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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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2024-11-13

International Research Workshop – Call for abstracts: Social movements and the law: Legal mobilisation in a comparative perspective

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Legal mobilisation has been broadly theorised and empirically studied as a repertoire of contentious action within the inter-disciplinary scholarly field of social movements and the law. Even though it attracted significant interest from scholars across a number of disciplines, it has been studied to very different extents depending on the policy fields and social movements under consideration. All the more so, very rarely has the use of legal tactics been compared across these different policy fields and social movements, resulting in an overall issue-specific literature on legal mobilisation.

Laying at the intersection of social movement and legal studies, this workshop intends to promote multi-disciplinary and comparative cross-movement research on legal mobilisation. We aim to bring together scholars at any career stage, researching legal mobilisation from different angles and in different empirical fields, considering both progressive and regressive legal mobilisation, as well as pro-active and reactive ones. In doing this, we plan to engage with questions such as:

  • Why, how, when and where do certain social movement organisations engage in legal mobilisation? Which country-specific characteristics of the legal system play a role?
  • Which constraints and opportunities do they face?
  • Who are the actors engaged in legal mobilisation and what is their relation to social movement fields?
  • What tactics are associated with legal mobilisation and how are they influenced by environmental and organisational factors?
  • Does the pre-existence of instances of legal repression influence the use of pro-active legal mobilisation?
  • To what extent do the internal composition and characteristics of specific movements and movement organisations influence the choice of mobilising the law?
  • Can we identify similarities and differences in the use of legal mobilisation by progressive and regressive social movements?
  • What are the characteristics of legal mobilisation at the international level?
  • What are the goals of this repertoire and how can we assess its ‘success’ – given that determining the ‘success’ of political contention is always a complex and debated task?
  • How do different degrees of success and failure relate to other repertoires and influence the decision to engage in legal mobilisation?
  • How does within- or cross-movement diffusion in the use of legal mobilisation take place?

We welcome proposals bridging theoretical and empirical contributions from the wide spectrum of the social, political and legal sciences, and which adopt diverse methodological approaches. We are especially – but not exclusively – interested in studies that address legal mobilisation in the environmental, labour, gender rights, civil rights, migration and pro-Palestinian movements.

 

If you wish to participate, please send a short abstract (max 300 words), your name and affiliation to federico.alagna@sns.it by 15 January 2025. There will be no registration fee and meals will be provided. While we will not cover travel and accommodation expenses, limited funds are available for those participants (especially early-career and non-affiliated researchers) who will exceptionally need financial support for their travel and/or accommodation and do not have access to other funding opportunities. In case you need such support, please state so in your submission.

 

Organisation committee

Donatella della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore

Scott Cummings, University of California, Los Angeles

Federico Alagna, Scuola Normale Superiore

News

01/07/2024

Le basi istituzionali di un panico morale

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Attraverso una lunga rassegna di casi concreti, Donatella Della Porta, direttrice di Cosmos, descrive il processo per cui la lotta istituzionale all'antisemitismo in Germania, inizialmente promossa dalla società civile progressista, si è trasformata nella costruzione di un apparato statale e di una struttura di potere ufficiale come strumento di razzializzazione e repressione.

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.