Social Movements
The Global Social Movements research cluster brings together scholars that study social movements global and transnational in scope, organization, diffusion, and outcomes. Each year we meet and share research at the annual American Sociological Association meetings. We welcome anyone interested in joining the conversation.
Research Cluster Leader
Gallo-Cruz is a cultural and political sociologist working in the fields of globalization, conflict, and social movements studies. Her research focuses on questions of how changing narratives and belief systems fold into the development of conflicts and movements for social change. She has recently completed a book manuscript entitled, (In)visibility and Resistance, which comparatively examines three women’s movements against state violence in Argentina, Serbia, and Liberia. She has also conducted research on the role of international NGOs in the global spread of nonviolence, on developments in US foreign military training in Latin America, on gender and stratification in social movement studies, and she actively contributes to the development of social theory.
Current Members
Ashley Colby: ashley.colby@wsu.edu
Ashley earned her PhD focusing on environmental sociology from Washington State University in 2018. Ashley’s dissertation research is on subsistence food production as a potentially revolutionary act that is in some ways attempting to develop a post-capitalist future. Ashley got her MA in sociology at WSU in 2013, and her BA in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago in 2007. She has travelled to over 30 countries on 5 continents. Ashley is currently interested in and passionate about the myriad creative ways in which people are forming new social worlds in resistance to the failures of late capitalism and resultant climate disasters. As a qualitative researcher she tends to focus on the informal spaces of innovation. She is currently pursuing research projects based in Uruguay, where she has recently founded a field school for experiential learning on the area of sustainability and agroecology.
Lior Yohanani: lyohanani@sociology.rutgers.edu
My research interests include nationalism, identity, migration, and mobilization into collective actions. I am interested, on the one hand, in the interplay between the state and its diaspora, and in how individuals’ national identity and sense of commitment are created, on the other.
Ben Manski: brmanski@gmail.com
Ben Manski studies the participation of ordinary people in the deliberate constitution of their societies. His work takes in social movements, law, politics, and ecology, focusing on democracy, democratization, and constitutionalism, and he has published widely on these themes. In the past, Manski practiced public interest law for eight years and managed national non-profit organizations, direct action campaigns, and political campaigns and parties for over twenty years. He is currently a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara, a Liberty Tree Foundation Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies Associate Fellow, Next System Project Research Fellow, and a Critical Realism Network Associated Fellow.
Chelsea Starr: chelsea.starr@enmu.edu
My dissertation was a qualitative analysis of the Riot Grrrl movement, completed in 1999 at University of California Irvine. It showed how a cultural movement could be a social movement also. After that I have researched framing processes in anti-Femicide protest organizations and in the Men’s Rights movement. I also published on the use of social media in the Egyptian revolution. My current interests involve using content analysis to explore framing processes. I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at Eastern New Mexico University.
Michelle I. Gawerc: migawerc@loyola.edu
Michelle is an associate professor of sociology and global studies at Loyola University Maryland. She studies how peace activists, particularly those in areas of protracted conflict, accomplish working across conflict lines to end injustice and/or advocate for a just peace. Michelle’s current research focuses on two Palestinian-led transnational coalitions in the Occupied West Bank, which involved Palestinian, Israeli, and international organizations working together to demand justice for Palestinians. She’s exploring why and when these unusual coalitions form, and how they develop and sustain themselves across substantial divides. She’s also exploring how coalitional strategy is developed, and how tactics are diffused and adapted for use elsewhere. Michelle’s previous research, from which the current project builds, analyzes how the two most prominent joint Palestinian-Israeli peace movement organizations are able to construct a collective identity (i.e., a sense of “we”) and build a strong solidarity allowing them to engage in joint action for peace. Publications include her book, Prefiguring Peace: Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding Partnerships, and a number of articles including: “Building Solidarity Across Asymmetrical Risks: Israeli and Palestinian Peace Activists” in Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change; “Promoting Peace While Memorializing the Fallen” in Peace Review; “Solidarity is in the Heart, Not in the Field: Joint Israeli-Palestinian Peace Movement Organizations during the 2014 Gaza War” in Social Movement Studies; “Constructing a Collective Identity across Conflict Lines: Israeli-Palestinian Peace Movement Organizations” in Mobilization; and “Doing No Harm? Donor Policies and Power Asymmetry in Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding” in Peace and Change, co-authored with Ned Lazarus.
