Working Title: Mobilization: Does Collective Identity Matter?
Organizer(s): Belinda Robnett, UC Irvine
E-mail(s): brobnett@uci.edu

Description: Social movement scholars have identified the importance of collective identity to the development of a social movement organization. Groups must cultivate collective identities to engender group consciousness, solidarity and commitment. They emphasize an "us" vs. "them" binary so that those inside and outside of the organization can clearly distinguish the boundary. This boundary between "us" and "them" is not always clear. Many activists participate in organizations even when they do not completely agree with the proffered collective identity.

Although collective identity correspondence is viewed as processual, relational, and negotiated, (e.g., Snow and McAdam 2000; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Whittier 1997) there is a tendency in the literature to discuss the outcome of collective identities as either congruent, when the personal identity and collective identity are in alignment, or incongruent (Robnett 2005). There is considerable evidence that numerous groups are composed of individuals and subgroups that do not always share complete identity correspondence (e.g., Gamson 1997; Hunt 1991; Reger 2002; Whittier 1995, 1997; Valocchi 2001). Given that people with diverse identities participate in organizations and still feel they share a collective identity, how do they reconcile the differences between their personal identity and those of the organization? Snow and McAdam (2000:2) note, "[T]he link between a movement's collective identity and the personal or individual identities of movement adherents has received almost no attention in the literature."

Benford (2003:445), states that, "little research has been done that takes into account the multiplicity of collective and personal identities associated with social movement participation." They ask, "How are these identity correspondences negotiated, managed, and experienced?" This session calls for a discussion of the complexities of collective identity processes beyond the influences of the social movement context emphasizing the ways in which these processes are impacted by biographical influences and ascribed group identity, such as one's race, or gender (Jasper 1997).

We will discuss the following questions: 1) How do social movement actors reconcile their experience of partial identity congruence with the social movement organization's collective action frames? 2) In what types of identity work do partially congruent participants engage? 3) Do identity construction processes take place primarily through social movement framing processes, and/or movement collective action as Snow and McAdam (2000:53) suggest, or is personal identity and collective identity equally important to participation sustenance?

Working Title: Building Bridges Over Great Divides? Social Inequalities and Social Movement Strategies
Organizer(s): Ellen Reese, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UC-Riverside; Jane Ward, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UC-Riverside; Christine Petit, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, UC-Riverside; Shoon Lio, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, UC-Riverside
E-mail: ellenr@ucr.edu

Description: This proposed thematic session explores the interrelationships between social inequalities and social movement strategies for a broad range of progressive and conservative social movements. Participants will address the following set of questions in terms of their current research and past experiences as activists in order to advance our understanding of these topics and to get feedback on new ideas:

1. How do social inequalities, such as those based on racism, class, patriarchy, heterosexism, ageism, or world system position, shape social movement organizations' goals, strategies, and rhetoric? How do social inequalities shape the internal divisions that frequently develop within SMOs over such issues?
2. What kinds of social movement strategies are most effective at confronting or reproducing social inequalities in the broader society and under what conditions? Are certain strategies more effective than others for particular social groups because of broader social inequalities? To what extent are authorities' responses to social movement activity shaped by broader social inequalities? Are they more repressive or conciliatory towards certain social groups than others?
3. How do SMOs appeal to diverse social groups and attempt to build strong alliances across groups with unequal power, prestige, and resources? What kinds of practices, rhetorical tactics, or organizational structures do social movement groups use to challenge or subvert relations of domination and oppression that operate inside them? What challenges do they face in such processes and how are those challenges best overcome? To what extent are SMOs simply paying lip service to "diversity" and what are the consequences of this?

Working Title: Bridging the Activist-Academic Divide
Organizer(s): Char Ryan (UMass Lowell) and Bill Gamson (Boston College)
E-mail(s): Charlotte_Ryan@uml.edu, gamson@bc.edu

Description: The activist-scholar group, Movement and Media Research and Action Project (MRAP), and the scholar-activist organization, Grassroots Policy Project, propose an interactive role play/scenario highlighting tensions between academic and social movement cultures that surface in collaboration. We will plan ample time for participant reflection after the scenario.

Our focus is not individual, but organizational – mapping opening and obstacles to mutually beneficial partnerships between social movement organizations and groups of scholars. We will address:

• Competing priorities and perspectives within the academic and activist worlds.
• Tensions inherent in establishing a bridging institution between unequal partners whose interests do not align neatly.

