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Growing interest in the use of digital technologies and a Putnam-inspired debate about youth engagement has drawn researchers from outside of the study of social movements into research on the topic. This interest in youth protest participation has, in turn, developed into a substantial area of research of its own. While offering important research contributions, we argue that these areas of scholarship are often not well grounded in classic social movement theory and research, instead focusing on new media and/or the relationship between activism and other forms of youth engagement. This chapter seeks to correct this by drawing on interviews with 40 high school and college students from a moderately sized southwestern city to examine whether traditional paths to youth activism (i.e., family, friends, and institutions) have changed or eroded as online technology use and extra-institutional engagement among youth has risen. We find that youth continue to be mobilized by supportive family, friends, and institutional opportunities, and that the students who were least engaged are missing these vital support networks. Thus, it is not so much that the process driving youth activism has changed, but that some youth are not receiving support that has been traditionally necessary to spur activism. This offers an important reminder for scholars studying youth and digital activism and youth participation more broadly that existing theory and research about traditional pathways to activism needs to be evaluated in contemporary research.

This chapter examines the dynamic of state-society interaction during the events of the winter 2013–2014 Ukrainian Maidan Revolution. Using a new dataset, containing responses from the activists of the dissent movement, the study uncovers the “tipping point” at which revolutionaries were much more likely to support violent tactics. The study adds to the scholarly debate on repression-dissent, showing that social interpretation of state repression is essential in affecting social support for political violence. In addition to the theoretical contribution, this article presents the first systematic scholarly account of the repression-dissent dynamic of the 2013–2014 Ukrainian revolution, implementing original empirical and interview data.

Prior social movement research has focused on the role that axes of inequality – particularly race, class, gender, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) status – play for who participates and how they do so. Age is another important axis of inequality. The pervasiveness of a youth deficit model, which casts young people as deficient and requiring benevolent adult tutelage, is of particular concern for youth. This chapter assesses whether the internalization of the deficit model influences young people's activism and how they perceive their engagement. Drawing on interviews with 40 high school and college students from a southwestern US city, we find that many young people have internalized deficit-model assumptions, affecting when and how they participated. This was most evident among high school students, who limited their participation because they were “not old enough” or gravitated toward more “age-appropriate” forms of activism. Interestingly, we found college students were more willing to engage in online activism but also felt compelled to do significant research on issues before participating, thereby distancing themselves from the deficit model's assumptions of their political naivety. Finally, some participants felt discouraged by the perceived ineffectiveness of protest, which resonated with deficit model narratives of the futility of youth engagement. These findings highlight the importance of understanding the impacts of an internalized deficit model as well as considering age as an axis of inequality in activism. Youth engagement is best supported by seeing young people as capable actors with unique interests, capacities, and points of view.

Social movement scholarship points to the significance of collective identity in social movement emergence. This chapter examines the relationship between structural identities, such as race, gender, and sexuality, and the collective identity of student activist conferences in order to analyze how groups succeed or fail at engaging difference. Utilizing ethnographic participant observation at two student activist conferences – one of majority Black students and the other of majority white male students – this chapter employs an intersectional framework in analyzing the resonance of organizational collective action frames. This chapter finds that cultural resonance, frame centrality, and experiential commensurability are all important factors in engaging difference, and that the utilization of political intersectionality in framing may shape frame resonance. This framework that applies intersectionality to framing contributes to social movement analysis by recognizing how structural identities shape collective identity and group mobilization.

South Koreans in the city of Ulsan claim that eating whale meat is a tradition, but what is the role of SMOs in making whaling into a tradition identified with a local identity? In following account of a confrontation that took place in Korea between anti-whaling protesters from Greenpeace and local defenders of whaling, it is shown that tradition is not an inevitable outcome of conserving the past; instead, it is an outcome of mobilization, framing, and choices made by movement participants. Tradition in the whaling town of Ulsan was formed through the encounter between opposed social movements, prompting strategic choices of counterframing, frame bridging, and the dissonance between framing and feeling rules. Through the encounters with transnational activists, the Korean defenders of whaling refashioned themselves as rooted cosmopolitans, utilizing global norms to justify local practices in the name of heritage and tradition.

Drawing on Bert Klandermans (2004) hypothesis that instrumentality, identity, and ideology are interacting motivations, which increase the likelihood of participation in social movements, this article examines why individuals joined the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement (CRM) during the 1960s. Analyzing data gathered from semi-structured interviews, newspapers, autobiographies, secondary sources, government and movement organizations documents, the empirical analysis indicates that the individuals’ motivations in the process of involvement in social movement activities differ over time. The accounts of former participants generally suggest that instrumentality provided a stronger initial motivation during the very early stage of the CRM. With the development of the movement and changes of the political context, the choice to participate rested – for the mass of individuals who decided to mobilize later in consequence of a “transformative event” – more on identity and ideology. The research underscores the importance of the “timing” of involvement in order to better grasp the causal justification of movement participation over time. Focusing on a deeply divided society, such as Northern Ireland, this research also broadens the comparative range of case studies in the field of collective action and enhances our understanding of how repressive measures by the establishment in relation to contentious politics in deeply divided societies mobilizes further the individual in social movement activities.

The authors theorize the role that identity, and especially collective identity, plays in the creation of new institutions. The authors begin by reviewing the literature on social movements, focusing on identity movements; from this, the authors extract and explore the role of identity in collective action and institutional formation. The authors propose that identity and lifestyle movements create institutions that furnish the necessary cultural tools to support and enact a given identity. As an example of this process, the authors examine Martha Stewart’s cultivation of a lifestyle-driven brand. The authors discuss the implications of their work on social movement theory and institutional theory.