The Internet as a Global/Local Site of Contestation: The Case of Iran

Social movement studies has become a minor, but familiar, field of academia, routinely included in general textbooks. This paper steps back from this situation to explore a wide history of ideas and an alternative, usage of phrase 'social movement', grounded in a broader awareness of historical possibility and a more dialectical sense of social development than contemporary 'social movement studies' usage. It then explores one way this figure of thought has been developed, in E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class . Here the alternative understanding is deployed to great effect, covering a wide range of historical phenomena, their interconnections and transformations. The paper uses this alternative understanding to think aspects of contemporary working-class self-organisation in Ireland. The author wants to provoke some discussion of whether as researchers or participants it is wise to allow the routine academic processes of field construction to define the limits of our own understanding. Keywords:E.P. Thompson; English working-class; Eppur Si Muove; social development; Social Movement

Although social movement studies have traditionally stressed conflict as a dynamic element in our societies, since the 1980s, research in democratic society has presented an image of an institutionalization of social movements. Since 1999, with the protest in Seattle against the WTO Millennium Round, this image has been however challenged by a new cycle of protest focusing on ‘alternative globalization’ and global justice. Beyond describing some forms of action that (through counter-summits and social forums) emerged in this cycle of protest, the article addresses the more general issue of conflict nowadays by considering the emergent character of protest itself. In social movement studies, protest has in fact been mainly considered as a ‘dependent variable’, and explained on the basis of political opportunities and organizational resources. The author suggests here a different approach, by looking at protests as eventful, in the sense of having relevant cognitive, affective and relational transformative impacts on the very movements that carry them out. Some forms of action or specific campaigns have a particularly high degree of ‘eventfulness’. Through protest events, new tactics are experimented with, signals aBolit the possibility of collective action are sent, feelings of solidarity are created, organizational networks are consolidated, and sometimes public outrage at repression is developed. Data from interviews, surveys, focus groups and discourse analysis are used in order to reflect upon the mechanisms that make protest eventful. More in general, the article suggests that the contemporary sociological reflection on conflicts as producers of social capital, collective identity and knowledge, could be useful to balance the negative vision of conflicts as being disruptive of social relations, an analysis that can emerge from an exclusive focus on the most extreme forms of political violence.

The article seeks to critically examine the secure/normative family from the standpoint of one or more members entering the arena of social movements because this, in many ways, is seen as putting nation/society before the family. In this context, the article attempts to understand how two activists of a Marxist group called Magowa1 enter different spheres of social/collective action and negotiate duties/obligations of the familial in the process of critiquing the normative, recasting lived practices in the family or creating alternate support structures to the family. I hope to tease out the processes of restructuring or reorganising the private sphere that seem inevitable when one or more members of the family enter the arena of social movements. While drawing from the insights from family studies in India, and social movement studies, the article attempts to explore the lives of two activists from the group to map mainly the ‘failed’ or ‘successful’ journeys of the processes of restructuring the ‘private’. These complex journeys help us to arrive at an understanding that goes beyond framework that either suggests that social movements ‘established alternatives to the family’ or ‘simply reproduced normative families in personal lives’. They help us to look for more complex grey areas, thus widening the scope of both family studies and social movement studies.

ABSTRACTSocial movements seek to influence views on environmental issues and put pressure on policy-makers in a range of related areas. But alongside their specific goals, they also often strive to create space for genuine deliberation about the need for societal transformation. This ‘dual orientation’ places them theoretically between social movement studies’ focus on strategic considerations and the ‘sincere’ (truthful) communication envisioned by democratic theorists to be a condition for ‘authentic’ deliberation, in which actors genuinely seek to understand each other’s views. Engaging with both fields of theory, a framework is developed for separating actions that are strategic, sincere and employ sincerity as strategy. Actors choose sincerity as a strategy when they practice truthful reasoning as a means to advance their interests in the public sphere. As illustrated by green movements, the concept captures how activists may handle three risks in public discourse: commercialization, politicization and idealization.

Influenced by the new pneumonia epidemic and the progress of new media science and technology, people have new perceptions of the ways and channels to view artworks, and graduation design exhibitions have also begun to give rise to new forms, with university graduation design exhibitions appearing in two different field carrier forms, cloud-based online and offline traditional exhibitions, and forming their own advantageous path characteristics in the process of development and evolution. How to make the use of this new visual form of new media technology no longer float on the surface, so as to maximize the value and significance of its new media technology needs to be explored and considered by design workers.