For instance, university-based and movement-based partnering groups face internal challenges. For instance, academic retention and promotion practices stress credentialization, thus intensifying competition and discouraging risk taking. Conversely, movement organizations' growing dependence on private donors and foundations may undercut oppositional movement cultures. Pressure to claim quick results and overextension may constrain movement groups' ability to design and implement long-term strategies, much less reflect and distill lessons from these efforts. In short, building a consistently democratic internal culture and building activist-scholar partnerships may be complicated by pressures from within, pressures from other allies and pressures from globalization's transformation of political, economic, media and other cultural institutions.

MRAP's weekly seminar involving senior scholars, recent Ph.D.s, graduate students, scholar activists and others including Grassroots Policy Project will collectively design the scenario. We welcome collaboration via the Internet. MRAP co-directors Char Ryan and Bill Gamson will take responsibility for communication.

Working Title: Law and Social Movements
Organizer(s): Anna-Maria Marshall, University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign
E-mail(s): amarshll@uiuc.edu

Description: Law serves as a contested terrain in the cultural life of social movement struggles: movements rely on rights to frame their grievances, to generate and circulate collective identity, and to recruit and mobilize activists. Legal regimes often shape a movement's political opportunities, and rights-based social movement organizations, staffed by legal experts, emerge to take advantage of those opportunities. Thus, there is a constitutive relationship between law and social movements: even as movements try to shape their legal environments, law shapes movement organizations, frames, goals and strategies.

Although pervasive, legal strategies are controversial among movement activists, reflecting tension within movement cultures. Legal strategies can exert a conservative influence on social movements, channeling protest and more radical forms of action into conventional political institutions. When movements deploy these institutional political strategies, the interactions with the state and other powerful elites can reshape the goals and frames of the movement. Legal strategies can also be de-mobilizing, substituting experts and elites for more democratic forms of participation. Moreover, legal institutions and organizations are often responsible for suppressing dissent and protest. Finally, legal strategies usually produce unsatisfying results, with judicial opinions, statutes and constitutional amendments that restrict rights.

Having conducted studies on a wide variety of social movements, including the LGBT community, civil rights, women's rights, indigenous people, the environment, AIDS awareness and other struggles, participants in this thematic session will provide opportunities to exchange theoretical and methodological approaches that will enrich conceptualizations of law and legal strategies in our studies of social movements.

Working Title: Reforming "Immigration Reform": Strategies for Redefining the Terms of the Immigration Policy Debate
Organizer(s): Greg Maney, Hofstra University; Nadia Marin Molina, Workplace Project
E-mail(s): socgmm@hofstra.edu, nadiamarin@yahoo.com

Description: Immigrant rights activists often express frustration over the terminology used in discussing immigration policies. As with the term "welfare reform," the phrase "immigration reform" suggests to many that a system allowing "undeserving" immigrants to enter the United States is problematic. Opponents of immigration liberalization have generated significant support for their position by playing upon both longstanding prejudices and heightened post-9/11 concerns over security. Mainstream media outlets like CNN and Fox have been more than happy to prominently feature these perspectives often to the exclusion of alternative voices. Politicians in districts with major demographic changes have manipulated NIMBY fears to mobilize support.

This thematic session focuses upon what, if anything, immigrant rights advocates can do to change the terms of the policy debate. What alternative messages are likely to capture the hearts and minds of the public? Can activists get the corporate media to convey these messages? If so how? If not, what alternative mechanisms for getting the word out will be most effective?

The session will be co-facilitated by a section member (Greg Maney) and the executive director of the Workplace Project (Nadia Marin Molina). The Workplace Project/Centro de Derechos Laborales was founded in 1992. It is the only nonprofit organization on Long Island, and one of a few in the country that organizes low-wage Latino immigrants to fight for better working and living conditions. The discussion statement will be placed on the conference Web site with a link to a listserv, enabling dialogue prior to the workshop. The co-organizers will make efforts to ensure broad-based participation by scholars of the immigrant rights movement as well as participants.

Working Title: Engaged Scholarship: How Public and Policy Sociology Can Affect Movement Cultures, Strategies, and Outcomes.
Organizer(s): Robert Kleidman, Cleveland State University; Jackie Smith, University of Notre Dame
E-mail(s): r.kleidman@csuohio.edu, jsmith40@nd.edu

Description: The purpose of this session is to further the practice and theory of engaged scholarship on social movements. Engaged scholarship addresses audiences outside and inside academia. It includes both public and policy social science. Public social science creates or furthers conversations about visions and values. Policy social science seeks to solve specific problems.

