About the Book

Researchers and students from divergent academic disciplines share an interest in the study of social movements and collective action. Through a variety of disciplinary approaches and techniques, researchers seek to understand the emergence and development of collective action. In the last few decades, the field of social-movements-studies has proliferated enormously, covering a wide array of movements, issues and places. With this growth, social movement scholars have criticized the traditional vision of collective mobilization as the results of irrational behavior and have instead developed a range of new approaches.

The expansion of the field has also led to increased theoretical debates and attempts to synthesize the different perspectives. But these attempts have met with the obstacle of the field being multidisciplinary. Discussion a theory from many areas of research can lead to misunderstandings. With this in mind, this book aims to revisit the disciplinary roots of social movement studies. Each discipline raises its own questions and approaches the subject from a different angle or perspective.

The chapters of the proposed handbook are written by internationally renowned scholars representing the various disciplines involved. They will review the approach their discipline has developed and discuss their disciplines' contributions and insights to the knowledge of social movements. Furthermore, each chapter addresses the "unanswered questions" and discusses the overlaps with other disciplines and reviews the interdisciplinary advances so far.

About the Author: Conny Roggeband is Assistant Professor at the Political Science department of the University of Amsterdam, where she also serves as a board member of the Amsterdam Research Centre of Gender and Sexuality (ARC-GS). She is affiliated to the political science department at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Ecuador. She has written on the politicisation of gender mainstreaming and equality policies, social movements and transnational feminist networking based on research conducted in Europe and Latin America. She is co-author (with Andrea Krizsán) of The Gender Politics of Domestic Violence: Feminists Engaging the State in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge 2017). She edited Gender and Norm Dynamics in Regional Governance (Palgrave 2014, co-edited with Anna van der Vleuten and Anouka van Eerdewijk), The Future of Social Movement Research: Dynamics, Mechanisms, and Processes (Un. of Minnesota Press 2013, co-edited with Jacquelien Van Stekelenburg and Bert Klandermans) and Handbook of Social Movements Across Disciplines (2007, coedited with Bert Klandermans).
Bert Klandermans is Professor in Applied Social Psychology at the VU-University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has published extensively on the social psychology of protest and social movement participation. He is the author of the now classic Social Psychology of Protest (Blackwell 1997). He is the editor and co-author (with Suzanne Staggenborg) of Methods of Social Movement Research ( University of Minnesota Press, 2002). With Conny Roggeband he edited the Handbook of Social Movements across Disciplines (Springer, 2007). He is the editor of of Sociopedia.isa a online database of review articles published by Sage in collaboration with the International Sociological Association. He is co-editor of Blackwell/Wiley's Encyclopedia of Social Movements and of The Future of Social Movement Research. Dynamics, Mechanisms, and Processes (Un. of Minnesota Press 2013). In 2009 he received a royal decoration for his efforts to link science and society; in 2013 he received the Harold Lasswell Award of the International Society of Political Psychology for his lifelong contribution to political psychology. In 2014 he received the John D. McCarthy Award from Notre Dame University for his contribution to the study of social movements and collective action. He holds a prestigious Advanced Investigator Grant of the European Research Council (ERC).