Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

549

Cultural Signification: Making Sense of Action in Social Movements

RC47 Social Classes and Social Movements (host committee)

Language: English

For many years, researchers have found that social movements contain cultural and psychological elements that guide actions in one way or another, leading eventually to movement mobilization. Cultural attributes, such as interpretation, emotion, collective identity, and frame, as they give meanings and signification to the action, work in participants’ engagement in the action.
While long recognized as indispensable for mobilization, these cultural components have also been regarded as the elements difficult to grasp; they are difficult to detect, observe, conceptualize, and generalize. We have come a long way to find frame and collective identity to work in a concrete movement setting. But we have to stop and think what else we have acquired as our common cultural languages. We know that emotions are important. But we are not sure if we have developed and conceptualized enough to bring emotion in our thought frame as a sound analytical concept. We are not sure further if these cultural languages can easily travel across researchers residing different continents, East and West and North and South. We may also have different methods and methodologies to detect and observe cultural components of action.
This proposed session aims at bringing together our cultural findings in social movement research. Proposing a new concept, new ways of doing research aiming at digging out cultural materials, rearranging current conceptualization, displaying a region/location-specific research method, etc, should help understand where we are, and which direction(s) we should move on from here. Posters: