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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.

Social movement scholars have profitably used framing theory to understand how movement demands resonate within different political and cultural climates. To be more useful, however, the theory's analytic vocabulary needs to be sharpened and clarified. To that end, this paper specifies the relationships between collective action frames, master frames, and ideology through a case study of the living wage movement. While concepts such as frame-bridging are critical in understanding how social movement demands resonate, these ideas need to be broadened to show how movements go beyond “fit” in negotiating the tension between their aspirations and the sobering realities of politics. I use the term economics of morality to convey the difficulty inherent in translating moral demands into policy solutions. A successful framing strategy must be pragmatic enough to compromise for short-term goals, but only in a manner that does not undermine the integrity of a movement's ideals and its long-term vision.

Injustice is perceived, experienced and articulated. Social movements, and their constitutive parts, frame and re-frame these senses of injustice. Two often-overlapping accounts of social movements are in focus in this chapter. Human geography has been flooded with movement-based analyses of environmental justice (EJ). Sociology (more appropriately political sociology) has provided insight into social movements in the form of ‘contentious politics’ (CP). Building on both sets of literature, this chapter seeks to advance thought in human geography through a detailed exploration of master and collective action framing. It argues, firstly, that framing analysis challenges activist researchers to retain ‘spatial constructs’ as their central focus, rather than discourse. It calls, secondly, for us to unbind injustice as much as justice in our analysis of framing. And lastly, it demands a multi-spatial perspective on framing beyond simply scalar accounts.