Book cover - Title reads 'Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Social Movements'. Edward Elgar Publishing logo at top right. Photo of large group of protestors on a city street at night.

Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Social Movements

By , , ,

Introduction

The Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Social Movements is essential for those seeking to enhance their understanding of social movements through rigorous research. Emphasising ethical considerations and the multidimensional nature of social movement research, the handbook integrates real-world examples to illustrate the challenges and strengths of various research methods. It is aimed at researchers, activists, and students.

This handbook has 50 contributors and 32 chapters by a mix of emerging and experienced researchers and activist scholars from both the Global North and South and includes a range of perspectives including feminist, Black, and Indigenous voices. It has three thematic parts:

  • Part I
    8 chapters focusing on research methodology.
  • Part II
    16 chapters on different methods of data collection and analysis, answering the question of ‘how to do this’, as well as showing what the strengths and challenges of particular methods are.
  • Part III
    7 chapters discuss the history of action research and contemporary participatory action research; community-based research and research that feeds into movement learning; how movement organisations use research, research on movement outcomes, and how to make our research more useful.

About the Handbook

Information from the Publisher.

This book was published by Edgar Elgar Publishing in 2024 and edited by Laurence Cox, Anna Szolucha, Alberto Arribas Lozano, and Sutapa Chattopadhyay.

This cutting-edge and authoritative Handbook covers a broad spectrum of social movement research methodologies, offering expert analysis and detailed accounts of the ways in which research can effectively be carried out on social movements and popular protests.

Addressing practice-oriented questions, this Handbook engages with both theoretical and political dimensions, unpacking the multidimensional nature of social movement research. Divided into three thematic sections, this stimulating Handbook dives deep into discussions relating to the methodological challenges raised by researching social movements, the technical question of how such research is conducted, and then to more practical considerations about the uses and applications of movement research.

Expert contributors and established researchers utilise real-world examples to explore the methodological challenges from a range of perspectives including classical, engaged, feminist, Black, Indigenous and global Southern viewpoints. The Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Social Movements will not only appeal to experienced researchers, but also to activists who have started to think about researching their own movements and to politically engaged students. It speaks to new and established scholars in relevant disciplines such as sociology, political science, anthropology, geography, development studies, gender studies, and race and ethnic studies, and particularly those looking to better appreciate the different research methods for understanding social movements.

A good social movement researcher is not just someone who knows how to collect data and analyse it; they are also clear why they are doing research and what they mean by that, and they are someone who has a good sense of how their own activity will help practitioners and, ultimately, the wider world. – pg 15 Source

Why Research Social Movements?

Pages 1-2 from Chapter 1: How can we Research Social Movements? An Introduction. 

For at least 150 years, activists have talked about movements as involving three kinds of activity: agitation (getting people to agree that something is unjust or otherwise wrong and that they should take action around it), education (once participants have got to that point of taking action, exploring why a problem persists, what social structures need to be changed and what interests need to be confronted to resolve it) and organisation (bringing people together in effective ways to bring the kind of pressure that is needed to actually resolve the issue).

As this suggests, most people’s engagement with movements starts from their own response to the issues, agitating to convince others, and educating themselves or others around the issues. Thinking about the movement itself may come a lot later, particularly if people are not familiar with other organisations or movements and take a particular way of organising for granted. Sometimes it is only the experience of defeat or failure – a particular organising approach not working – or of becoming involved in a different struggle or group that sparks reflection about organisation; in other words, about movements themselves.

Movements have a long history of discussing these challenges, sometimes in critical conversations between different organisations and attempts to form alliances between different movements, sometimes in internal debates and conflicts over what strategy to adopt.

The more democratic – and the more significant – a movement is, the more it is likely to be a space of reflection, conversation and argument about questions such as these:

  • What are we actually doing well, and what are we doing badly?
  • Is what we are doing working?
  • What direction is it taking us in, and is this where we want to go?
  • Do we have other possible options?

These start as practice-oriented questions, but inevitably bring in theoretical and political dimensions.

Reflective activists also find themselves reading movement history, talking to activists from other movements, trying to find out about movements in other countries or regions as a way of trying to make sense of their own situation; and of course reading movement theory of various kinds that argues for particular ways of doing things, or particular understandings of the world that movements exist in.

These may be comparative or theoretical perspectives, but activists read them to reflect on and potentially change their own practice.

