ABSTRACT
Interest in the cultural aspects of protest and collective action is not limited to the study of new social movements, which we looked at in the last chapter. The methods and perspectives of cultural analysis have also been adopted in other areas of social movement studies, such as in the book, Social Movements and Culture, which the editors considered part of ‘the general turn toward cultural analysis in the social sciences’ (Johnston and Klandermans 1995: vii). Since the publication of that collection of essays, Hank Johnston (2009: 3) has edited another volume entitled Culture, Social Movements and Protest, which, he says, considers the ‘important additions to the cultural canon’. That book seeks to build on the earlier volume, which, according to Johnston (2009: 3), ‘brought together US and European perspectives to present several new analytical approaches from various social science fields: rhetorical analysis, sociology of culture, narrative analysis, social psychology, and cognitive sciences’. The stated intention of the later book is ‘to move our understanding yet another step ahead, extending the scope of how a cultural perspective can inform protest analysis’ (Johnston 2009: 3).
