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, 340 E. Superior 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.
