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

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Methodological Challenges in Social Movements Research

RC48 Social Movements, Collective Actions and Social Change (host committee)

Language: English

This session will focus on analysing the relationship between empirical work and theoretical ideas in studying contemporary social movements (Klandermans and Staggenborg, 2002). Following the most recent tendencies of conceptualizing social movements, one of the aims of the session is to debate actual trends in constructing and designing research questions in order to address the social movements’ research field. As Della Porta (2014) argues, no methodological struggle between qualitative and quantitative scholars is recorded researching the integration of different methods and methodological practices. 
However, every methodological choice has to intervene with ontological, normative and theoretical positions, dealing with methodological debates and finding new trends to overcome opposite positions. We invite to present theoretically driven or empirically grounded papers addressing the following main topics, among others:

• New conceptual and theoretical thinking about methods and methodological techniques in studying social movements; 
• Methodological reflections about new approaches and practices; 
• Empirical research addressing new methodological approaches, but also about the use of old/traditional methods in the analysis of new collective spaces.

Posters: