Call for contributions – Organised in joint cooperation between the Institute for Social Movements (ISB) in Bochum, the Institute for Protest and Social Movement Research (IPB) in Berlin and the ISA’s Research Committee on Social Classes and Social Movements (RC47), the international conference on cross-movement mobilisation aims to bring together experts and early-career scientists to promote a research area that is highly relevant for social movement studies and for society as a whole, and which has not received sufficient attention in current scholarship. The conference will be held on April 5-7, 2017,  at Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany).

Please provide an abstract (250 words) including the name of the preferred panel no later than  1st of October 1, 2016 and send it to: cross-movement-mobilization@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Please, indicate if you need travel funding assistance as some travel grants will be available. If you have questions about the individual panels please contact the session organizers directly.

Visit the conference website.

Selected papers will be published in a special issue on cross-movement mobilization in the journal “moving the social”. This special issue has already been confirmed and scheduled. In addition, shorter contributions can be published on the blogs “Protest und Bewegungsforschung” and “openDemocracy”.

The international conference aims to provide a platform to present and discuss research on the conditions under which movement alliances evolve, on the success and failure of cross-movement mobilisations at different levels – from local to global – as well as on various topics such as ecology, labor, economy, and urbanization. The conference will bring together fields of research in sociology, political sciences, and history. Particular prominence will be given to social movement studies, industrial relations, international relations, political economy, and social history, in order to sharpen our understanding of internal modes of cooperation, tensions, synergies, and effects of interaction in cross-movement mobilization.

Among the different sessions:

Session I – Joint actions against the radical right

There has been a recent increase in cross-movement mobilization against radical right wing groups in Europe and beyond. One of the movements which have become increasingly active is the labor movement, and this panel is interested in how labor movements in different countries mobilize, cooperate and build alliances with other movements in order to fight the growth of radical right activism. Which kinds of strategies are used in such cross-movement mobilizations? Which kinds of movements are the labor movement cooperating with? What are the political and movement related consequences of these kinds of mobilizations? How does the counter-mobilization of the radical right influence the sustainability of such cross-movement cooperation?

Session organizers: Jenny Jansson & Katrin Uba, (Department of Government, Uppsala University, Sweden)

Session II – Engaging difference – Lessons from Cross-Movement mobilisations in Latin America

In the last decades, social mobilization in Latin America has been transformed as with the increasing politicization of diversity: from the Zapatista uprising to the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounters and the World Social Forum, building cross-movement alliances has been at the forefront of mobilization strategies and internal reflections for social movements in Latin America. Recognizing the knowledge and valuing the experiences of marginalized communities has been a central concern not only for decolonial approaches in academia, but also for indigenous, afro-Latin, women’s, and peasant movements. Popular education approaches and feminist pedagogies have needed to rethink the revolutionary subject their approaches are directed at and are continuously reformed to fit contemporary Latin American realities. This panel focuses on movement experiences with cross-movement mobilization in Latin America. Its particular focus are the experiences, knowledges, and practices of emancipatory social movements striving to challenge Latin American coloniality. The panel asks: How does cross-movement mobilization play out in Latin America? What role do popular education methodologies and feminist approaches play in the alliance-building approaches between heterogeneous social movements? How are actors from the global North implicated in these processes? 

Session organizers: Johanna Leinius (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/ipb), Eva Kalny (University of Hannover) & Marco Antonio Teixeira (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Session IV – Protest Waves or Cross-Movement Mobilisations?

Social movements interact in various ways. They can develop in direct response to other movements, as counter-movements, or as competing movements in the same issue area – the idea of movement sectors and movement industries draws on this notion. Movements in one country can also influence the development of movements in other countries – leading to weak or strong forms of transnationalization of protest. They can also replace earlier movements as successors after an earlier movement has de facto dissolved – as expressed in the concept of separate waves of one movement. And they can also interact more indirectly, building on an increased willingness to protest created by other movements – an idea that lies behind the more general notion of protest waves. In this panel we invite empirical studies and theoretical papers that explicitly address these forms of interaction between different movements. A special focus shall be placed on interactions between movements addressing different issues.

Session organizer: Sebastian Haunss (Universität Bremen) & Jochen Roose (Universität Wrocław)

For a full description of the 20 sessions, see the following website.  Further information on the workshop groups of the Institute for Protest and Social Movement Research (IPB), and how to become a member visit this website.

Conference organisers

Sabrina Zajak 

Giulia Gortanutti 

Johanna Lauber 

Ana-Maria Nikolas

Conference Committee

Dr. Britta Baumgarten, Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology, University Institute of Lisbon (CIES-IUL), Portugal (IPB) 

Prof Dr. Stefan Berger, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany (ISB) 

Prof Dr. Marissa Brookes, University of California, Riverside, USA 

Dr. Priska Daphi, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Germany (IPB&ISA47) 

Prof. Dr. Donatella della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy (IPB) 

Prof. Dr. Margit Mayer, Freie University Berlin (IPB) 

Prof. Dr. Ilse Lenz, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany (ISB) 

Prof. Dr. Geoffrey Pleyers, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium (ISA47) 

Prof. Dr. Britta Rehder, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany (ISB) 

Prof. Dr. Dieter Rucht, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Germany (IPB) 

Prof. Dr. Maria Kousis, University of Crete, Greece 

Prof. Dr. Sabrina Zajak, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany (ISB&IPB) 

Prof. Dr. Jochen Roose, Willy Brandt Zentrum Wrocław (Breslau) , Universität Wrocław (IPB)