Social Movements

Abstract

Social movements are important agents of social, political, and cultural change, dating back from the present to at least the far‐reaching empires of the Greco‐Roman world and the various rebellions and religious movements spawned during that era. This entry sketches a general overview of social movements, accenting their role as carriers of social change, providing a working conceptualization, elaborating the varieties or types of social movements, and identifying the focal issues and questions that animate most research on social movements.

An imperious, closed sandbox? A rejoinder to Van Dijk’s critique of the framing perspective on social movement mobilization

“…Perhaps its discursive and behavioral appeal is rooted in part in its elasticity, particularly that it lends itself to being used so seamlessly as a noun or a verb. What we have attempted to do in past work is to fine tune its conceptualization and theorize its dimensions and nuances, providing a conceptual architecture as it applies to the mobilization of collective action (see Snow, 2022, for a summary), in large part due to the erstwhile conceptual void in the social movement literature for considering and discussing meaning-contestation and –making within the context of social protest and movements.…”