Sociologica

Introduction. Disenchanted Prophets: Social Movements between Dissent, Solidarity and Creativity

Jonathan Bach — 2023-07-24

Social movement theory, with its Euro-American focus, struggles to capture the radically divergent imaginaries and claims that accompany current waves of protest. The Special Feature titled “The Many Faces of Protest: Rethinking Collective Action in a World of Dissent” examines select progressive protests and their transformative potential in times of deep uncertainty. In so doing, it helps sociologists and others make sense of how the repertoires, domains of action, and prefigurative capacities of collective action are changing around the world today.

Memory Protest and Contested Time: The Antimonumentos Route in Mexico City

Alexandra Délano Alonso — 2023-07-24

This article examines the corridor of Antimonumentos (antimonuments) in Mexico City. In a context of more than 110,000 enforced disappearances and hundreds of thousands of deaths since the start of the “war on drug cartels” in 2006, the Antimonumentos are one of the ways in which memory activists seek to mark significant events of violence and state neglect, and expressly confront both the government and society by voicing public demands for justice, accountability, and non-repetition. They occupy public spaces anonymously, without permission, and establish a link between past and present instances of state violence, thereby drawing attention to intersecting forms of violence. We examine how these countermonuments exemplify a protest against a specific regime of temporality, and how they also allow us to reflect on the temporality of protests.

“The River is Our Street.” Intersectional Rural Protest in Brazil’s Amazon

Claudia Horn — 2023-07-24

In Northern Brazil, the Tocantins-Araguaia industrial waterway project seeks to expand the export corridor for soy directly through the Amazon Forest, threatening to destroy ecosystems and local traditional communities’ socioeconomic base. However, dispersion, precarity, and isolation from political participation impede the collective organizing of those in rural “sacrifice zones” who are affected by this infrastructure project. This paper investigates how social movements address this difficulty, analyzing a boat caravan of labor leaders from diverse movements representing fisher, family farmer, Indigenous, Quilombola, women, youth, and church groups against the construction of the waterway. It argues that the campaign’s intersectional practices — recognizing autonomous cultural identities, building solidarity around crosscutting threats to production and social reproduction, and formulating unifying inclusive demands and alternatives — address the collective action problem in these peripheries. Moreover, the campaign reflects labor organizations’ environmentalization, i.e., the incorporation integration of regional, agrarian, and environmental justice concerns.

Chile’s Estallido Social and the Art of Protest

Terri Gordon-Zolov — 2023-07-24

Chile’s 2019–2020 social uprising, known as the estallido social or “social explosion,” brought about radical changes in the socio-political landscape of the country. A minor subway fare hike of 30 pesos soon escalated into a major revolution, whose motto, “It’s Not 30 Pesos, It’s 30 Years,” expressed pent-up discontent with the 30-year legacy of the brutal 17-year regime of Augusto Pinochet. Through massive mobilizations and artistic interventions, Chileans demonstrated against social and economic inequities born from the neoliberal model of the dictatorship, judicial impunity, and a lack of rights and protections for women, Indigenous peoples, and minority groups. In Santiago, youth occupied the site of Plaza Italia, “Ground Zero” of the protests, and the equestrian statue of war hero General Baquedano became a symbolic figure for the struggle for the city. This article focuses on the Chilean “art of protest,” considering how Chileans drew on a vanguardist artistic ethos to enable a reformulation of the public sphere and a collective, new political paradigm.

Unwritten Endings: Revolutionary Potential of China’s A4 Protest

Kin-man Chan — 2023-07-24

The A4 or White Paper Revolution as dubbed by international media refers to a series of protests against China's draconian Zero-Covid policy that started in November 2022. Although the protests did not last long, they debunked the myth that stringent pandemic measures were widely supported by the Chinese people. Additionally, they revealed the potential for social mobilization in China, regardless of the forceful crackdown on civil society and media censorship by the regime. This paper analyzes how the protests were able to garner support from a wide spectrum of people and circumvent the structural constraints imposed by an increasingly totalitarian regime. It demonstrates that hegemony will never be complete and that resistance is possible even under a “perfect dictatorship”.

