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，但运动也通过一系列建设性的战略和战术来寻求目标，比如积极创造替代性的经济制度。本研究将探讨解决方案议程如何适应对集体目标的追求，以及同时使用建设性和争议性行动的影响。研究结果将增加对社会运动的理论理解，也将对寻求谈判解决紧迫社会问题的政策制定者和公众代表有用。本项目运用民族志的工具，在多个地点分析“抵抗和建设”的一般社会运动实践，在一个具体的金融剥离运动的背景下。研究设计采用了三个社会运动组织的访谈、观察和收集的文件：一个基层非营利组织、一个中介召集人和一个跨国社会运动组织。该项目将学术研究扩展到有争议的政治理论与社会学理论辩论的对话中，探讨了为什么演员会将争论和建构的剧目配对，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新的理论桥梁，并通过将调查范围扩大到一套新的曲目，为社会运动实践提供信息。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.