There is a growing recognition of the value of intergenerational relationship building in communities and social movements. However, what has not been recognized is the way that the generational segregation of social media use may affect efforts to build sustained and trusting intergenerational collaboration. Changing patterns of social media use figure prominently in discussions of contemporary culture. They are blamed for transformations in political life, including polarized debate and increased fear alongside more individualized forms of political expression. At the same time, social media is celebrated for allowing for rapid and accessible spread of ideas, new connections and innovative forms of expression. New platforms attract new users, and each generation has a distinctive relationship with particular platforms. Each platform has become identified with a particular generational demographic. Tiktok with Gen Z and Facebook, with Gen X and Boomers. Set in a context characterized by political fragmentation and rapid technological innovation, this project asks: in what ways is social media creating challenges for intergenerational collaboration within social movements?

This project will do a pilot study of an emergent social movement in order to develop a conceptual model to explain how social media affects intergenerational collaboration, to identify the mechanisms that facilitate and block intergenerational collaboration and to identify best practices for online organizing that supports intergenerational collaboration. Over a two year period, this project will share these findings in two co-authored conference papers, two peer reviewed journal articles, co-authored with graduate students, a webinar for not-for-proft organizations and the general public, and accompanying resource materials.

Month: Sep   Year: 2024

Month: Sep   Year: 2026

How best do we track the landscape of protest. This project evaluates the distinct picture generated via newspapers, social media and aggregators .

Month: Jun   Year: 2020

How does the perception of time affect social movement strategy? I am currently writing a book on this topic.

Month: Jul   Year: 2019

Peoples Global Action emerged as a decentralized network of grassroots social movements in 1997 in response to a call from Mexico’s EZLN for an ‘instrument of coordination’. It organized global conferences of movements, caravans and global days of action, with a peak of activity occurring between 1997-2005.
In order to understand the lessons does this internationalist model offer for contemporary movements, activists and scholar activists have been collecting the stories from this formation.
To date, 40 oral history interviews have been collected from organizers in Brazil, Bolivia, Ireland, India, the UK, Canada, US, Germany, Italy, Catalonia/Spain, Serbia, Switzerland. A digital archive will be made public in 2023.

Month: Jan   Year: 2015

An international journal for social movement activists and scholars.

The development and increased visibility of social movements in the last few years, has made it clear just how much knowledge movements generate. This knowledge is generated across the globe, and in many contexts and a variety of ways. We are activists from different movements and different countries, researchers working with movements, and progressive academics from various countries. We have been involved in many different projects to support and develop the recent knowledge generation processes around contemporary social movements. Through this work we have come to recognise how much we stand to learn from each other – from the specific experiences of movements, from the languages that have been developed within and around different movements, and from different places and times. The purpose of this journal is to learn from each other’s struggles: across movements and issues across continents and cultures across theoretical and disciplinary traditions. The journal will be a space for abstraction from and translation between movements. It will seek to develop analysis and knowledge by both movement participants and academics who are developing movement-relevant theory and research. The journal seeks to include material that can be used in concrete ways by movements. The material may do this through its content, but also through its language, purpose and form. We hope this process will allow generic lessons to be learned from specific movement processes and experiences. We hope to translate knowledge across and between different movement contexts. Movements have always generated knowledge, both internally and in alliance with other movements. We would like to continue the rich tradition already established by many activists, researchers and academics. It is the aim of this journal to add to and amplify the processes that already exist; the journal does not seek to substitute itself in any way for these already existing processes. Organisation Our vision is for a practitioner journal where activist and academic peers will review each other’s work as part of this process of translation. We will be seeking both formal research (qualitative and quantitative) and practically-grounded work on all aspects of social movements. We will be seeking work in a range of different formats, suited to the different voices speaking within the journal. These might range across (for example): conventional articles review essays facilitated discussions and interviews action notes teaching notes key documents and analysis book reviews …and beyond. Our focus in the editing process will be on bringing out and sharing the quality of each other’s knowledge from one movement to another. We will seek to assist authors to find ways of expressing their understanding, so that we all can be heard across geographical, social and political distances. The journal will be online, free, and multilingual, in order to make it as widely accessible as possible. Our hope is to have a number of semi-autonomous groups focussed in different regions of the world and on different languages. These groups would share a common vision and translate articles from and for each other, but with a wide degree of freedom in how they go about developing their own section of the journal.

A study of the changes to the policing of protest in Canada and the United States, 1995-2010