Media Technologies for Work and Play in East Asia: Critical Perspectives on Japan and the Two Koreas examines work and play technologies in the three Northeast Asian countries by collecting ten essays on analogue and digital technologies such as pachinko, Pokėmon GO, esports, and televised nuclear testing. This book argues that the development and practices of media technologies have to be situated in the local contexts; therefore, Asia is neither an exception to nor a laggard to western technologies. To advance this argument, the first aim of the book is to use three approaches—political economy, cultural studies, and science and technology studies—to examine the complexity of media technologies. The second aim is to discuss how media technologies in Asia illustrate the peculiar geopolitical relations between Japan, South Korea, and North Korea as results of colonisation and independence, war and reconstruction, westernisation and indigenisation, as well as state-led development and globalisation. This volume bridges two groups of current literature: an examination of technological development in Japan and South Korea since the 1970s and the use of technologies in local contexts. In addition, it also enhances an understanding of how North Korean leaders and citizens use media technologies to connect themselves to the world.

Making an Impact: Cultural Studies, Media and Contemporary Work

This study was motivated by the lack of knowledge and skills of junior high school students in the city of Pontianak to design learning tools, in the form of lesson plans, student worksheets, assessments, and KIT media in science and social studies learning. The method used is the implementation of in-service in the form of training and mentoring in the development of inquiry learning tools using MGMP (teacher discussion activity)-based lesson study strategies. The results of the activity showed that the IbM program designed the inquiry learning tool for teachers who were members of the Science MGMP and the Social Sciences MGMP had achieved the expected goals, namely increasing the knowledge and skills of science and social studies teachers in designing inquiry learning tools. It is shown from the acquisition of the results of the response questionnaire and the output of the activities produced.

Navigating New Studies of Media and Technology Lisa Parks (bio) It is a pleasure to highlight a few books that have been especially insightful and helpful to my recent thinking, research, and teaching on global media technologies. Each of these books is so densely textured it is a great challenge to do them justice in just a few pages. Nevertheless, I shall try. The first is Brian Larkin's Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Trained as an anthropologist, Larkin has developed a richly researched study of media cultures in Nigeria. Equipped with language skills and a nuanced understanding of local Muslim religious practices and traditions, Larkin offers a vivid account of the emergence of modern Nigerian media infrastructures. Building on work by Simon Marvin and Stephen Graham, Saskia Sassen, and others, Larkin uses the concept of "infrastructure" as a rubric for understanding the macro- and micro-level operations that generate and sustain media cultures, focusing on the city of Kano. In Larkin's words, infrastructure refers to the "totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities."1 [End Page 191] Using a combination of ethnographic, discursive, and textual approaches, Larkin is careful to historicize this concept in relation to Nigeria's colonial experience. The book opens with a chapter called the "Colonial Sublime" that details the construction of bridges, roads, railroads, and later radio networks that tethered the colony to the British empire. Such technological campaigns were integral to the formation of a particular colonial subjectivity. As Larkin explains, "Railways, roads, and radio broadcasts were erected to bring into being a technologically mediated subject proud of his past but exposed to new ideas, open to the education, knowledge, and ideas traveling along this new architecture of communication."2 As the book unfolds, Larkin proceeds to investigate how this technologically mediated subjectivity has transformed along with Nigeria's changing political conditions. While the book's first half concentrates on colonial infrastructure, radio networks, and mobile film units that brought state newsreels to villages, the second investigates the rise of commercial cinema, video-film rental stores, and informal economies of piracy that have bloomed within postcolonial conditions. Attentive to the vicissitudes of power, Larkin notes that piracy "depends heavily on the flow of media from official, highly regulated forms of media trade, but then develops its own structures of reproduction and distribution external and internal to the state economy."3 Larkin's many strengths include abilities to conceptualize across different historical moments, different media and technological systems (radio, mobile film units, cinema, digital video) and different scholarly disciplines (such as anthropology, film and media studies, science and technology studies, African studies, and urban studies). Signal and Noise inspires new ways of thinking about what media technologies are, how they have emerged in different ways in different parts of the world, and how local and national Nigerian actors have contended with the forces of the global media economy. While Signal and Noise analyzes the modern mediascape of Nigeria, James Schwoch's Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946–69 offers another spin on global media, examining "the architects and carpenters of global television from the Cold War era." Global TV sets out "to show how global television was significantly shaped by the theory and practice of Cold War geopolitics."4 That television's globalization is intertwined with the history of global security is a fact often sidestepped in more cultural accounts of the medium's past. After immersing himself in so many archival collections (of various US presidents, the USIA, CIA, and the US State Department, etc.) Schwoch has acquired an insider-like understanding of global television's marriage to global security concerns. Schwoch's revelation that cold war tensions over various "extraterritorialities, or spaces beyond the traditionally understood borders and perimeters of nation-states" were formative to television's globalization guides his historical analysis.5 After the International Telecommunications Union resolved how to regulate the extraterritorial [End Page 192] space known as the electromagnetic spectrum, as Schwoch points out, cold war tensions persisted in relation to other extraterritorialies such as...

