism: The Jewish Chronicle and the Production of a Moral Panic

Date: 09/10/2025 - 09/09/2025

Place: Palazzo Vegni

Category: COSMOS Talk

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The Cosmos Talks program for the fall

Date: 18/09/2025 - 04/12/2025

Place: Palazzo Vegni

Category: COSMOS Talk

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2025 COSMOS Summer school: Studying protest. Methodological practices in social movement research

Date: 08/09/2025 - 13/09/2025

Place: Cortona

Category: Summer School

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The second seminar series by FIRE – Working Group on Feminism, Intersectionality and Gender – is here!

Date: 13/06/2025 - 26/06/2025

Place: Palazzo Strozzi

Category: COSMOS Seminar

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Understanding Contemporary Mass Social Unrest, International Workshop

Date: 29/05/2025 - 30/05/2025

Place: Palazzo Strozzi

Category: COSMOS Workshop

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Reclaiming Power: Bridging Social Movements and Industrial Relations in Labour Mobilisation

Date: 26/05/2025 - 27/05/2025

Place: Palazzo Strozzi

Category: COSMOS Conference

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Social movements between sociology and history. An interdisciplinary dialogue

Date: 22/05/2025

Place: Aula Altana, Scuola Normale Superiore, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Category: COSMOS Conference

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Social movements and the law: Legal mobilisation in a comparative perspective

Date: 20/05/2025 - 21/05/2025

Place: Palazzo Strozzi

Category: COSMOS Conference

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Active Youth? Trends of political participation in East Central Europe

Date: 07/05/2025

Place: Palazzo Vegni

Category: COSMOS Seminar

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Rhythms of repression: policing pro-Palestinian protests in Toronto

Date: 07/05/2025

Place: Aula Altana, Scuola Normale Superiore, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Category: Other

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Student protests in Serbia: turning tragedy into a movement

Date: 07/05/2025

Place: Palazzo Vegni

Category: COSMOS Roundtable

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The criminalization of migration in Italy: A state of the art

Date: 11/04/2025

Place: Palazzo Vegni

Category: COSMOS Workshop

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News

28/10/2025

Call for papers: Social Movements and the Law Legal Mobilization in a Comparative Perspective
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28/10/2025

Antisemitism weaponized, an interview with Neve Gordon
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20/10/2025

Armed conflicts in the world, an alarming trend
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14/10/2025

Europe and Ukraine, two different views at the Summer school on War, Peace and the world order
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06/10/2025

"Il no al genocidio si intreccia con le preoccupazioni per il futuro."
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02/10/2025

Israele e Palestina alla Summer School su guerra, pace e ordine mondiale
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Publications

Journal Article - 2025

Communication creates partial organization: A comparative analysis of the organizing practices of two climate action movements, Youth for Climate and Fridays for Future Italy
Marco Deseriis, Lorenzo Zamponi, Diego Ceccobelli
This article focuses on a neglected aspect of the climate action movement Fridays for Future, namely, the relationship between its mediated communication practices and its early organizational processes. Drawing from a strand of organizational communication that underscores the constitutive dimension of communication to organizing processes, we analyze the significance of mediatized leadership and networked communication for the foundation and early development of two national chapters of Fridays for Future: Youth for Climate (YFC) Belgium and Fridays for Future Italy (FFFI).

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.

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.
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Faculty of Political and Social Sciences Scuola Normale Superiore Palazzo Strozzi Piazza degli Strozzi 50123 Firenze Italy
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