5 May 2011

An Invitation to Join the European Social Movements Research Network

This is to invite you to join a newly-formed European Social Movements Research Network organized under the auspices of the Council for European Studies at Columbia University. Potential participants are broadly defined as anyone researching social movements in European countries, east or west, including of course transnational, comparative and historical work. Please note that the network is open to researchers from anywhere in the world who study social movements in Europe, from a range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. The network is multilingual as far as scholarly work goes although we expect that administrative / coordinating discussions will be through English.

Council for European Studies European Social Movements Research Network
A new international multidisciplinary research network has been established under the rubric of the Council for European Studies (at Columbia University) on European Social Movements.

While active citizenship and popular protest have been a perennial theme of European societies, European civil society has come in recent decades to have an increasingly transnational character, accelerating with the development of new social movements such as environmentalism and second-wave feminism, the fall of the Berlin wall, the rise of new right-wing movements and current unrest over economic crises from Greece to Iceland.

The CES Social Movements Research Network aims to bring together scholars and graduate students located around the world and working within a multiplicity of disciplines to study the themes of social movements, civil society, popular protest, active citizenship, NGOs, and contentious politics in Europe, as well as the ways in which social movements interact with spheres such as the media, culture and memory, democratic institutions and policing, etc. and the longer-term outcomes of social movements both positive and negative.

While it welcomes scholars whose primary focus is national, regional or local, it also supports and encourages comparative and cross-national work, studies of transnational movements and those engaging with European institutions, as well as historical work on earlier generations of European social movements.

The main goals of the research network are to build a network of scholars from a range of disciplines and career stages in order to foster collaborative and comparative work; to organize themed workshops and panels at conferences on areas of common interest; to develop work for joint publishing projects; to create webspace for working papers and dissemination initiatives; to provide an arena for the fruitful collaboration between scholars from different institutions and at different career stages; and to support the contribution of scholarship to processes of active citizenship at all levels in the democratic process.

Our launch activities are:

– Networking lunch at CES Barcelona conference of Europeanists (June 20 – 22)
– Online networking webspace for network participants
– CFP for book proposal “The European social movement experience”
– A directory of members’ research interests, working languages, publications etc.

Details for all of these will follow in due course.
You can see the link to the CES network site here :
http://www.ces.columbia.edu/research/research.html

If you are a scholar working in the area of European Social Movements and would like to be a part of this network, please send the following information to laurence.cox@nuim.ie:

Name
Academic affiliation (please include department / institute)
Email
Research homepage, if any
Research interests
Working languages
Details of up to three recent publications (with links if available online)

We will then send you an invitation to join the network.

– Networking lunch at CES Barcelona conference of Europeanists (June 20 – 22)

Please let Cristina Flesher Fominaya c.flesher@abdn.ac.uk know as soon as possible if you are coming to the Barcelona conference and would like to participate in the networking lunch. The dates for the conference are June 20-22, we do not have the exact date for the lunch yet.

Cristina Flesher Fominaya, University of Aberdeen
Laurence Cox, National University Ireland, Maynooth
Founding co-chairs, CES European Social Movements Research Network
Department of Sociology
National University of Ireland Maynooth
Co. Kildare, Republic of Ireland

Interface: a journal for and about social movements http://www.interfacejournal.net
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Beyond the crisis: global justice, equality, social movements seminar http://ceesa-ma.blogspot.com/2011/03/beyond-crisis-global-justice-equality.html
The Norwegian oil experience: a toolbox for managing resources? http://tinyurl.com/norwegianoil