ABSTRACT
During the past decade social movement studies has continued to flourish, taking a number of new, diverse and fruitful directions and increasingly beginning to acknowledge the role of social movements as producers of knowledge rather than as mere objects of knowledge for academics. Amongst the more recent social movement approaches have been those that emphasise emotions at both macro (causal) and micro levels (collective action dynamics) (Goodwin et al. 2001; Jasper 2003), those who see networks as the new paradigm (Diani 2000; Diani and McAdam 2003) and those working on self-organisation and complexity approaches to social movements (Chesters and Welsh 2006; Escobar 2009). There have also been important contributions based upon conceptions of embodiment and experience (McDonald 2006), those that emphasise cultural perspectives drawing upon movement narratives and storytelling (Johnston 2009; Polletta, 2009) and a wide array of important developments in social and political theory that have impacted upon social movement studies. These include the work of political theorists such as Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004) and their concepts of empire and multitude, the work of actor network and theorists who challenge the way we understand the ‘social’ (Latour 2007) and the growth of interest in social movements as examples of an increasingly mobile society (Urry 2007) or as an antidote to the failure of institutional politics (Badiou 2005).