For well over a century now, movement participants have been not only consumers but also producers of research: documenting their own practice, attempting to understand movements in other times and places, trying to generalise from different cases, engaging in collective reflection around their participants’ experience, and among other things researching the people they hope to engage, the issues they are working on and their opponents. Not every activist or every organisation does this, but as a rule of thumb, as movements develop (engage wider social groups, persist over time, widen their political goals, create spaces for discussion, reflection, training and education), different kinds of research tend to become a regular part of their practice.

Starting from a rather different place, students, academics, journalists and think tanks also research movements. Some do so as sympathisers or opponents; others are simply trying to produce material for university or media purposes with little interest beyond that. Others again carry out their research in dialogue or collaboration with movement organisations.

These other kinds of research raise important ethical questions.

Social movements represent a difficult collective effort, often of the poor, powerless and oppressed, to change these circumstances against powerful opponents.

It should be clear that turning them into figures of hate or fun for media consumption purposes is deeply unethical (but all too common). Similarly, but less blatantly, a piece of student or professional academic research which is only intended to be read by an examiner or a handful of colleagues, and to help the researcher’s career – while drawing on knowledge produced by activists and demanding their time and engagement – arguably represents an exploitative and ultimately unethical form of research.

Keep reading Chapter 1: How can we Research Social Movements? An Introduction.

Contents of the Handbook

1. How can we research social movements? An introduction

PART I APPROACHES TO RESEARCHING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

2. Researching global movements: practices, dialogues and ethics
3. Feminist methodologies in social movement studies: gender, positionality and research in practice
4. Research from, with and for Indigenous social movements
5. Social movements as learning communities, researchers and knowledge producers
6. A Marxist approach to researching social movements
7. Researching social movements in authoritarian states: preparing and conducting fieldwork in Iran and Turkey
8. Cross-sectoral dialogues with social movements in Southeast Asia: translating values, affects, and practices in a polymorphic region
9. Methodological pluralism in social movement studies: why and how

PART II DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS IN SOCIAL MOVEMENT RESEARCH

10. Learning within freedom movements: using critical oral history methodology
11. Doing digital ethnography: a comparison of two social movement studies
12. Media and communication activism: doing ethnography with ultra-right and progressive social movements
13. Visual research with Mayan social movements in Guatemala: a critical approach
14. Back and forth: militant ethnography in the ‘crowded fields’
15. Making sense of the Narmada movements through Adivasi narratives
16. The art of talks and conversations in Indigenous research: decolonising interview methods
17. Researching social movement participation in the Global South: what to do after discovering and recording plural and ambiguous narratives in the field?
18. Using surveys to study demonstrators
19. Analysing protest events: a quantitative and systematic approach
20. How do grievances become manifestos? Developing frame analysis in social movement research
21. Researching identity and culture in place-based struggles
22. Researching ideologies and social movements: why and how?
23. ‘Repertoires of contention’: examining concept, method, context and practice
24. Searching for mechanisms of social movement success: research on political and cultural underpinnings of protestors’ impact
25. Historical approaches to researching social movements

PART III APPLICATIONS OF SOCIAL MOVEMENT RESEARCH

26. A story of three activists: the value of activist action research in social movement learning
27. Community-based research: approaches, principles and challenges
28. Participatory research as activism: Orlando Fals Borda and the Latin American tradition of engaged research
29. Participatory action research in social movements
30. Using research in movement strategy
31. Research methods for studying collective action outcomes
32. Civil resistance research: how can we make our work more useful to activists and organizers?
Index

…engaged research faces the ongoing challenges that movements themselves face: how to make more transformative connections between movements, how to incorporate many voices narrating their part in movements, and how to think from and for movements without excluding difference and diversity. – Page 21, Source

Watch Videos

Watch 7 video sessions celebrating the publication of the Handbook: How can we research social movements? A Global Online Symposium, 24 April 2024 including:

  • Social movements in SE Asia (Speaker on Indonesia : Wijayanto Speaker on Thailand : Wichuta Teeratanabodee Speaker on Myanmar: Zo Bilay (Zobi))
  • Feminist and Southern approaches, researching identities and ideologies (Sevil Çakır, Minati Dash, Susann Pham and Ayse Sargin)
  • Roundtable on the book (Keisha-Khan Perry and the four editors)
  • Classical and contemporary approaches to researching movements (Tiago Carvalho, Arnab Roy Chowdhury, Aurora Perego & Stefania Vicari, Clare Saunders and Katrin Uba)
  • Indigenous and global movement research (Carlos Y Flores and Axel Köhler)
  • The politics of Social Movement research (Natasha Adams, Geri Augusto, Steve Chase and Joanne Rappaport)
  • Researching online and media activism (Cinzia Padovani and John Postill)

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New Books in Public Policy, New Books Network Podcast

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