Mobilization Spring Update

Social Movement Scholar,

This is my final issue as editor of Mobilization. Since 2016, I’ve had a front-row seat to a decade of research on contentious politics, reading, thinking about, and occasionally losing sleep over the work that defines this field. It has been one of the best jobs in academia. I’ve had the chance to work with brilliant authors and generous reviewers, encounter movements I never would have studied otherwise, and watch the field evolve. I’m especially grateful to Hank Johnston for the opportunity, and to the editorial team, Maria Grasso, Marco Giugni, Deana Rohlinger, Liz Borland, and Kelsy Kretschmer, for making every issue better. Mobilization is a special journal: small enough that you know the community, serious enough that the work matters. I’m grateful to have been part of it.

The good news is that Catherine Corrigall-Brown (University of British Columbia) is taking over as editor-in-chief. Her work shows how participation evolves over time, and how movements endure by adapting, building coalitions, and giving people reasons to stay. Those are also the qualities that sustain a strong scholarly community, making her the ideal person to lead the journal.

I’m also excited about this summer’s Mobilization-SDSU Conference, “Rethinking Our Field: The Future of Social Movement Research,” June 22–23 at San Diego State University. If you haven’t been, participants often say it’s their favorite conference. Abstracts are due April 12. See mobilizationconference.sdsu.edu for details.

My final issue covers a lot of ground: movement narratives around Earth Day, everyday resistance among women leaders in India, identity in the anti-abortion movement, revolutionary dynamics in the Arab uprisings, what keeps protesters coming back after the crowds thin, and ideological debates within online extremism. Enjoy.

Neal Caren

Time to renew? Most subscriptions expired with the December issue. Mobilization has maintained affordable rates for over a decade, and your subscription includes four print issues, full online access to our archive, and, most importantly, support for independent, field-defining research in social movement studies. Renew or join today.

The newest articles in Mobilization

Inconvenient Truths: Earth Day Narratives of the U.S. Environmental Movement
Erik W. Johnson and Scott Frickel
How accurate are the foundational narratives that activists and scholars tell about Earth Day 1970? Johnson and Frickel unpack three interlocking claims: that Earth Day reoriented the movement from conservation to pollution, that it represented a surge of grassroots protest, and that it triggered a wave of federal environmental legislation. The analysis draws on longitudinal data on national environmental organizations (1962–1998), collective action events from the New York Times (1960–1995), and secondary historical sources to show that conservation organizations consistently outnumbered antipollution groups, that the environmental movement had the lowest proportion of protest events among contemporary movements, and that key legislation preceded Earth Day. The article reveals how movement narratives simplify history in ways that shape both activist strategy and scholarly accounts of contentious politics. Read the article.

Negotiating with Intersectional Consciousness: Women Leaders and the Everyday Politics of Advocacy in India
Soma Chaudhuri and Alison Colby
Chaudhuri and Colby introduce the concept of intersectional consciousness to explain how grassroots women leaders in Gujarat, India, strategically deploy intersecting identities of caste, religion, class, and gender during everyday advocacy. Based on 251 life history interviews with rural and urban activists, the study traces how leaders recognize their own intersectional positions as simultaneously privileged and disadvantaged, then mobilize or defer to others’ positionalities to minimize harm and maximize outcomes. In rural settings, intersectional consciousness operates as a survival and negotiation strategy shaped by entrenched caste hierarchies; in urban contexts, leaders use it to build institutional legitimacy and sustain collective claims. By foregrounding spatial variation and microlevel tactical repertoires, the article extends intersectionality from an analytical framework to an action-oriented praxis within social movement theory. Read the article.

“This Movement Is for Everyone”: Radical Inclusivity in the U.S. Anti-Abortion Movement After Dobbs
Gabrielle D. Beacken, Zelly Martin, Inga K. Trauthig, and Samuel C. Woolley
How do individuals whose identities conflict with a movement’s mainstream negotiate inclusion within it? Beacken, Martin, Trauthig, and Woolley extend the concept of heretical social movement organizations to heretical social movement individuals (HSMIs) within the post-Dobbs anti-abortion movement. Through participant observation and interviews with fifteen activists who identify as queer, progressive, or people of color, the analysis shows that HSMIs negotiate identity through three modes: transcendence, where anti-abortion identity supersedes all others; dueling, where competing identities generate tension and new factional spaces; and alignment, where marginalized identities are reframed as ideologically consistent with opposition to abortion. The study maps a continuum from identity moderation to outright refusal, advancing understanding of how movements evolve through internal heterogeneity. Read the article.

