Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Social Movement Learning

Social movement learning refers to both the learning that takes place within social movements and learning about or from social movements. It is a rapidly growing area of interest, including within action research, and begins with the concept of social movement.

Social Movements

A social movement is a collective of people with a common interest directed towards political and/or social change. Because there must be widespread popular support and active participation, social movements are distinct and different from small, staffed and resourced organizations (like non-governmental organizations) or tiny pressure groups advocating, organizing, publicizing and/or pressurizing for an issue or position (e.g. Trotskyite sects or corporate lobbyists). There has been a growing interest in social movements because they are seen by many as important agents for social change.

For the most part, there is broad understanding of the political nature of social movements and broad agreement that they operate outside of the state. However, there are many areas of considerable disagreement. One such area concerns exactly what it is that social movements are trying to do. Since they usually emerge to deal with some concrete objective(s), social movements are often described as being ‘issue’ focused. Sometimes, this is accurate and reflects the self-understanding of the members of a movement. However, when a movement is explicitly struggling to overturn the existing order of things, such a description functions to diminish the scope and relevance of the social movement by reducing it to a ‘stakeholder’ that has a set place in the existing order of things.

Another key area of disagreement is the issue of the politics and democratic practice of social movements. Whilst there is often a widespread assumption that social movements are politically left oriented, many are in fact movements of reaction and intolerance. Even those social movements that are genuinely progressive when they emerge do not necessarily remain that way. Sometimes a social movement is the engineered product/project of a small group of committed activists who need to add social power to their argument or position or theory. Social movements created in this way seldom sustain themselves at the popular grass-roots level. In other instances, a social movement emerges from the experiences, thinking and struggle of ordinary people and is a genuinely grass-roots, popular project. In any case, social movements are invariably dynamic and contested spaces.

Social Movement Learning

As suggested above, for social movements to be social movements at all, the issue or issues they deal with must matter to a lot of people, and these people must be organized in some way. Further, for social movements to have an impact, the ideas and thinking about the nature of these issues and how to overcome them must also be well-organized, coherent and convincing. Not surprisingly then, there is growing interest in the processes and content of the learning and knowledge connected with social movements.

The relationship between social movements and knowledge and learning emerged as an important theme within social movement theory in the early 1990s. It was argued that social movements define themselves within society precisely in the creation of new knowledge and are thus fundamental determinants of human knowledge. Since then, there has been an increasing interest in social movements as sites of learning. Much of this work has centred on knowledge and knowledge production and has been undertaken by academics or intellectuals outside of the movements themselves. There is thus a growing body of work considering the differences between ‘academic’ and ‘movement’ intellectuals.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution