Course Meeting Times
Seminars: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session
Course Goals
Students who take this course will be able to:
- Understand and articulate the relationships between social movements and the media system, from various standpoints within social movement studies.
- Demonstrate knowledge of the major shifts in research approaches to media & mobilization over time.
- Apply theoretical and methodological tools of social movement research to a specific social movement.
- Plan, research, and complete a substantive project that contributes to comparative analysis of some aspect of social movement media, grounded in a concrete movement case and linked to the social movement studies literature. Final projects may take the form of a paper and / or a research tool.
Learning Tools and Activities
Participants in this course will engage with a series of written and audiovisual texts, discuss them together, and share reflections on the course blog; explore methods of social movement research in a series of labs, and develop and deliver a substantive final project that focuses on some aspect of media & mobilization.
Learning activities over the course of the semester will include:
- Engage with class texts and discussions;
- Take shared notes via ether pad;
- Write a series of blog posts;
- Present a summary of a social movement studies book to the rest of the class;
- Co-facilitate a seminar discussion;
- Attend a protest event and document media practices;
- Interview a social movement participant;
- Conduct a media attention / frame analysis;
- Conduct peer review of each other’s work;
- Complete a final project (develop clear research questions, choose appropriate methods & tools, produce compelling study design; present a detailed project workplan; research, write, and present the final project)
Website: Networked Social Movements
Student Assignments & Grading
Grading for this course is organized as follows:
- 10% texts & discussion: you are responsible for engaging with all texts for the class, and coming to all course meetings prepared to discuss the week’s texts
- 20% reflections / blog posts
- 10% final project proposal
- 10% peer review
- 10% book report
- 30% final project
- 10% final project presentation
A Note About the Writing Center
The Writing and Communication Center offers free one-on-one professional advice from published writers about oral presentations and about all types of academic, creative, and professional writing.
A Note About Blogging and Anonymity
All participants in the course are expected to post regular blog entries on a publicly accessible site (the course blog, Networked Social Movements). You may, however, choose to remain anonymous (actually, pseudonymous) by publishing under a pseudonym not easily linkable to your real name.
Required Statement on Plagiarism
Plagiarism—use of another’s intellectual work without acknowledgement - is a serious offense. It is the policy of the CMS Faculty that students who plagiarize will receive an F in the subject, and that the instructor will forward the case to the Committee on Discipline. Full acknowledgement for all information obtained from sources outside the classroom must be clearly stated in all written work submitted. All ideas, arguments, and direct phrasings taken from someone else’s work must be identified and properly footnoted (or linked). Quotations from other sources must be clearly marked as distinct from the student’s own work. For further guidance on the proper forms of attribution, consult the style guides available in the Writing and Communication Center Website on Plagiarism.