Movement Dilemmas under Authoritarianism: National and Local Activism in Russia

Anna Zhelnina — 2023-07-24

Scholars of social movements are often skeptical about the applicability of their analytical tools and theories, mainly developed for advanced democracies, to the analysis of civic and political life in authoritarian states. In this article, I will apply the micro-sociological strategic interactionist perspective to analyze the national political oppositionist movement and local grassroots mobilizations in Russia and show that movement players and activists in authoritarian states have agency, face dilemmas, and make strategic choices informed by their understanding of the situation and the adversaries they interact with.

Social Media Outrage against Fake COVID Tests: Decoding an Instance of Flash Activism in Bangladesh

Anwesha Chakraborty — 2023-07-24

In this paper, we attempt to outline and to discuss how social media platforms provide the public a space, albeit unsafe, in quasi-authoritarian contexts to share their opinions and grievances on contentious issues. We focus on the case study of a short-lived yet intense wave of social media outrage against a corrupt actor, Shahed, in Bangladesh, who was accused of selling fake Covid-19 tests to the public. Identifying it as an instance of flash activism in the digitally-networked media arena, the paper brings out some of the characteristics that define this act of public outrage under increasing government surveillance, such as the brief duration of the protests, the public indignation that resulted in the online expressions of the outrage and users’ strategies such as employing humour and satire to express indignation and avoid being persecuted by the regime. Our aim with this short paper is to understand how the internet challenges authoritarian governments insofar as it gives voice to citizens to express grievance, how governments transform their legal repertoire to gag their population from voicing opinions, and how people still find new, innovative ways to express themselves under such regimes.

What Role Do Political Parties Play in Social Protests? Recent Trends in Argentina and Chile

Sofia Donoso — 2023-07-24

There is a growing consensus about the complementary nature of institutional and non-institutional politics as means to push forward policy agendas. However, the bulk of research tends to concentrate on one aspect of this relationship, namely, how social movements influence the political arena, for example by impacting different stages of the policy-making process and creating new political parties. There is comparatively less understanding of the reverse dynamics: the degree to which political parties also influence the protest arena by adopting and utilizing strategies and tactics commonly associated with social movements and by connecting to demonstrators. Focusing on Argentina and Chile, two countries that have experienced massive protest waves in recent years, this article examines the presence of political parties in the organization, staging, and channeling of demonstrations. Given that the reception of political parties in demonstrations is closely tied to whether they are welcome in the protest arena or not, we also analyze how Argentine and Chilean protesters perceive political parties and the level of identification they feel with them. Our primary data source comes from 1935 surveys conducted as part of the Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation (CCC) network between 2015 and 2017. We found that political parties in Argentina exhibit stronger ties to social movements compared to those in Chile. We seek to link this outcome to divergent and historically rooted patterns of protest dynamics in both countries and discuss the implications of our findings in the conclusion.

Legacies of Authoritarianism and Elite Responses to Social Unrest. The Estallidos Sociales in Peru and Chile

César Guzmán-Concha — 2023-07-24

Massive social unrest broke out in Peru and Chile in recent years. In both countries, the constitutional issue was central in the articulation of protests. However, elite reactions to these movements were different. In Chile, political institutions sought to accommodate the popular demands, launching a process of constitutional reform that attempted to appease discontent redirecting it to institutional politics. Whereas in Peru, the political elite was unable to agree on a process of constitutional revision. The “estallido social” of 2020, which led to the ousting of President Merino, re-emerged two years later with more intensity in the aftermath of the failed coup d’état attempted by President Castillo. To understand these different responses to mass social unrest, this article proposes a theoretical framework grounded in historical institutionalism. The main argument is that authoritarian regimes are critical junctures that produce enduring legacies in the power configurations of the polity. Legacies will vary depending on two aspects: whether authoritarianism consolidates a power basis, and how these regimes end. Different socio-political legacies favored distinct elite reactions and approaches to the threats posed by popular movements. To illustrate this argument, the article draws on previous studies and provides preliminary evidence. Overall, the article contributes to political sociology by integrating critical junctures and outcomes of social movements literature.

