The Idea Of Collective Identity

This reading was about social movements, how they are started and why, which is ultimately, to bring about important social changes. This chapter also talks about the important social movements which took place in America, from the women's suffragette movement, to the civil rights movement, to the legalization of same sex marriage and the LGBTQ movement. These chapters also defined social movements as “collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities”. These two beginning chapters also delve into what is to be expected later on in the book. These first two chapters made me realize just how many different social movements there are, whether in the past

Social movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s have been interpreted and written about in varying ways. While contemporary scholarship disagrees with past analyses and offer fresh perspectives, past research can also provide a pathway for defining important questions for future research on social movements in America.

Therefore, it is understandable that movement scholars tend to write from a rather activist stance. There is nothing wrong with this per se, however, as historians, we should critically assess in how far this positioning might limit our scholarship. At times, Payne tends to overemphasize the unity and the solidarity among the organizers and the local population and fails to mention the tensions among direct democratic groups like SNCC. Every social movement is made up of people, united under what they perceive as an urgent need to bring about change. This unity tends to suppress theoretical and practical differences for some time and can thus create a tremendous amount of communality and solidarity among its members. However, as history has shown over and over again, as soon as the external threat either diminishes or proves resistant to change, movements tend to disunite. This is what Baker and other activists wanted to prevent by modeling their training around local long-term strategies and individual

Despite the inequality in the United States, many Americans have been determined to have their voices heard. Recently, movements such as Occupy Wallstreet and the Tea Party Movement have formed in response to the growing wealth and control by the “1%”. These social movements have become very popular at times due to discontent among the populace and the wide accessibility of social media. While these movements tend to have rapid success early on; lack of cohesion, results, and true direction

In the last decade or a half, it is seen that collective action has become easier due to technological and social advancements, which has significantly helped grass-root movements gain power and influence in the political sphere. The ability of movements to raise money, gather large support, enter competitive political elections and impact party support and agenda, has made them very influential and appealing to political parties. Social movements are able to influence political parties by having a strong support base and source of funding to keep the movement going, having goals that a party can associate with and incorporate those goals into the party’s agendas. It is also seen that social movements gain significant influence over parties

Social movements shed light to social issues present in communities and harvest social change in political, religious, educational, health, government, and other institutional matters. Social movements give individuals a clear outlet to concerns about the rights and well-being of themselves and others, mostly through public protest and conversation, in order to promote social justice and democracy. Throughout history, humans naturally ended up starting movements to simply improve their way of life and movements have continually aided in a remarkable change in communities. In the essay “From Civil Rights to Megachurches,” Charles Duhigg explains the three critical steps that initiative successful social movements. Social movements must

Social movements are likely to have longer enduring effects due to the size of the collective group. In the event that a man tackles a reason however neglect to create the adequate supporters, when he or she dies, the reason may pass on too. Accordingly, it is with the advantage of assembling, organizing, and preparing that social movement’s life span is accomplished. Since, these social movements are more inclined to rise above time. Consequently, collective action causes the development to have dependable effect by utilizing the right individuals. By gatherings political inclusion in taking imperative issues to congress they impact dependable changes. Parks inclusion with the NAACP allowed her to gain knowledge of a previous bus boycott. Along these lines, without the support of the NAACP, and exposure to her fellow civil rights fighters’ actions; Rosa Parks might not have been a name edged in

When looking at current social movements it is important to understand how race, class, and the current political sphere intersect with current social environments. Because we have movements that are focused on systemic/longstanding social issues it is important to understand how decisions are made in reaction to these systemic problems and how public opinion is effected by them. The interplay between public opinion, culture, and political decisions are observed in each of the following articles. By looking at the Black Lives Matter movement, Occupy Wall Street, and articles analyzing how political movements affect political change, we hope to deepen our understanding of how social movements affect social interaction, which ultimately affects policy decisions in this country.