This workshop will emphasize grassroots public and policy social science, which brings social scientists into relationship with non-elite members of the community, often through existing activist organizations. Engaged grassroots scholarship may address activism itself or the policy or larger sociological concerns of activists. It includes activists in some or all of: the design, execution, and analysis of research and the implementation of research findings.

The session will include social scientists and activists. The session will provide a forum for the exchange of ideas about past, current, and future engaged scholarship, examining how this work can affect movement cultures, strategies, and outcomes. The session will also include discussion of whether and how to create continuing means of exchanging information and resources. The organizers will encourage participants to exchange brief statements about their work and aspirations before the workshop.

Working Title: The Politics of Feminist Framing
Organizer(s): Lyndi Hewitt, Ph.D. student in Sociology, Vanderbilt University; Holly McCammon, Professor of Sociology, Vanderbilt University
E-mail(s): lyndi.hewitt@vanderbilt.edu, holly.mccammon@vanderbilt.edu

Description: We propose a session constructed around the theme of framing processes in historical and contemporary women's and feminist movements. We hope to promote analysis and discussion of 1) the ways in which activists' framing has been influenced or constrained by particular political and cultural contexts and discursive fields, 2) the ways in which feminist framing has influenced various (including cultural) movement outcomes, and 3) the challenges of framing in collaboration with other women's and feminist groups, especially across boundaries of culture, geography, and/or issue areas. We envision that discussion statements might draw either on theoretical or empirical material and address any particular movement or historical period in which women were actively seeking enhanced rights or social change. Such a session would allow scholars of contemporary and historical U.S. women's movements as well as of those of contemporary transnational women's activism to explore intersections and differences in their politics of feminist framing.

Working Title: Transnational Linkages and Movement Cultures
Organizer(s): Anna-Liisa Aunio (a graduate student at McGill), Suzanne Staggenborg (faculty at McGill), Kathleen M. Fallon (faculty at McGill)
E-mail(s): aaunio@po-box.mcgill.ca, suzanne.staggenborg@mcgill.ca, kathleen.fallon@mcgill.ca

Description: Amid growing and intensifying exchange across borders, transnational connections provide local activists with potentially powerful resources to affect social change. While many scholars have explored the political opportunities and/or resources that transnational links offer local and national movements, few have asked when and how movement cultures draw upon global or 'world' cultural norms, identities, symbols, and strategies that present discursive and emotional opportunities for activism. Under what conditions do local movements engage in "upward scale shift" towards transnational mobilization, and when do they re-engage in local, regional and national organizing through "downward scale shift"?

This thematic session will explore the aspects of movement communities that facilitate or constrain activists' ability to utilize transnational cultural resources in local and national contexts, including local culture, organization, resources and ideology. In addition, this session will examine how movement communities and their cultures shape the adoption or adaptation of norms, identities, symbols and strategies to effect social change. Specifically, we ask: when and how are movement communities and cultures constrained by their connection with and use of global norms, identities, symbols and strategies? What aspects of movement communities and cultures enable activists to draw upon global discursive and emotional opportunities? How do movement cultures influence the adoption or adaptation of strategies from other contexts?

Working Title: Social Movement Publicity
Organizer(s): Ashley Currier, Ph.D. candidate, University of Pittsburgh; Kathleen Blee, Professor, University of Pittsburgh
E-mail(s): ashley.currier@gmail.com, kblee@pitt.edu

Description: An anchor of the widely accepted definition of a social movement is that the organized response to a social problem is public. Yet social movements vary in the extent and nature of their public self-presentations. In repressive circumstances, social movements may go to great lengths to obscure their activities. Social movement organizations (SMOs) that operate on the boundaries of legality-illegality also may hide from public view to continue their work. But even legal SMOs in liberal democracies face strategic decisions about to represent themselves to different audiences, including the state, media, social institutions, general public, and marginalized communities.

This workshop thematic session invites discussion of theorizing and empirical work on the topic of social movement strategies of publicity and visibility. We will solicit statements from scholars working on a range of social movements to encourage discussion of such questions as: What are social movement strategies of publicity? What cultural factors shape SMO public self-representations? How do social movements decide what to present and what to keep from public view? And how do strategies of publicity (or invisibility) reflect the internal processes of social movements and SMOs?

