Networked Social Movements: Media & Mobilization

Scene from the Occupy Wall Street protests of people around a table covered with laptops and cell phones.

Occupy Wall Street Day 3, September 19, 2011. (Original photograph by David Shankbone on flickr.)

Instructor(s)

MIT Course Number

CMS.361 / CMS.861

As Taught In

Spring 2014

Level

Undergraduate / Graduate

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Course Description

Course Description

This seminar is a space for collaborative inquiry into the relationships between social movements and the media. We'll review these relationships through the lens of social movement theory, and function 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.

Related Content

Sasha Costanza-Chock. CMS.361 Networked Social Movements: Media & Mobilization. Spring 2014. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


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