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Knowledge of how social movements move, diffuse, and expand collective action events is central to movement scholarship and activist practice. Our purpose is to extend sociological knowledge about how movements (sometimes) diffuse and amplify insurgent actions, that is, how movements move. We extend movement diffusion theory by drawing a conceptual analogue with military theory and practice applied to the case of the organized and highly disciplined nonviolent Nashville civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We emphasize emplacement in a base-mission extension model whereby a movement base is built in a community establishing a social movement school for inculcating discipline and performative training in cadre who engage in insurgent operations extended from that base to outlying events and campaigns. Our data are drawn from secondary sources and semi-structured interviews conducted with participants of the Nashville civil rights movement. The analytic strategy employs a variant of the “extended case method,” where extension is constituted by movement agents following paths from base to outlying campaigns or events. Evidence shows that the Nashville movement established an exemplary local movement base that led to important changes in that city but also spawned traveling movement cadre who moved movement actions in an extensive series of pathways linking the Nashville base to events and campaigns across the southern theater of the civil rights movement. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications.

Scholars typically assume that rights-based movements have generalizable impacts upon social inequalities; yet inequality reduction may be unequally distributed across space. By focusing on the American civil rights movement – a movement oriented toward achieving equal opportunity for people of color, especially Black Americans in the US South – this research evaluates whether reductions in racial inequality were contingent upon an active local movement presence or if all areas benefited equally. Census data from periods before and after the civil rights movement (1950 and 1980) are utilized to construct a measure of racial inequality change, focused upon high school graduation and management occupation employment rates. The presence of “the Big Four” civil rights organizations (the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE], the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP], the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC], and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC]) in Southern counties helps to explain this change in racial inequality. Counties which had certain civil rights organizations were more likely to experience a greater reduction in racial inequality than counties that didn't have such organizations. Education equity improved in counties that were less Black, more urban, had HBCUs, and CORE or SNCC organizational presence.

Recent scholarship has called for researchers to recognize the urgency of place-based education as a critical component of social studies pedagogy. This study seeks to understand better the relationship between place-based education, sacrificial listening and difficult history.

In this qualitative, arts-based research study, collaging is used to investigate how students use the theory of sacrificial listening while trying to make sense of difficult histories during a place-based history education experience. Students enrolled in a PBE experience received instruction about the theory of sacrificial listening at the beginning of a two-week course on the lasting impact of the civil rights movement. Students created a collage and responded to a reflection prompt about the course after engaging in course experiences, including travel to Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Alabama.

Findings in the study demonstrate how sacrificial listening appeared, both explicitly and implicitly, in the ways students processed difficult history during a place-based education experience. Ultimately, the study found, though students organized their thoughts in distinct ways, they all leaned on the theory of sacrificial listening to make sense of what they learned.

Few studies have applied the theory of sacrificial listening as a pedagogical framework. Future research should build on this work, further investigating the theory as a pedagogical framework in conjunction with both place-based history education as well as other instructional settings.

This study examines the barriers and drivers to student-led mobilization for sustainability in higher education institutions (HEIs) across Canada. Findings indicate that the most common barrier to student mobilization was a lack of political opportunities and social capital. In response, the findings indicate that the primary drivers that student-led sustainability groups used to overcome barriers included: sharing framing perspectives to inspire and motivate action across campuses, using social networks to borrow and leverage social capital from other stakeholders, and impacting campus stakeholder behaviors resulting in the creation of a culture of sustainability. Social movement theories have been applied to the barriers and drivers to student-led action in order to provide a deeper understanding of how students mobilize on campuses. The findings suggest that while students may struggle to elicit policy changes across HEIs due to common barriers, their efforts can successfully shift the campus culture of sustainability. This study addresses an identified need for more literature investigating sustainability activism in higher education more broadly and more specifically fills a gap in our understanding of how student activism may contribute to social change.

This chapter examines how groups' tactical selection shapes social movement mobilization and survival. I focus on 35 Indivisible groups founded in 10 American cities immediately after the 2017 Women's March. I analyze the descriptions of over 8,000 events on group Facebook pages from 2017–2019 and conduct 25 interviews with group members. These data allow me to assess how the type, diversity, and flexibility of tactics shape group mobilization and survival. I find that groups that use more protest and electoral tactics and those that use a diversity of tactics host more events and are more likely to survive over time. Being consistent in tactics was successful when groups used political tactics, particularly protest and electoral activities. Groups that engaged in a variety of tactics could also be successful, particularly in smaller and more conservative settings. This research illuminates the complex and situational ways that tactical choices matter for social movement longevity.

As national governments and international organizations strive to combat climate change and limit greenhouse gas emissions, the energy transition is at the center of the global agenda. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 of the UN 2030 Agenda calls for affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all, but there is ample ambiguity on what is to be considered “sustainable” as opposed to “renewable.” This chapter discusses the role of nuclear power in this context, and more specifically the thorny issue of nuclear waste: unless a sustainable strategy for the disposal of nuclear waste is found, the inclusion of nuclear power as a legitimate recipient of Green Deal and other aid will be contested. The cases of Italy, Germany, and France are discussed, showing how these countries have struggled over decades to solve the “wicked problem” of nuclear waste and have dealt with conflict through different mixes of stakeholder engagement, procrastination, or use of scientific expertise for legitimation.

Through the comparative analysis of the three cases, conclusions are drawn on relevant factors that contribute to the policy capacity needed to tackle complex, integrated, super-wicked problems of sustainability policy: issues of problem definition, multilevel coordination, time management, and the engagement of community and science are described and identified as critical.