Categories In Question: Concepts and Frameworks for Social Movements and Collective Action In Turbulent Times

Over recent decades the study of social movements has been inventive with its own language. The field has produced new concepts to keep pace with forms of action that earlier models did not anticipate, such as digital mobilization, or affective politics. The older vocabulary, though, has not gone away. Class, collective identity, historicité, contention and the rest remain in wide circulation, often working alongside the newer concepts rather than being replaced by them. This panel asks how the two layers relate. Which long-standing categories still earn their place? Which have been quietly reworked, and which now get in the way?

A second question concerns where these categories come from. Much of the conceptual apparatus of movement studies was built on the experience of movements in the global North, and it still carries that geography with it. We are interested in work that displaces the North as the field's default theoretical and spatial frame, and that asks what mobilizations elsewhere reveal about the reach and the limits of our concepts.

RC47 and RC48 bring two emphases to this discussion. One reads mobilization through social structure, conflict, class; the other follows the dynamics of collective action, identity, change. These are less rival accounts of the same thing than analyses of different aspects of it, and the panel is an occasion to make them speak to each other, and where possible work together.

We welcome theoretical and conceptual papers and critical assessments of established frameworks that put particular categories to the test.