The Many Impacts of Social Movements:
Fifty Years after William Gamson’s The Strategy of Social Protest
CBSM Mini-Conference at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management
Wieboldt Hall, 339 E Chicago Street Chicago, IL, 60611, on August 7 and 8, 2025 (click HERE to register)
Initially, most social movement research concerned what drove mobilization and why people participated in social movements. William Gamson’s 1975 work stood out in seeking to address whether social movements were able to gain influence and why. Although slow to take this lead, scholars over the last quarter century have turned attention to the potential influence of social movements and their actions over a variety of important social outcomes. Early work concerned movements’ political and policy influence, but since then, research has expanded to other potential sites of impact. These include social movements’ influence on nonpolitical institutions, such as business, medicine, science, religion, education, the police, and the military, movements’ cultural impacts on public discourse, media, collective memory, public opinion, and art, movements’ influence on other movements, including on broader tactical repertoires, and on movement participants’ later activism.
To take stock of these advances and highlight new research, the Collective Behavior and Social Movements (CBSM) section of the American Sociological Association is holding a mini-conference at the downtown campus of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, Illinois, on August 7 and 8, 2025 – the two days immediately prior to opening of the American Sociological Association’s national meeting in Chicago. (The CBSM section day is the first day of the conference.) Centered on the many kinds of influence that social movements have had and what drives that influence, the workshop will be organized into plenary sessions, thematic sessions, and roundtables.
Among the plenary speakers will be Aldon Morris, Francesca Polletta, Steven Epstein, Myra Marx Ferree, Kenneth Andrews, Donatella Della Porta, and Brayden King. There will be a question-and-answer session with editors of several journals, including Mobilization, Social Movement Studies, Social Science Computer Review, and Science Advances, as well as series editors from Cambridge University Press and Amsterdam University Press. The paper sessions will include panels on the impacts of movements on politics and policy, on non-political institutions, on news and social media, on entertainment media and art, on collective memory, on collective identity, on activist biographies, in authoritarian polities, and in China and Hong Kong. Other panels include ones focused on strategy, methods, revolutions and rebellions, and the impacts of gender-based movements, right-wing movements, and Black Lives Matter.
The mini-conference is being sponsored in part by Northwestern University and the University of California-Irvine Jack W. Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy.
SCHEDULE
Thursday, August 7
8:00 – 9:00 am: Check in, Coffee
9:00 – 10:30 am: Plenary session 1, Room 147
Edwin Amenta, University of California, Irvine, “Introduction: The Many Impacts of Social Movements”
Donatella della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore, “Gaining Momentum: Time Intensification as Protest Outcome”
Aldon D. Morris, Northwestern University, “Reflections on the Civil Rights Movement: From Martin Luther King, Jr. to Donald J. Trump”
10:30 – 10:40 am: Break
10:40 am – 12:20 pm: Concurrent Panel Sessions
Social Movements’ Strategies I
Presider/Discussant: James M. Jasper, City University of New York
Room 105
| Jonathan Smucker, University of California, Berkeley | Alienated or Rational? An Integrated, ‘Neoclassical’ Approach to Occupy Wall Street |
| Tom Einhorn, University of British Columbia | How Master Frames Bridge Protest Cycles |
| Rajkamal Singh, New York University | How the Divided Organize Collectively: The Paradoxical Effects of Mobilizing Structural Networks on Coalition Formation |
| Alice Mattoni, University of Bologna | Activists’ Digital Strategic Capacities and Social Movement Outcomes |
Movement Impacts on Art and Entertainment Media
Presider/Discussant: Francesca Polletta, University of California, Irvine
Room 109
| Levi Mitzen, Florida State University | Rage For the Machine: MAGA Hip Hop and Negotiating the Populist Master Frame |
| Danial Vahabli, Stonybrook University | Mentioning the Unmentionable: Perception of Opportunities, Agency, Emotions, and Identity in Iranian Resistance Rap Prior and During the Women, Life, Freedom Uprisings |
| Julia Dessauer, Indiana University | Cancellations and Comebacks: Sexual Harassment Accusations and Career Trajectories in the Entertainment Industry |
| Celine Liao, University of Washington | Movie Screening Groups as Cinematic Counterpublic: The Making of the Feminist Movie Era in China |
Movement Impacts on Non-Political Institutions
Presider/Discussant: Brayden G. King, Northwestern University
Room 348
| Jesse Yeh, Northwestern University | Intersectional Backlash: Gender, Race, and School Politics |
| Matthew Baggetta, Brad R. Fulton, and Julie A. Beasley, Indiana University | A Nation of Organizers or Mobilizers?: How Social Movements Influence the Collective Action Practices of Everyday Institutions |
| Saber Khani, Boston College | From Fields to Streets: Oil Industry and Petro Protests |
