Call for papers – Mobilization: An international quarterly

Call for papers
Special Issue
Mobilization: An international quarterly

Methods in movement: New approaches to investigating collective action processes

Guest Editors: Lorenzo Bosi, Olivier Fillieule and Stefan Malthaner

Collective action – including protest movements, squatting, political violence, strikes, online political activism, and other forms of political contention – is an inherently dynamic phenomenon. It unfolds in complex interactions, shaped by strategy, conjuncture, and contingency, it is situated within particular historic moments, in social time and space, and intertwined with activists’ biographical paths. Processual perspectives seek to capture this reality in movement, directly observing the processes in action or reconstructing them to explain how sequences of events unfold over time.

Processual research has gained considerable momentum in recent decades in the broader field of contentious politics. However, process-oriented methodologies have not advanced to the same extent. This special issue addresses the “methodological gap” between process-oriented theory and empirical practice. In light of this gap, we invite researchers to push beyond the current state of knowledge, by developing innovative process-oriented methodological approaches and research practices capable of capturing the dynamics of collective action. This special issue aims to foreground the methodological challenges of studying social processes, with particular attention to how process-generated data can be collected, analysed, and interpreted.

Building on these considerations, this special issue asks: how can we methodologically investigate the dynamics of collective action over time? We invite manuscripts from sociology, political science, social psychology, and anthropology that move beyond cross-sectional «snapshots». We are particularly interested in papers that utilize innovative research methodologies that bridge the gap between high-level theory and empirical application, develop process-oriented research on the past or the present, expand existing approaches and research practices, combine different types of methods and data, and/or link different levels of analysis.

While this special issue does not aim at narrowing the debate to any particular methodology, we appreciate contributions that build on mix-method approaches. Theoretically informed empirical analyses that prioritize methodological advancement and the practical handling of process-produced data will be preferred. All submission will undergo a rigorous double-blind peer review process.