Methods In Question: Researching Social Movements and Collective Action between Conflict and Process

Method and theory advance together, or not at all: to ask how the study of social movements might move forward is already to ask about method. This panel takes method in that fuller sense and asks how to pursue it in turbulent times, when movements form, spread and dissolve faster than our research designs were built to follow.

Several questions follow. The first is the Weberian question of value-neutrality. Participatory and engaged approaches have made it pressing again, though not in a single direction: some read them as grounds for setting the ideal aside, others for defending it more carefully. A second concerns empathy. Some movements we defend, others we approach because we find them objectionable, and the understanding we owe to each is not the same. What does it require when its objects are this unequal, and where is its limit?

Others come from the context of action. Digital networks have changed what a movement is, and what it means to study one: the platform becomes a field site, the trace becomes data, the researcher inherits the reach and blind spots of the infrastructure. How do we study mobilization that is fast, unstable and transnational, without forcing it into frames built for steadier objects?

RC47 and RC48 have long worked this ground from overlapping angles; bringing them together widens the conversation. We welcome contributions treating method as a theoretical problem: engaged and public sociology, value-neutrality and its limits, empathy and interpretive understanding, and digital and networked research.