| Oscar Bueno, University of Texas, El Paso | Alternative Economies and Artistic Resistance in the Borderlands: Market and Cultural Practices in the Juárez–El Paso Region. |
Movement Influence and Research Methods
Presider/Discussant: Jennifer Earl, University of Delaware
Room 309
| Weijun Yuan and Edwin Amenta, University of California, Irvine, and Neal Caren, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | How to Code Texts with Generative Large Language Models: Analyzing the News of Social Movement Organizations |
| Tina Law, University of California, Davis | Mired in Multivalence: Municipal Liability and the Post-1960s City |
| Edmund Cheng, University of Hong Kong | Do Conspiracy Theories Drive Collective Action? Cross-national Evidence from LLM Models and Experimental Analysis |
12:20-1:20: Lunch [Room TBA]
1:20-3:00: Concurrent Panel Sessions
Media, Movements, and Strategic Shifts
Presider/Discussant: Pamela Oliver, University of Wisconsin
Room 107
Deana A. Rohlinger, Florida State University | The Death of the Mainstream SMO? Curating Conservatives in The Attention Economy |
Maxwell Roberts, University of California, Irvine | Breaking Bad News: How Conservative and Right-wing Media Manage Coverage of Extremist-Right Movements’ |
Danial Vahabli, Stony Brook University | Digital Boomerangs: Pitfalls of Transnational Advocacy and Affordable Alternatives in the Global South |
Braxton Brewington, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Quadruple B: How Leftist Social Movements Interact with Media |
Social Media, Platforms, and Political Participation
Presider/Discussant: Neal Caren, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Room 309
| Devo Probol, University of Pennsylvania | Power to the Players: Digital Activism and Rethinking the Stages of a Social Movement |
| YJ Chae, Rutgers University | From Grievances to Threats: Family Change, Fathers’ Grievances, and Threat-Making in Men’s Rights Movement |
| Yi-Cheng/Ken Hsieh, McGill University | Mapping Disruption: How the Media Perceive and Rank Protest Tactics |
| Levi Mitzen, Grant William Bailey, Kyle Rose, Yuki Maynor, Deana A. Rohlinger, and E. Ashby Plant, Florida State University | Is Social Media Really to Blame? Young Adults, News Media, and Political and Civic Engagement. |
Impacts of Progressive Movements, Gender Politics
Presider/Discussant: David S. Meyer, University of California, Irvine
Room 109
| Alejandro Márquez, University of South Florida | Deter-care Chain: How the State Creates, and the Immigrant Rights Movement Addresses, the Migrant Care Crisis on the US-Mexico Border |
| Jo Reger, Oakland Univerity and Suzanne Staggenborg, University of Pittsburgh | Processes of Emergence and Submergence in the US Women’s Movement |
| Roberta S. Pamplona, University of Toronto | Defending Feminism Through Intersectionality: Feminist Strategies Amid Right-Wing Movements in Brazil |
| Kristopher Velasco, Princeton University | The Logics of Queer Justice: Disaggregating Transnational Pathways for Recognizing Homosexual, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity-Based Rights |
Rebellions & Revolutions
Presider/Discussant: Jeff Goodwin, New York University
Room 105
| Samson Yuen, Hong Kong Baptist University | The Age of Mass Revolutions |
| Gilad Wenig, University of California, Los Angeles and Neil Ketchley, University of Oxford | Staffing the Revolutionary State |
| Tina Law, University of California, Davis | Defining Riots: The Racialized Origins and Evolution of “Riot” as an American Legal Concept, 1901-2021 |
| Sean Terence Boylan, Purdue University | Political Polarization and Violence in the US |
Movement Impacts on Politics and Policy I
Presider/Discussant: Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur, Rhode Island College
Room 348
| Jeffrey Broadbent, University of Minnesota | How Social Movements Affect Policy Outcomes: Political Process as Complex Dynamical System |
| Luis Rubén González Márquez, University of California, Merced | Beyond Success or Failure: Hegemony and the Direct Political Effects of Contention Campaigns Against Renewable Energy Megaprojects |
| Katrin Uba and Jenny Jansson, Uppsala University | A Threat to Protest as a Winning Strategy? The Experience of the Swedish Labour Movement |
| Yaniv Ron-el, University of Chicago | Successes and Failures in Social Movements: Toward a Theoretical Agenda |
| Arman Azedi and Dana Fisher, American University | Palestine Advocates in the Liberal-Progressive Activist Universe |
3:00 – 3:15 pm: Break
3:15 – 4:45 pm: Plenary 2, Room 147
Steven Epstein, Northwestern University, “Cultural Authority and Lay Expertise: How Social Movements are Transforming Health and Biomedicine”
Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin, “Political Demography and Political Identity”
Kenneth T. Andrews, Washington University in St. Louis, Neal Caren, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Rashawn Ray, University of Maryland, “The Paradox of Reform: Protests, Policies, and Police Killings in America”
Friday, August 8
8:30 – 9:00 am: Coffee, Breakfast
9:00 – 10:30 am: Plenary session 1 Room 147
Meet the Editors: Neal Caren (Mobilization), Katrin Uba (Social Movement Studies), Jennifer Earl (Science Advances), Deana Rohlinger (Social Science Computer Review), David Meyer (Cambridge U. Press), and James Jasper (Oxford U. Press, Amsterdam U. Press). Moderated by Braxton Brewington, University of North Carolina.