Empathy for Earth and Farmland: A Bland Ranking of Attentions

Giorgio Osti — 2023-07-24

The environmental crisis, so looming and diverse (climate change, pollution, loss of biodiversity), requires the social sciences to make every effort to identify attitudes and actions suitable for mitigating it. Empathy towards plants, animals and ecosystems appears to be a powerful category both analytically and pragmatically. The paper focuses on a great mediator between society and environment: the ‘agrosilvopastoral’ sector, wondering how much empathy plays a role in this mediation. For reaching this goal, first, a definition of empathy is delineated; then thanks to a typology of the position and analytical levels of the social sciences, different pieces of literature on earth and farmland empathy are framed; and finally, an exemplifying secondary analysis of over 60 abstracts collected from a conference on earth and farmland empathy is carried out. The literature and content analyses show two results: some scholars and practitioners do not recognise a role of mediator with ecosystems to agrosilvopastoral sector, some others adopt a bland ranking of empathy towards the human and non-human figures of agro systems. Because of their relationship with animals, shepherds are seen among the most important mediators between humans and non-humans, despite their relative isolation from social life.

From the Editors

Elena Esposito — 2023-07-24

Fixing the Climate: Charles Sabel in Conversation with Filippo Barbera

Filippo Barbera — 2023-07-24

In this interview with Filippo Barbera, Charles F. Sabel discusses his latest book, Fixing the Climate (Princeton University Press, 2022, with D.G. Victor), that dramatically reorients our thinking about the climate crisis. It provides a road map to institutional design oriented around concrete problem-solving that can finally lead to self-sustaining reductions in emissions that years of global diplomacy have failed to deliver. The discussion touches upon a number of key issues of general interest for social scientists: global governance; decisions under uncertainty and risk; pragmatic solutions to wicked problems; technological solutions and innovation.

Construction versus Realism? The Unrealized Potential of Communicative Constructivism

Hubert Knoblauch — 2023-07-24

The ideas linked to the formulation “Social Construction of Reality” (SoCo) have spilled over from the Social Sciences and Humanities to public discourses, e.g. on gender and truth, and form in epistemic terms the crossroads of the polarization of liberal and anti-liberal world views par excellence. By focusing on the “academic debate” about the theory of Social Construction of Reality we argue that the polemical misuse of “social construction,” quite common in public and political discourse, also characterizes New Realism. This recent philosophical movement frames its innovative character first by reframing the problem of the social construction of reality from social theory to philosophy and such failing the basic idea of the entire approach, and second, by referring not to Social Construction of Reality but to a specific understanding of “Social Constructionism.” However, the numerous critiques of SoCo over time have led to Communicative Constructivism (CoCo) as a comprehensive reformulation within Sociology of Knowledge. As an empirically grounded theory, CoCo relates to new forms of realisms constituted in their opposition to SoCo.

Necessary Entanglements: Reflections on the Role of a “Materialist Phenomenology” in Researching Deep Mediatization and Datafication

Andreas Hepp — 2023-07-24

This article unpacks the deep engagement of media and communication studies with questions of social construction and the material infrastructures on which media’s role in social construction is based. For that reason, for communication scholars, there is no contradiction between constructivism and realism, and the notion of a materialist phenomenology seems necessary and unproblematic. We take materialist phenomenology further as a concept via the notion of entanglements, drawing on Karen Barad. Then we go on to explore two contemporary debates in media and communication studies which illustrate its broader commitment to understanding the materiality of social construction: first, the broad phenomenon of deep mediatization (Couldry & Hepp, 2016) whereby all aspects of social processes now take mediated forms, and second, the particular process of data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2019) whereby life itself is increasingly the object of colonial appropriation in the form of extracted data.

Concepts of Realism in Constructivist Approaches

Thomas S. Eberle — 2023-07-24

The thesis of this paper is that the debate on realism versus constructivism is misconceived as there exist many different variants of constructivism, each of which operates with a certain, albeit minimalist social ontology. Different concepts of realism are carved out in phenomenology, Berger and Luckmann’s social constructivism, ethnomethodology, relational constructionism, and, finally, communicative constructivism. A differentiated view is recommended.