ABSTRACT
In the study of social movements and protest, research from a cultural perspective began in earnest a little over two decades ago. Prior to that time, a cultural focus was mostly latent, kept in suspended animation by scholars assuming the role of beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies in social movements. It was via the notion of framing as an element in recruitment and participation, rst through of social psychology (Gamson, Fireman, and Rytina 1982) and then symbolic interactionism (Snow, Rochford, Worden, and Benford 1986), that the systematic treatment of cultural factors established roots in the eld. For quite some time thereafter, the framing perspective, especially in the elaborations of David Snow, Robert Benford, and colleagues, and an interest in the role of collective identity, which was kindled by European research in new social movements, were the main carriers of cultural analysis. This was the general lay of the land regarding culture in social movement studies until the publication of Social Movements and Culture (Johnston and Klandermans 1995), which brought together US and European perspectives to present several new analytical approaches from various social science elds: rhetorical analysis, sociology of culture, narrative analysis, social psychology, and cognitive science. Since that time, there have been important additions to the cultural cannon: Jasper (1997), Rochon (1998), Steinberg (1999); Davis (2002); Young (2002); Stryker, Owens, and White (2000); Ewick and Silby 2003; Goodwin and Jasper (2004), Johnston and Noakes (2005), Polletta (2006), to name a few. This volume of theoretical essays and empirical research is intended to move our understanding yet another step ahead, extending the scope of how a cultural perspective can inform protest analysis.