Apoorva Ghosh: apoorva.ghosh@uci.edu
Ghosh is a Ph.D. student of Sociology (ABD) and a Social Science Merit Fellow in the University of California, Irvine. While working on his Ph.D., he also teaches sociology and social science courses to undergraduate students. He serves in American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Student Forum Advisory Board and in the Society for the Study of Social Problems’ (SSSP) Board of Directors. He has been a council member in ASA’s Sex & Gender (2016-18) and Sexualities sections (2018-19) as a graduate student representative. Ghosh had also been a Fulbright scholar in the U.S. from India in 2012-13.
Chris Tilly: tilly@ucla.edu
Tilly is professor of Urban Planning and Sociology at UCLA. His research could best be summarized as studying bad jobs and how to make them better. His books have particularly examined precarious work (Half a Job: Bad and Good Part Time Jobs in a Changing Labor Market; The Gloves-Off Economy: Labor Standards at the Bottom of America’s Labor Market; Are Bad Jobs Inevitable?; Where Bad Jobs are Better: Retail Jobs across Countries and Companies) and racial and gender inequality in the world of work (Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skills, and Hiring in America; Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women’s Work, Women’s Poverty; Urban Inequality: Evidence from Four Cities; How Global Migration Changes the Workforce Diversity Equation). Although much of this work has focused on the US, he has increasingly written about workforce and development issues and social movements in Latin America and elsewhere. From 2012 forward, he has founded and led Experiences Organizing Informal Workers, an eight-country comparative research network, and a US-China exchange of labor scholars. Tilly is involved in a number of research and writing projects growing out of Experiences Organizing Informal Workers, notably a study comparing organizing by informal domestic and construction workers in China, India, Korea, Mexico, South Africa, and the US. He is also currently working on a study of how technological change is transforming retail jobs.
Atef Said: atefsaid@uic.edu
I am an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I am interested in sociological theory, political sociology, social movements and revolutions and international sociology. I am currently working on my book manuscript which is tentatively titled “Revolution Squared: The Politics of Space and Time in the Egyptian Revolution. The book asks: How are revolutions defined by their spatiotemporal context? Based upon ethnographic, archival, visual arts, and social-media based research conducted between 2011–2015, I consider this question in relation to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Specifically, I investigate three things: 1) How and why did the Egyptian Revolution become solely associated with and, in turn, reduced to, the events in Tahrir Square?; 2) How did this naming and narrowing of attention affect events themselves? In other words, how was the spatio-temporal understanding of the revolution constitutive of what actually happened on the ground?; and 3) To what extent and how did all of these processes contribute to the dramatic expansion of political space in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, and the equally dramatic contraction of that space in the years that followed?
Yao Li: yao_li@hks.harvard.edu
Li is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. She will be joining the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida in Fall 2019. Li holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Johns Hopkins University. Her research combines quantitative and qualitative methods to address debates in the fields of environmental sociology, social movements, political sociology, and development with a focus on China, Taiwan, and the United States. She is the author of Playing by the Informal Rules—Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable despite Rising Protests (Cambridge 2018; Cambridge Series in Contentious Politics). Her articles have appeared in journals including Government and Opposition, the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, and The China Journal. In 2015, she was named an Exemplary Diversity Scholar by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity.
Michael Yarbrough: myarbrough@jjay.cuny.edu
Yarbrough is a social scientist who studies how law shapes the ways people define their relationships with each other, with a particular emphasis on marriage. He works as an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), where his teaching focuses on the Law & Society major. His current book manuscript is a study of South Africa, the only jurisdiction in the world that has recently opened its marriage laws to two previously excluded forms of marriage: same-sex marriages, and marriages under indigenous systems of African customary law. Yarbrough has also recently published three co-edited volumes (with Angela Jones and Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis) on queer relationships, activism, and political priorities after the spread of same-sex marriage rights. His research has been published in Social Politics, Law & Social Inquiry, Sexualities, the South African Review of Sociology, and the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, and it has won a Fulbright-Hays fellowship and the Yale Sociology Department’s Dissertation Prize. His teaching received John Jay’s Distinguished Teaching Prize in 2015. Outside of John Jay, Yarbrough has served as a Research Associate of the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg, and as a member of the Board of Directors for CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies. He holds a B.A. in sociology from the University of Chicago, and a J.D. and a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale.
Minwoo Jung: minwooju@usc.edu
Jung is a Ph.D. candidate of sociology at the University of Southern California. His research interests include human rights, political sociology, social movements, globalization, and gender and sexuality. His dissertation supported by SSRC IDRF examines the shifting relationship between nation-states, globalization, and rights in the contested terrain of “LGBT rights” in Asia. His previous work has appeared in positions: asia critique.
