COSMOS SUMMER SCHOOL
UNDERSTANDING CONTENTIOUS POLITICS: THEORY AND PRACTICE OF SOCIAL MOVEMENT RESEARCH
Academic Year 2025/26
The Scuola Normale Superiore is organising for the academic year 2025/2026 – within the MERITA Project, the network for talent, with funding of the Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR) (NRRP, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan) a Summer school denominated:
“Understanding contentious politics: theory and practice of social movement research”.
The Summer school will focus on how to analyse present and past forms of grassroots participation activated by social movement actors at the local, regional and transnational level. More in general, it aims at disseminating knowledge on how to investigate processes and mechanisms that sustain mobilisation. Grassroots participation has been at the centre of the public and political debate in the last decade (covering a range of issues, from anti-austerity to climate, from feminist to solidarity with Palestine). Massive popular protests have deeply impacted national and global politics. The emergence of new protest movements requires scholars to reflect on the research strategies and methodologies that are employed to study grassroots participation. The summer school addresses this gap discussing how to apply the main theories and methods in the social sciences to investigate social and political mobilisation. The use of the following methods and techniques for social movement inquiry will be addressed: surveys, qualitative interviews, ethnographic participant observation, frame and discourse analysis, protest event analysis, social network analysis, participatory action research and historical methods. Ethical issues regarding every methodology will be address within the method lectures.
- The Summer school will be held in person from May 11th to May 15th 2026, at the Scuola Normale Superiore,
- Palazzone di Cortona (Arezzo, Tuscany), for a total of 35 hours.
- The official language of the Summer school is English.
- The Summer school will have a maximum of 20 participants.
