ABSTRACT
One might be tempted to say that each of the 12 empirical studies in this collection highlights a particular spatiality critical to understanding the mobilization of a social movement or other contentious political action. But this would be far too simplistic. In fact, while each study begins with a particular spatial focus, each goes on to examine multiple spatialities through which extremely complex mobilization processes are constituted, contested, and re-constituted. Social movement mobilization, and contentious politics more generally, is inherently spatial, as are all social and political processes. The spatial constitution of social and political processes almost always involves multiple spatialities. However, the roles of specific spatialities – e.g., place, space, territory, region, scale, networks – are always contingent and subject to change. Indeed changing the spatial constitution of social and political struggle is central to the course it takes.
