Labour and Other Social Movements: Collective Elaboration and Collective Actions in the Evolution of the Modern Age

Tuesday, 8 July 2025: 13:00-14:45
Location: SJES023 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
RC47 Social Classes and Social Movements (host committee)
RC44 Labor Movements

Language: English

Social struggles are increasingly seen through the lenses of intersectional inequality, cultural diversity, multiple identities, and competing production of knowledge, ideas, ethical principles, with particular regard to the world system and environment. They also involve new interactions between labour and other social movements, raising new sociological questions about the nature of the struggles (Della Porta; Turner; Fairbrother).

The joint session aims to reflect on the different relationships, from coalitions to competition, between labour and other social movements, especially in the creation of knowledge and in the framing of social conflicts.

Movements try to counteract the dominant actors’ cultural orientations by alternative point views of modernity (Touraine), counter-movements to commodification (Polanyi), or even counter-hegemony (Gramsci).

These struggles are relevant in the academic and public debate (Burawoy) around key concepts, as just transition, digitalization, dignity of work, social justice, democracy and so on.

Labour and social movements try to produce their collective elaborations also in collaboration with the scientific community and mutual intersectional learning. This cultural production has an epistemological relevance to address the challenges of today’s social complexity (Morin).

This session will gather empirical and theoretical contributions, encouraging a multidisciplinary approach to the debate, with attention to the following questions.

How labour and social movements produce and share knowledge?

What are the practices, actors and methodologies?

What are the relations between collective elaborations and collective actions?

What is the role of the scientific community and, in particular, of sociology?

What are main opportunities, problems and struggles for knowledge and collective actions?

Session Organizers:
Daniele DI NUNZIO, Fondazione Giuseppe Di Vittorio, Italy and Guglielmo MEARDI, University of warwick, Italy
Chair:
Guglielmo MEARDI, University of warwick, Italy
Oral Presentations
Workers' Chains of Struggles: How Labour Protests Spread in Time and Space
Donatella DELLA PORTA, Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy; Marco ANTONELLI, Italy
Representation of “Marginalised” Migrant Workers: Unions, Social Movements and Other Actors
Marco BETTI, Italy; Guglielmo MEARDI, University of warwick, Italy; Marcello PEDACI, Università di Teramo, Italy
Labor's Melancholia: Worker Organizing in the Face of Death
Jamie MCCALLUM, Middlebury College, USA
New Strategies of Migrant Labour Movements
Grzegorz PIOTROWSKI, University of Gdańsk, Poland
Reconsidering Class Struggle in Everyday Life: Labour Protests and Mundane Resistance in Contemporary Russia
Alexandrina VANKE, Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian Federation