Movement-relevant Theory: Rethinking Social Movement Scholarship and Activism

TLDR

American social movement scholarship has drifted from the realities of actual movements, and the recent surge in global justice activism creates a need for a new, relevance‑oriented direction that transcends competing theoretical camps while drawing useful insights from earlier work and engaging directly with participants. This paper seeks to chart the convergence of movement‑relevant scholarship by mapping the academic literature employed by movement actors and the analyses occurring within movements, with a particular focus on the global justice movement. The authors conduct a qualitative exploration of this convergence, identifying the scholarly works cited by participants and the internal analytical practices of movements, centering on the global justice movement.

Abstract

The dominant American social movement scholarship has become detached from the concerns of actual social movements. But the dramatic growth of social movement activity in recent years, especially the global justice movement, is creating the conditions for an emerging new direction in social movement scholarship which prioritizes the relevance of such work to the movements themselves. A problem in the current social movement literature is that the different schools of thought tend to overemphasize particular variables and pit them against one another. Rather than simply seeking to emphasize a different variable in the lifecycle of a social movement, a movement-relevant approach has the potential to transcend these schisms (such as structure versus culture). At the same time, this approach does not categorically reject earlier theoretical perspectives, but instead seeks to glean what is most useful for movements from these earlier works. Likewise, this emergent direction entails a dynamic engagement with the research and theorizing already being done by movement participants. In this paper, we explore this growing convergence of movement-relevant scholarship, identifying the academic work being used by movement participants as well as the analysis taking place within the movements themselves, with a particular focus on the global justice movement.