Nicole Fox: nicole.fox@csus.edu
Nicole Fox, Ph.D., received her doctorate in sociology from Brandeis University and researches how racial and ethnic contention impacts communities, including how remembrances of adversity shape social change, collective memory and present-day social movements. She is a professor of criminal justice at CSUS teaching on comparative criminal justice and global criminology. Her book, Rebuilding from the Ashes: Memory and Reconciliation After the Rwandan Genocide, focuses on how memorials to past atrocity shape healing, community development and reconciliation for survivors of genocide and genocidal rape. Her most recent project examines bystander intervention, with an emphasis on individuals who conducted acts of rescue during times of social unrest and political violence. Her scholarship has been published in the Journal for Scientific Study of Religion, Sociological Forum, Societies without borders, the International Journal of Sociology of the Family, among others. Her work has generously been support by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Grant, the National Science Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, TAG Institute for Social Values, University of New Hampshire’s Prevention Innovations, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Society for the Study of Social Problems and the American Sociological Society’s Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline.
Heather Hurwitz: heather.hurwitz@gmail.com
Hurwitz, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. Also at CWRU, she is a Core Research Faculty member in the Women’s and Gender Studies interdisciplinary program. For nearly 20 years, Heather has participated in and studied a variety of social movements in the United States and Global South. She analyzes contemporary urban protests and social movements using a feminist and intersectional lens. Her current research focuses on the global Occupy Wall Street Movement, activism to support Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, global feminisms, and feminism within not-explicitly-feminist social movements. Some of the global studies courses she has taught include Global Activism, Global Feminisms and the Internet, and Global Inequality. http://www.heathermckeehurwitz.com
Yael Findler: findler@usc.edu
I am a PhD student at the University of Southern California, department of Sociology. My interests are ethnography, cultural sociology, social movements, therapeutic culture, political sociology, and gender. I am currently developing my dissertation project, that examines civic organizations that focus on veterans’ mental health in Israel and the U.S. In a previous project, I analyzed the challenges that the trauma discourse and the “survivor” identity pose for collective action, looking at the case of anti-sexual assault activists.
Greg Prieto: sprieto@sandiego.edu
Professor Prieto’s research interests lie at the intersection of race, racism, and legal violence. His primary focuses are immigration, police and Border Patrol, and social movements. His first book project is comparative ethnographic study of two Mexican immigrant communities in California as they negotiate and mobilize against a growing deportation regime.
Jeffrey Swindle: jswindle@umich.edu
I’m a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan. My research is on the history, diffusion, and power of cultural schemas about development. Where do cultural schemas of development come from, how do they spread, and to what extent do they shape individuals’ ideas and behaviors? I am especially interested in the role of social movements in facilitating the spread of cultural schemas of development to people around the world. I am a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan. I also have a MPhil degree in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge. My dissertation examines the dissemination of global cultural scripts that denounce violence against women as being bad for development and contrary to human rights. I focus on the roles of media and foreign aid in diffusing such scripts at local levels, and the impact of people’s exposure to these scripts on their attitudes and behaviors. Beyond my dissertation, I am engaged in many other research projects including topics such as global perceptions of different countries, the multi-faceted effects of education and foreign aid on intimate partner violence, the importance of cultural influences for migration, and the effect of exposure to small family cultural scripts on fertility.
Ida Nikou: ida.nikou@stonybrook.edu
Nikou is a third year Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department at Stony Brook University, whose research focuses on the intersection of development and social movements. Ida is interested in the ways local level organizations and social mobilizations, from bottom up, shape institutional development capacities. More specifically, she focuses on labor-based organizations within the Middle East region and their consequences for development outcomes. Her current work in progress includes a historical analysis of strike activities in Iran in relation to the global socio political and economic context.
Yan Long: longyan@berkeley.edu
Yan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California Berkeley. She is a political sociologist interested in the evolution of technocratic governance as a transnational institutional model and its impact on existing forms of domination and resistance. Yan’s current book project, Side Effects: The Transnational Doing and Undoing of AIDS Politics in China (under contract, Oxford University Press), concerns the transformation of China’s infectious disease control driven by the conflict between transnational AIDS institutions, the state, and local activist groups. This book stems from her dissertation that won the 2014 ASA Dissertation Award. Yan is starting a new comparative project with colleagues in six countries to examine the local experiences of globalization that shapes nonprofits sectors in cosmopolitan areas such as San Francisco, Shenzhen, Vienna, Taipei, Singapore and Sidney. Her work has appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology. Yan was previously an assistant professor of International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington after working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. She obtained her PhD in Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.