The topics of differential recruitment to activism and its longer-term impacts have generated substantial empirical research. Yet, the lack of longitudinal studies of movement participation have limited our understanding of individual activism’s dynamics over time. Here, we use six years of longitudinal survey data and two waves of interview data from a class of college students before, throughout, and after college to examine predictors of variation in college activism, the ebb and flow of activism over the course of college, and the effect of college activism on activism two years post-graduation. Our findings dispute one consistent empirical claim in social movement studies and confirm another. Counter to the scholarly finding on the weak impact of predisposition on recruitment, we find that predisposition powerfully predicts variation in college activism. Consistent with the claim that significant early activism is linked with future activism, we find that students’ activism at the end of college significantly predicts their engagement in activism after graduation.

The Handbook presents a most updated and comprehensive exploration of social movement research. It not only maps, but also expands the field of social movement studies, taking stock of recent developments in cognate areas of studies, within and beyond sociology and political science. While structured around traditional social movement concepts, each section combines the mapping of the state of the art with attempts to broaden our knowledge of social movements beyond classic theoretical agendas, and to identify the contribution that social movement studies can give to other fields of knowledge. The Handbook starts by presenting some of the main core theoretical perspectives in the field. A section exploring some of the major social transformations that have recently affected social movements is then followed by one devoted to the analysis of micro dynamics of collective action. At the meso-level, movements’ cultures, organizational models, and repertoires of action are covered. Finally, the last sections address the political and non-political opportunities for social movements’ development, as well as at social movements’ effects on their environment.

This article outlines how the critical theory of the Frankfurt School has influenced some key debates within social movement studies. The impact of Jürgen Habermas's sociology is widely acknowledged, especially with regards to our understanding of ‘new social movements’. There have however also been several lesser‐known attempts to bring the concerns of Theodor W. Adorno's negative dialectics and Herbert Marcuse's critique of one‐dimensional society to bear onto social movement research. For this reason it makes sense to outline the relevance of the ‘first generation’ members of the Frankfurt School – something that is often missing from the most authoritative overviews and textbooks on social movement theory. Presenting a body of literature that often appears as fragmented or only on the periphery of social movement theory in this way reveals a number of common themes, such as negation, refusal and co‐optation. To this end, the article provides a comprehensive theoretical overview of the multiple ways of how critical theory has made sense of social movements and argues that its concerns can be brought into a rewarding dialogue with contemporary social movement studies.

About the Contributors

This lively textbook integrates theory and methodology into the study of social movements, and includes contemporary case studies to engage students and encourage them to apply theories critically. A wide range of protest cases are explored, from American, European and global arenas, including contemporary examples of political violence and terrorism, alter-globalisation, social networking and global activism. Key chapter features encourage students to engage critically with the material: method points uncover the methodology behind the theories, helping students to understand the larger study of social movements; debate points highlight classic arguments in social movement studies, encouraging students to critically assess theoretical approaches; and case studies connect theories to cases, allowing students to relate key principles to real-world examples. A companion website offers additional student and instructor resources, including lecture slides and worksheets.

The purpose of the study is to analyze the views of the last century's philosophers and find out how they shaped the methodology of discourse analysis. The article examines ideas derived in poststructuralism, postmodernism and the Frankfurt School. The scientific novelty of the paper lies in the philosophical application of discourse studies, as well as singling out the interdisciplinary cooperation between humanities and social studies. As a result, the contribution of M. Foucault, J. Habermas and J. Derrida to the formation of the conceptual apparatus of critical discourse analysis is described; the main categories developed by the above-mentioned authors are summarized, allowing us to apply philosophical methodology to conduct a research of various issues emerging at the intersection of political science, linguistics, sociology, psychology, cultural studies.