Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Constructive Side of Social Movements

这个项目考察了社会运动的建设性方面。尽管人们的注意力和研究往往集中在罢工和抗议等有争议的行动上，但运动也会通过一系列建设性的战略和战术来寻求目标，比如积极创建替代经济机构。这项研究将调查解决方案议程如何适应集体目标的追求，以及同时使用建设性和争议性行动的效果是什么。研究结果将增加对社会运动的理论理解，也将有助于寻求通过谈判解决紧迫的社会问题的政策制定者和公众代表。本项目使用多个地点的民族志工具，在特定的金融资产剥离运动的背景下分析普遍的社会运动实践--“抵制和建立”。这项研究设计对三个社会运动组织收集的访谈、观察和文件进行三角测量：草根非营利组织、中介召集人和跨国社会运动组织。该项目将学术延伸的争议性政治理论与社会学的理论辩论进行对话，询问为什么演员将争辩和构建的剧目配对，以及由此产生的实践如何塑造了社会运动。作为一项基线研究，该项目寻求在社会学的两个实质性领域之间建立一座新的理论桥梁，并通过将调查范围扩大到一套新的剧目来为社会运动实践提供信息。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project examines the constructive aspect of social movements. Although attention and research often focus on contentious actions like strikes and protests, movements also seek their goals through a range of constructive strategies and tactics such as proactively creating alternative economic institutions. This study will investigate how a solutions agenda fits into the pursuit of collective goals and what the effects of simultaneous use of constructive and contentious actions are. Findings will increase theoretical understanding of social movements and also will be useful to policy makers and public representatives who seek to negotiate solutions to pressing social issues.This project uses the tools of ethnography in multiple sites to analyze the general social movement practice of "resist and build" in the context of a specific campaign of financial divestiture. The research design triangulates interviews, observations, and documents collected at three social movement organizations: a grassroots nonprofit, an intermediary convener, and a transnational social movement organization. Bringing scholarship extending theories of contentious politics into dialogue with theoretical debates in sociology, the project asks why actors paired repertoires of contention and construction and how the resulting practice has shaped the social movement. As a baseline study, the project seeks to establish a new theoretical bridge between two substantive areas of sociology and to inform social movement practice by broadening the scope of inquiry to a new set of repertoires.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.