A Nested Framework for Understanding Revolutionary Situations: Tracing the Discursive and Material Dimensions of Transformative Events
Jannis Julien Grimm
Grimm develops an event-centric and discourse-sensitive framework for analyzing revolutionary situations that centers the interplay between discursive and material arenas of contention. The approach combines protest event analysis with discourse-theoretical methods to examine how specific events become catalysts for reconfiguring political antagonisms, affective solidarities, and collective claims. Three cases from Middle East and North Africa illustrate the framework: the 2011 Mohamed Mahmoud clashes in Egypt, the 2019 Lebanese Thawra, and the Khartoum sit-in massacre in Sudan. Each shows how the meanings actors construct around pivotal moments condition subsequent trajectories of mobilization and repression. This nested approach clarifies how revolutionary dynamics unfold through the co-constitution of physical interactions and symbolic struggles under conditions of radical uncertainty. Read the article.

Theorizing Initial and Sustained Protest Participation in Black Lives Matter: From Emotional Energy to Fictive Kinship
Mathis Ebbinghaus
Drawing on in-depth interviews with thirty-eight Movement for Black Lives activists in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Ebbinghaus examines why people join protests and what sustains their participation over time. The analysis reveals that initial participation following the killing of George Floyd was fueled by a three-part emotional process: sadness and anger at injustice, a quest for social solidarity intensified by pandemic isolation, and the emotional energy generated at protest sites. By contrast, sustained participation more than two years later was anchored in fictive kinship, the family-like bonds among committed activists that form through shared symbolic descent from the movement’s sacred figures and rituals. By distinguishing initial from sustained protest motives, the article identifies fictive kinship as a novel mechanism for explaining costly long-term collective action. Read the article.

Dissent Inside the Echo Chamber: Ideological Debate in the Online Incel Movement
Catharina O’Donnell and Eran Shor
Do online echo chambers suppress all debate? O’Donnell and Shor complicate this assumption through digital participant observation of the largest Incel forum, examining when and how ideological dissensus emerges within an extremist movement. Adapting Freeden’s core-periphery framework, the study shows that Incels enforce unanimity on their fatalistic “Black Pill” ideological core but debate three peripheral questions: the possibility of “ascending” from Inceldom, whether to expand membership, and the justifiability of violence. Consensus on essential principles, the authors argue, facilitates rather than forecloses disagreement on unresolved questions. The study specifies the conditions under which conformity and contestation coexist in digital political spaces, complicating portrayals of online extremist groups as ideologically homogeneous. Read the article.

New book reviews, edited by Kelsy Kretschmer, covering solidarity and labor precarity, democratic socialism and climate politics, state repression, crisis and activism, grassroots union organizing, marriage equality framing, and everyday immigrant resistance. In this issue:

• Paul Y. Chang reviews Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest by Jennifer Jihye Chun and Ju Hui Judy Han, which redefines what counts as success in collective action by documenting the “repertoires of solidarity” that sustain precarious labor activists through spectacular and often tragic protests in South Korea.

• David Purucker reviews Organize or Burn: How New York Socialists Fight for Climate Survival by Fabian Holt, which examines how the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America evolved into a “movement party” by combining electoral campaigns with street-level organizing around the Green New Deal.

• Antoine Durance reviews How States Repress: A Short History of the Power to Punish by Vanessa Codaccioni, which traces the evolution of state repression across three paradigms, from political to security to counterterrorism, showing how each expands the categories of populations targeted and shifts repressive authority away from the judiciary.

• Mona Khneisser reviews Crisiswork: Activist Lifeworlds and Bounded Futures in Lebanon by Yasemin İpek, which examines how middle-class activists in Lebanon turn to civil society participation as both ethical engagement and a vehicle for professionalization, revealing the contradictions of activism under conditions of chronic crisis.

• Devin Wiggs reviews We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big by Eric Blanc, which argues that grassroots worker-led organizing is more scalable than traditional union-staff models and documents how post-pandemic campaigns from Starbucks to Amazon have reshaped the American labor movement.

• Eric Swank reviews Framing Equality: The Politics of Gay Marriage Wars by Omar G. Encarnación, which compares the framing strategies of marriage-equality movements in Brazil, Spain, and the United States, arguing that moral frames were more effective than legal frames in advancing same-sex marriage.

• Maria De Jesus Mora reviews Everyday Activists: Undocumented Immigrants’ Quest for Justice and Well-Being by Christina M. Getrich, which documents how DACA recipients in the D.C. Metro region engage in everyday forms of resistance when direct collective action is foreclosed by legal precarity and the threat of deportation.