Conceptualizing Culture in Social Movement Research: (Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology)

Culture has become a prominent concept in social movement research. It is, however, often employed in an unsystematic and limited way. This volume introduces and compares different concepts of culture in social movement research. It assesses advantages and shortcomings of existing concepts and introduces new approaches. In particular, it addresses facets of cultural theory that have hitherto been largely neglected in the literature on social movements. This includes ideas from anthropology, discourse analysis, sociology of emotions, narration, spatial theory, and others. The chapters in this volume address three relationships between social movements and culture: culture as a framework for movements, social movements' internal culture, and culture and cultural change as a result of social movement activity. For the purpose of making concepts easily accessible, each contribution explains its approach to culture in an understandable way and illustrates it with recent cases of mobilization.

Table of Contents:
1. Protest and Culture: Concepts and Approaches in Social Movement Research. An Introduction; Peter Ullrich, Priska Daphi, and Britta Baumgarten PART I: THEORIZING CULTURE FROM DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES BEYOND THE MAINSTREAM 2. Feeling - Thinking: Emotions as Central to Culture; James Jasper 3. 'A Whole Way of Struggle?': Western Marxisms, Social Movements and Culture; Laurence Cox 4. Reassessing the Culture Concept in the Analysis of Global Social Movements: An Anthropological Perspective; June Nash PART II: CULTURE AS A FRAMEWORK FOR MOVEMENT ACTIVITY 5. Culture and Activism Across Borders; Britta Baumgarten 6. Comparing Discourse between Cultures: A Discursive Approach to Movement Knowledge; Peter Ullrich and Reiner Keller 7. Culture and Movement Strength from a Quantitative Perspective: A Partial Theory; Jochen Roose PART III: INTERNAL MOVEMENT CULTURE 8. Movement Space: A Cultural Approach; Priska Daphi 9. Movement Culture as Habit(us): Resistance to Change in the Routinized Practices of Resistance; Cristina Flesher Fominaya 10. Memory and Culture in Social Movements; Nicole Doerr 11. Embodying Protest: Culture and Performance within Social Movements; Jeffrey Juris PART IV: IMPACT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ON CULTURE 12. Moving Culture: Transnational Social Movement Organisations as Translators in a Diffusion Cycle; Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak 13. Memory Battles over May '68: Interpretative Struggles as Cultural Re-Play of Social Movements; Erik Neveu

About the Author :
Britta Baumgarten is a Research Fellow at CIES, Lisbon, Portugal. Her research interests include social movements, civil society and political participation, especially in Portugal and Brazil. Priska Daphi is a Research Fellow at Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt/Main, Germany. She is a founding member of the Institute for Protest and Social Movement Studies in Berlin. Peter Ullrich is a Research Associate at Technische Universitat Berlin, Germany. His recent publications include Prevent and Tame: Protest under (Self)Control.

Review :
"A valuable and timely contribution. The authors and editors of this terrific volume provide the tools for figuring out how culture matters to movements with a useful conceptual framework and case studies chock-full of theoretical insights." - Francesca Polletta, University of California, Irvine, US "In line with the more general cultural turn in the social sciences, this state-of-the-art collection of essays and analyses provides stimulating ideas and insights into theoretical, methodological, and empirical aspects of culture in social movements. It is a must for both curious newcomers and experienced scholars working in this field." - Dieter Rucht, Free University Berlin and WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany