About

This is the course site for CMS.361/861: Networked Social Movements: Media & Mobilization, taught by Sasha Costanza-Chock at MIT.

The seminar is a space for collaborative inquiry into the relationships between social movements and the media. The course reviews these relationships through the lens of social movement theory, and functions as a workshop to develop student projects. Seminar participants will work together to explore frameworks, methods, and tools for understanding networked social movements in the digital media ecology. We will engage with social movement studies as a body of theoretical and  empirical work, and learn about key concepts including: resource mobilization; political process; framing; New Social Movements; collective identity; tactical media; protest cycles; movement structure; and more. We’ll explore methods of social movement investigation, examine new data sources and tools for movement analysis, and grapple with recent innovations in social movement theory and research.  Assignments include short blog posts, a book review, co-facilitation of a seminar discussion, and a final research project focused on social movement media practices in comparative perspective.

The graphic in the header was created by Team Utrecht during the Occupy Data Hackathon; it’s a visualization of 14 @reply networks from #Occupy related hashtags, visualized using Gephi.