*This session will allow conference members the opportunity to ask questions and learn more about the publishing process.
10:30-10:40: Break
10:40 am – 12:20 pm: Concurrent Panel Sessions
Social Movements’ Impacts in Mainland China and Hong Kong
Presider/Discussant: Lynette Ong, University of Toronto, and Samson Yuen, Hong Kong Baptist University
Room 309
| Jeff T. Sheng, St. Mary’s University | The Double-Edged Sword of Anonymity: Repression and Resistance After the 2019-2020 Hong Kong Protests |
| Samson Yuen, Hong Kong Baptist University | Regulating Violence from within: Internal Brakes in a Leaderless Movement |
| David Xu, University of California, Berkeley | The Platform of Contention: How Platform Algorithms Spark Militant Strikes in China’s Gig Economy |
| Lynette Ong, University of Toronto | The Secret Police Among Us: Diverging Instruments of Mass Repression in China and the Soviet Union |
Movement Impacts on Collective Memory
Presider/Discussant: Hajar Yazdiha, University of Southern California
Room 348
| David Cunningham, Washington University in St. Louis | Contesting Confederate Memory: Removed Monuments and Racialized Inequality in the Contemporary U.S. South |
| Matt Coetzee, University of Notre Dame | Contingent Memory Activation and Civil Repair: Collective Memory and Crisis Response in Post-Apartheid South Africa |
| Nancy Whittier, Smith College | “Has it Ever Been This Bad Before?” Collective Movement Memory as an Outcome of and Contributor to Mobilization |
| Ellen Berrey, University of Toronto, Caleb Dawson, University of California, Merced, Kendal Kandasamy, University of Toronto, Alex Hanna, Distributed AI Research Institute | Campus Challenges to Racist Memorials and University Administrations’ Responses in the United States and Canada in the 2010s |
| Jaleh Jalili, Rice University | Politics of Mourning: Gravestones as Cultural Objects of Social Movements |
Movement Impacts on Politics and Policy II
Presider/Discussant: Edwin Amenta, University of California, Irvine
Room 105
| Katrin Uba, Uppsala University and Cassandra Engeman, Stockholm University | Do Protests Matter for Court Decisions? Environmental Justice and Social Movements In Sweden |
| Paul Almeida, University of California, Merced | The Three Trajectories of Climate Action |
| Catharina O’Donnell, Harvard University | How Movements Shape Political Party Organizations from the Inside |
| Jordan Banick, Independent Scholar; Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur, Rhode Island College; Robert W. Widell, Jr., University of Rhode Island | Looking Back, Looking Forward: Launching the Project, Sharing Our Memories |
Biographical Impacts of Movements
Presider/Discussant: Marco Giugni, University of Geneva, and Chandra Russo, Colgate University
Room 107
| Matthew Borus, Binghamton University | The Impact of Disruptive Protest on Protesters Themselves: A Case Study |
| Marco Giugni, University of Geneva, and Maria Grasso, Queen Mary University of London | The Short-Term Biographical Consequences of Youth Political Participation |
| Ye Joon Lee, Northwestern University | Civic Engagement & Entrepreneurship |
| Chandra Russo, Colgate University | “I Am Of and From Here”: The Biographical Impacts of Antiracist Organizing in the Poor White US South |
Media Coverage and Legitimacy
Presider/Discussant: Deana A. Rohlinger, Florida State University
Room 109
| Jozie Nummi and Amorette Young, Purdue University | Beyond the News: Social Media and the Struggle for Protest Legitimacy. |
| Yao Li and Huixuan Wu, Florida State University | Disaggregating Media Framing: Advancing Media-Movement Studies Using Network Clustering |
| Pamela Oliver, Chaeyoon Lim, Anna Milewski, Erin Gaede University of Wisconsin | News Coverage by and for Whom? Comparing Coverage of Black Protests in Mainstream Newswires and Local and Nonlocal Black Newspapers |
