Workshop: identity politics and social movements

Workshop: identity politics and social movements
Centre on Social Movement Studies, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence

27-28 October 2025

The politics of identity has become one of the most contested topics in contemporary political debate, especially in the Western world, with social movements often placed at the heart of contemporary polemics and conflicts. Conceptually, the politics of identity rose to prominence in social movements in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, often associated with the ‘New Left’. This led to the idea of ‘New Social Movements’ within the study of contentious politics (Kriesi, Melucci, Touraine). Although this terminology has since fallen out of favour (Calhoun 1993), the relationship between social movements and identity is as relevant as ever.

 One of the main difficulties of studying identity-based politics and activism is its association with ‘identity politics’, a term which is often portrayed in a negative or simplistic way by Anglophone journalists and commentators. Critics see social movements as the vanguard of attempts to push particular identity agendas – such as “wokism” or “decolonisation” – on traditional institutions such as states, political parties, or governments. This tendency has been exacerbated by a strong presentist bias, which emphasises the exceptionality of contemporary identity politics rather than situating it within a broader history of identitarian activism. The end result has been a sustained attack on progressive social movements, especially in Europe and the United States, which has fuelled the rise of competing right-wing and/or conservative forms of identity politics. This has led to a highly polarised debate, in which contentious politics obscures the realities of social movement activism.

In this workshop, we would like to push back against this simplistic and ahistorical discussion. Instead, we want to explore empirically the complex relationship between social movements and identity politics. We start from the premise that “identity” is not a fixed or single frame within which social movements operate. Rather, social movements attempt to capture and acknowledge identity as a practice as well as a goal. We would therefore like to think about how the study of social movements might (a) offer insight into how identity politics has developed as a powerful basis for collective action, and (b) help disentangle the empirical basis of identity politics from critical characterisations from the left and right. We are also interested in how an emphasis on identity can lead to innovation, failure, conflict, and unintended consequences within social movements.

To this end, we invite papers for this workshop that touch on any of the following themes:

● The significance of identity as a frame, goal, or outcome in either contemporary or historic social movements

●Identity and experiments in radical democracy within social movements, including intersectionality, representation and recognition (eg. safer spaces, progressive stacking, liberation caucuses etc.)

● Identitarian protest tactics and repertoires, such as no-platforming and anti-no-platforming, statue toppling.

●Identity politics and the university campus, including student activism, institutional change, institutional backlash, and tensions within movements

●Identity politics and the left, including discussions of universalism, ideology, (dis)unity, dominant movement cultures, and progressive mobilisations on the basis of race, gender, sexuality and others.

● The role of the media and/or social media in the radicalisation of identity politics

●Identity politics and the right, including nationalism, religious identity, majoritarian racial politics, nativism, the manosphere, anti-trans/anti-LGBTQ mobilisation, and white supremacy

We invite papers that deal with any time period from the 1970s to the present day. Case studies can be drawn from Europe, North America, or the Global South. Comparative research, across both time and space, is encouraged and we are particularly interested in doctoral students and early-career scholars whose empirical, ethnographic or archival work currently addresses the workshop themes.

Organisation

The two-day workshop will be hosted by COSMOS and will feature a number of different panels, each composed of two or three 15-minute papers. We intend to put together a journal special issue or forum following the workshop.

Participation in the workshop will be free. Some funds to offset travel expenses may be available. The workshop will be funded by the British Academy Knowledge Frontiers programme and is part of the project “A New Democratic (Dis)Order: Race, Identity, and Political Mobilisation in France and the UK, c.1970-Present”. Additional support will be provided by the Centre for the Study of Social and Political Movements at the University of Kent.

Paper proposals should include:

• A title
• A paper abstract (max. 500 words)
• A 1-page CV. 

The deadline for proposals is 1 September 2025.

• Participants will be confirmed no later than 15 September 2025.
• Proposals should be sent to timothy.peace@glasgow.ac.uk

Organising committee

Emile Chabal (University of Edinburgh)
Laia Corxet Solé (Scuola Normale Superiore)
Alex Hensby (University of Kent)
Timothy Peace (University of Glasgow)
Lorenzo Zamponi (Scuola Normale Superiore)