Social movements exist amongst various areas of people’s everyday life. For example, the world has been introduced to social movements such as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, in which people are challenged to dump a bucket of ice on their heads in support of an ALS charity. Another example includes the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, to which an African American man by the name of Michael Brown was shot by a Caucasian police officer; this sparked Americans to use various support methods to generate awareness to racism and policy brutality. Both of these scenarios exemplifies the power social movements possess in society today. The purpose of this paper is to explain how to social movement of Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign has affected the

Social movements have been a fundamental part of civilization’s freedom. It is the bridge that takes social grievances to the polity. Without this connection, people would not be able to express their concerns freely. A social movement is much more than just spontaneous uprisings with no organization; they are a complex organization that require detailed analysis to understand where they come from. In this sense, I would be devoting my time to analyze the different factors that cause the rise and development of social movements. I will consider a social movement “as organized yet informal social entities that are engaged in extra-institutional conflict that is oriented towards a goal. These goals can be either aimed at a specific and narrow policy or be more broadly aimed at cultural change” (Christiansen, 1, 2009). Consequently, it would be naïve to propose any explanation that relies solely on a single factor as the reason for the emergence of a social movement. Any meaningful analysis here has to happen through the understanding of multiple factors (both endogenous and exogenous), as well as their interaction, which collectively culminate in any given type of social movement. More importantly, it is key to understand that every social movement is the product of the previously mentioned

Social movements are an integral part of a cohesive and progressive society. Movements have been made throughout history and so it’s unsurprising that so many have occurred in the relatively short existence of the United States. One particular movement in current history is the Ferguson protests of 2014 that were marked by rioting in the streets of the small St. Louis suburb. These riots serve to show the significant unrest surrounding the way black people are treated in this country as well as to demonstrate that racism is still a very large problem in our society.

In Johnston, Laraña, and Gusfield’s discussion of New Social Movement (NSM) theory, they identify the concept as a “double-edged sword,” in that is has both related itself to the changing shape of society but also overemphasized the newness of its model, almost divorcing itself from previous social movement theories instead of acknowledging and assessing the similarities between them and integrating what is useful from theories of the past. As its basic framework asserts that social movements now are not as linked to class as they were in the time of the emergence of Marxism and at the height of industrialist society (as Resource Mobilization Theory might stress), new

beliefs. Sober uses the example of lightning. He points out that according to the Greeks,

In 2008, the United States of America (US) experienced a financial crisis which affected the rest of the world. Investment banks and Wall Street crashed. It left a good portion of US citizens in debt, unemployed, homeless, etc. As a result, Occupy Wall Street became a movement to demonstrate that the people have had enough and started protesting and voicing their opinions. In terms of globalization, the development of ‘Occupy’ movements have altered the notion of social movements to which it is not just about highlighting and fighting for causes, rather it desires to place the power back into the hands of the people. The term ‘movements’ has become a catchall definition about the mobilization of people from short term causes to longterm

In an age of globalization and the rapid spread of social movement ideologies and frames, it is imperative to ask what are the result of such movements, and while analyzing the broad range of social movements may seem like a Herculean task, a closer look at identity movements offers a more conclusive answer. Identity movements use particular identities to group together similar peoples on the basis of social, ethnic, or religious similarities in a movement that makes demands of the state. Not all of these demands are progressive either, some seek for the exclusion of minorities or the collapse of the state, others call for decolonization and social policy change on the basis of identity based rights. Identity movements can use a variety of methods to reach their goals, from rioting to working with political parties depending on domestic policies, but social scientists have found that successful identity movements do have discernible outcomes. Identity movements can lead to a forcible change in policy, the exclusion of a minority out-group, the capture of resources, or the capture of the state and its institutions. In this essay I will analysis how identity movements can lead to the capture and dissolution of the state, exclusion, and policy change in terms of real identity movements that used a variety of methods to obtain real results in both current and recent history. Beginning with state capture I will show how the vast amounts of