| Didem Türkoğlu, Kadir Has University | Student Protests, Social Media, and Illiberal Political Change: A Case Study of Turkey |
| Neal Caren, Braxton Brewington, Marty Kennedy, University of North Carolina | Insert Quote Here: Selective Modulation in Protest Coverage |
12:20 – 1:20 pm: Lunch
1:20 – 3:00 pm: Concurrent Panel Sessions
Reforming Authoritarian Polities
Presider/Discussant: Dana Moss, University of Notre Dame
Room 107
| Saber Khani and Mohammed Ali Kadivar, Boston College | Compliance on Campus |
| Nader Andrawos, Harvard University | Prison as Public Schooling and Public Life: Imprisonment as Ethical Formation within Social |
| Sarah Hernandez, New College of Florida | Is Resistance Futile? [about being faculty at Florida college] |
| Defne Over, Texas A&M University | Sustaining Resistance: Collective Memory, Emotions, and Democratic Mass Mobilization in Turkey |
The Impacts of Black Lives Matter
Presider/Discussant: Kenneth T. Andrews, Washington University in St. Louis
Room 109
| Anna DalCortivo, University of Minnesota | The Five Assumptions: Police Abolition and Community-Based Justice Approaches at George Floyd Square.” |
| Pierce Greenberg, Thomas V. Maher, Rhys Hester, and Kylah Rainey, Clemson University | Do Protests Influence Racial Disparities in Criminal Sentencing? Investigating the Impact of the George Floyd Protests on Sentencing Outcomes |
| Jaleh Jalili, Rice Univeristy | Movements, Urban Contexts, and Place-based Identities: The Case of Black Lives Matter Protests in Portland |
| Sarah Gaby and Firdaous Sbai, University of North Carolina, Wilmington | The Long Shadow of History: Historical Contextualization of Movement Outcomes |
Movement Impacts on Collective Identity
Presider/Discussant: Ann Mische, University of Notre Dame
Room 105
Eunchong Cho, University of California, San Diego | Rethinking Youth Movements: Expanding Mannheim’s Generation Theory for Youth Identity Movements |
Youbin Kang, Cornell University | Between the TV and the Barricade: Dramaturgy and Recognition Politics in Subway Strikes |
Nathan Tsang, University of Southern California | Doing Politics Nonpolitically: Explaining How Cultural Projects Afford Diasporic Identity |
Jeff Sheng, St. Mary’s University | Online Affordances for Collective Identity in Social Movements for LGBT Military Inclusion |
Social Movements’ Strategies II–
Presider/Discussant: Kristen Miller, City University of New York
Room 309
Marcel Paret, University of Utah, and Zachary Levenson, Florida International University | Blackness as Movement Strategy |
Yeryeng Choi, University of California, Irvine | How Activists Carry On: The Two Sides of Group Ties and the Role of Coercive Emotions |
Jeff L. Feng, Northwestern University | The Shame and Disappointment of Environmental Justice Movements |
Gavin Riley, Vanderbilt University | Lavender or Beige?: How the Human Rights Campaign Strategically Frames Gay Identity |
Right Movement Influence
Presider/Discussant: Rory McVeigh, University of Notre Dame
Room 348
| Esther Hernández-Medina, Pomona College | The Anti-gender and Anti-LGTBQ Right-Wing Backlash in the Dominican Republic |
| Levi Mitzen et al., Florida State University | Influencing Regret: Global Anti-Feminism and Mobilizing Feelings of Regret Using Social Media. |
| Adam Burston, The Ohio State University | Hegemonic Diversity: How Right-Wing Activists from Marginalized Backgrounds Interpret Their Movements’ Past and Shape Its Future |
| Didem Türkoğlu, Kadir Has University | Far-Right Movement Parties and Higher Education Policy |
| Eitan Alimi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem | Making Relational Sense of the Settlement Movement’s Success |
3 – 3:15 pm: Break
3:15 – 4:45 pm: Plenary 2: Room 147
Brayden G. King, Northwestern University, Protests, Power, and Influence: Movements’ Transformational Potential
Francesca Polletta, University of California, Irvine, When Social Movements Change Common Sense
4:45 pm: Program Adjourns for the Day