Purpose Starting from the assumption that knowledge becomes all the more important for movements in times of crisis, as old structures are challenged and new ones envisaged and proved feasible, the purpose of this paper is to suggest ways to expand the toolkit of social movement studies in order to empirically address knowledge practices as a meaningful part of contemporary progressive activism. Design/methodology/approach The authors start by arguing that, in their effort to pursue or resist social and political changes, contemporary progressive social movements form collective spaces of knowledge production that are true laboratories for innovation. For this reason, the authors begin by making a case for accounting more explicitly for knowledge production within social movement studies - not as a substitution for but, rather, as a necessary complement to current cultural approaches. Building on extant literature on the nexus between movements and knowledge, the authors then outline the peculiarities of movement knowledge. Findings On these bases, the authors outline the core components of what the authors call repertoires of knowledge practices - that is, the set of practices that foster the coordination of disconnected, local, and highly personal experiences and rationalities within a shared cognitive system able to provide movements and their supporters with a common orientation for making claims and acting collectively to produce social, political, and cultural changes. Originality/value The authors conclude by identifying some promising avenues of research to further develop the understanding of movement practices of knowledge production and transmission.

Social media play a key role in shaping citizens’ political opinion. According to the Eurobarometer, the percentage of EU citizens employing online social networks on a daily basis has increased from 18% in 2010 to 48% in 2019. The entwinement between social media and the unfolding of political dynamics has motivated the interest of researchers for the analysis of users online behavior—with particular emphasis on group polarization during debates and echo-chambers formation. In this context, semantic aspects have remained largely under-explored. In this paper, we aim at filling this gap by adopting a two-steps approach. First, we identify the discursive communities animating the political debate in the run up of the 2018 Italian Elections as groups of users with a significantly-similar retweeting behavior. Second, we study the mechanisms that shape their internal discussions by monitoring, on a daily basis, the structural evolution of the semantic networks they induce. Above and beyond specifying the semantic peculiarities of the Italian electoral competition, our approach innovates studies of online political discussions in two main ways. On the one hand, it grounds semantic analysis within users’ behaviors by implementing a method, rooted in statistical theory, that guarantees that our inference of socio-semantic structures is not biased by any unsupported assumption about missing information; on the other, it is completely automated as it does not rest upon any manual labelling (either based on the users’ features or on their sharing patterns). These elements make our method applicable to any Twitter discussion regardless of the language or the topic addressed.

In this article, we aim at expanding the event-based and protest-centered perspective that is typically adopted to study the nexus between social media and movements. To this aim, we propose a network-based approach to explore the changing role that these tools play during the dynamic unfolding of movement processes and, more particularly, over the course of their institutionalization. In the first part, we read the added value of social media as a function of the 'integrative power' of the networks they foster -a unique and evolving form of sociotechnical power that springs from the virtuous encounter between social media networking potential and social resources. In the second part, we investigate this form of power by focusing directly on online networks structure as well as on the type of communication and participation environments they host. We apply our proposed approach to the longitudinal exploration of the Twitter networks deployed in the period 2012-2014 during three annual editions of the transnational feminist campaign 'Take Back The Tech!' (TBTT). Results from our case study suggest that, over time, TBTT supporters do in fact make a differentiated use of social media affordances -progressively switching their communicative strategies to better sustain the campaign's efforts inside and outside institutional venues. Thus, the exploration of the TBTT case provides evidence of the usefulness of the proposed approach to reflect on the different modes in which social media can be exploited in different mobilization stages and political terrains.

In this article, we extend our understanding of fringe politics to include relational and thematic elements, namely, the relationship of far-right collective actors with their broader network and the claims made within it. Locating our analysis at the intersection of protest event and social network analysis, we focus on the far-right Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik) which, since late 2013, has committed to moderation. Analysing the protest events in which Jobbik took part and the types of claims upon which it has mobilized between 2009 and 2017, we examine whether there has been a corresponding distancing from extremist groups and radical claims – a finding that would indeed validate the substantive transformation of Jobbik. By focusing on often neglected relational and thematic aspects, the study provides new ways to analyse fringe collective actors, the relationship with their environment and the evolution of such a relationship over time.

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