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Professional ethics require researchers to disclose all risks to participants in their studies. Changes in the legal climate in the United States and new modes of surveillance and communication call into question the effectiveness of measures used by researchers to protect participants from the risks they now face. This paper explores existing and newly enhanced risks to participants in social movement studies and examines problems with confidentiality agreements and informed consent procedures, two avenues that scholars traditionally use to protect research participants. The utility of Certificates of Confidentiality and researcher privilege also are examined as means to safeguard the privacy and security of research participants. The conclusion raises larger issues about the accountability of scholars to their research participants and the nature of risk in today's changing political climate. These include how to weigh potential risks and benefits to social movements and activists who are studied, the consequences for scholarship if scholars avoid studying movements and activists that pose risks, and the need for scholars to collaborate with research participants to tailor ethical research practices and to use institutional resources to challenge threats to the privacy and integrity of the people and groups they study.

Kathleen M. Blee is distinguished professor of Sociology and chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is completing a book manuscript on emerging social movement groups in Pittsburgh. She has also written extensively on women in U.S. racist movements, including Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s, published in 1991 by the University of California Press and Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement, published in 2002 by the University of California Press. Earlier, she studied the historical origins of regional poverty and co-authored The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia with Dwight Billings, published in 2000 by Cambridge University Press.

Kathleen Blee's (1996, 1998, 2002) pioneering work on the white supremacist movement has demonstrated that the contemporary hate movement depends increasingly on women's participation. Oddly, given the import of this claim, few social movement scholars have explored its applicability to the militant factions of the new nativist movement. This chapter begins to address that gap through analysis of online discussion groups moderated by the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), one of the two major anti-immigration organizations that mobilize monthly civilian border patrol operations on the U.S.-Mexico border. Contrary to stereotypes that depict Minuteman activism as an exclusively male domain, this analysis demonstrates that Minutewomen have carved out a significant niche within the new nativist movement through online activism. This activism includes but is not limited to coordinating campaigns to boycott businesses rumored to employ or profit from the patronage of undocumented immigrants, oppose multicultural programs in local schools, and defend or depose elected officials according to their stance on immigration policy. These findings raise the ominous possibility that the relative anonymity afforded by technologies such as the Internet has extended the quasi-private sphere in ways that have opened new and highly gendered spaces for right-wing activism.

Drawing on ethnographic research among far-right youth movements, this chapter discusses the view of a “new Europe” as manifested in young activists' discourses and practices. In arguing that it is necessary to better understand local contexts of political mobilization, it simultaneously foregrounds the transnational orientation of young far-right militants and the interplay of local and translocal factors in shaping their activism. In so doing, this chapter seeks to shed light on the background and the main rationale for their alternative conceptualizing of Europe and to situate it in a long tradition of thinking about Europe, recognizing similarities with the developments in the early twentieth century.

The scholarly conversation about insider and outsider positionality in observational research is long, rich, and often contentious. Debates about the benefits and challenges of studying sites where researchers share insider identities with participants, in particular, have yielded insights about power, inequality, and the uniquely relational character of observational research. In this chapter, we enter this conversation by relating our experiences with outsider-ness and insider-ness while studying social movements. We draw on two ethnographic case studies of social movement organizations within higher education settings. We identify some of the challenges faced while qualitatively studying identity-based movements embedded within institutions, specifically (1) being mindful of and negotiating the impact of researcher identity and how it relates to those of the subjects; (2) determining one's level of participation within the movement being studied; and (3) securing research approval and access to data. We offer suggestions for how researchers might think through these challenges in their own work.

The purpose of this paper is to explore dirty work sites within an academic context. Working with particular “unloved” groups (Fielding, 1993) can present a number of challenges to researchers, and if professional boundaries are not carefully maintained, researchers can be seen as “dirty workers” within an academic context.

The paper draws a qualitative research project that explores women's involvement with nationalist movements in the UK.

Researching “unloved” groups, and in particular racist organizations, presents a number of potential emotional and professional, and can render researchers “dirty workers” if clear professional boundaries are not maintained.

Examining academia and some academic research as a dirty work site adds to existing literature (Kreiner et al., 2006) that suggests any occupation can have a “dirty work” element that must be negotiated. This paper presents new challenges for managing spoiled “dirty” identities, and suggests that identity management is context-specific.

Attention to the role of institutions in the construction of racial inequality suggests that the status of racial groups in society results not necessarily from the mobilization of racist ideology but from the normal workings of social and political arrangements. (Lieberman, 1998)In the Post-Civil Rights context, all politics are racial. (Omi & Winant, 1994)

A social movement scene is “a network of people who share a set of subcultural or countercultural beliefs, values, norms, and convictions as well as a network of physical spaces where members of that group are known to congregate” (Leach and Haunss 2009, p. 260, emphasis in the original). The purpose of this paper is to further develop theories of social movement scenes by examining the spatial dimensions of proximity, centrality, visibility, and accessibility, arguing that different scene configurations are shaped by gentrification processes.

This is an ethnographic study based on research conducted in Sweden over a five year period (2007-2012), including several summer research trips and a sustained fieldwork period of 14 months. Using snowball sampling, the author conducted semi-structured interviews with 38 activists involved in autonomous movement scenes. The author interviewed both men (n=26) and women (n=12) who ranged in age from 18 to 37, with most interviewees in their late 20s and early 30s.

Findings suggest that neighborhoods in the early stages of gentrification are most conducive to strong scenes. The author’s findings suggest that, while some of these conditions are locally specific, there were common structural conditions in each city, such as changes in the commercial landscape and housing tenure.

This paper contributes to the specificity of the concept of a social movement scene by presenting three spatial dimensions of scenes: centrality (relative to the Central Business District), concentration (clustering of scene places in one area of the city), and visibility (a visible presence communicated by signs and symbols). A second contribution of this paper is to offer a set of hypotheses about the urban conditions under which social movement scenes thrive (or fizzle).