Working Title: Narratives and Health Social Movements
Organizer(s): Matthew E. Archibald, Professor, Emory University; and Charity Crabtree, Ph.D. candidate, Emory University
E-mail: marchib@emory.edu

Description: The purpose of the session in narratives and health social movements is to examine the role that narratives play in social movement structures, strategies and outcomes. We invite discussion statements and papers that will promote conversations around any number of topics relevant to social movements that deal with health and well-being. Health social movements have cultures that differ from other movements in large part because of the special kinds of identities created by movement narratives. Narratives function as mechanisms that link core elements of movements. Papers might address questions such as: How do narratives function as forms of sociopolitical action? How do frames and ideologies emerge through narrative rituals? How does resource mobilization influence group identity and accompanying narratives? How do narratives serve as mechanisms of social cohesion, surveillance and control? What are the methodological implications of defining health movements as bundles of narratives? How do narratives link organizational actors as well as individual ones? What are their mechanisms? How do movement narratives balance radical with reformist concerns? Interesting answers are likely to arise when different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives are applied to questions such as these as well as to others participants might bring to the session. Our approach to this topic is inclusive. We welcome a broad range of ideas, methods and approaches.

Working Title: War without End?: Evaluating Peace Movement Strategies
Organizer(s): Patrick Coy, Kent State University; Lynne Woehrle, Mount Mary College
E-mail(s): woehrlel@mtmary.edu, pcoy@kent.edu

Description: Despite organizing some of the largest transnational protests in human history, the peace movement has failed to either stop recent wars from happening or ongoing occupations from ending. The purpose of this thematic session is to evaluate peace movement strategies since September 11, 2001. What have been the main strategies pursued by the peace movement? While not stopping wars, have these strategies been successful in other ways? What alternative strategies might prove more effective?

The discussion statement will be placed on the conference Web site with a link to a listserv, enabling dialogue prior to the workshop. The co-organizers will make efforts to ensure broad-based participation by scholars of peace movement as well as participants.

Working Title: Insider Activism: Blurring the Lines Between Institutions and the Grass-Roots
Organizer: Benita Roth, Binghamton University
E-mail: broth@binghamton.edu

Description: In keeping with the workshop's theme of addressing aspects of movement strategies and cultures, I propose a workshop on the general subject of insider activism, that is, insurgent activities by those situated within established institutions. These studies may focus on historical insiders or current insiders, and would explore the nexus between institutionally situated activism and "the grass-roots."

I propose this thematic session for two reasons. First, for at least 15 years, social movement scholars have argued against conceptualizing the institutional and extra-institutional as dichotomous domains for protest. For example, the "contention" paradigm put forward by McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly (2001) calls for a blurring of the line between institutional and extra-institutional politics in exploring episodes of contentious political change. Second, feminist social movement scholars have also problematized the demarcation of inside/outside in social movement politics, arguing, as Katzenstein (1998) does that such a dichotomous conceptualization of institutionalized and non-institutionalized settings is not useful for understanding feminist insurgency. Case studies of social movements often show interplay between sympathetic insiders and movement activists, and indeed such interplay is conceptualized as one form of political opportunity that outsiders may usefully pursue.

Issues that I would expect to come up in the course of discussion would be understandings of what constitutes an insider position and what constitutes an outsider position; the complexity of operating within different kinds of institutional spaces; smaller or larger scale studies of insider/outside strategic cooperation and outcomes. However, I would assume that this short list is provisional and that research into this subject area would reveal new issues for discussion. I would be happy to co-organize this session if there is someone else with similar interests.

Working Title: Hip Hop Culture and Social/Global Change
Organizer: D. Mark Wilson, UC Berkeley
E-mail: MWilson@psr.edu

Description: This proposed session invites scholars, artists and activists to explore together the role hip hop culture plays in shaping social changing and/or maintaining social and global structures of inequality. Participants are invited to share their thoughts on the relationship between performance, conversation, identity and collective action among hip hop artists, the role hip hop artists play in changing social and global economic structures through the political conversations they create, the role of "consent" in hip hop art and culture, and the marketing, media and global forces that commodify and compromise the activism of hip hop artists. Though not limited to these topics, participants invited to address the following are particularly welcomed: (1) the socio-economic emergence of hip hop culture from movements of social change led by youth in the 1970s, (2) the varied ideas, artistic styles and hybrid forms in hip hop culture that work to critique, transform and change socio-political and economic structures, and (3) the role of media structures, cultural dimensions and economic forces in hip hop that facilitate social change and global conversations, especially where race, gender and sexual orientation are concerned.