Comparative Social Movements
Research Paper:
Your paper should address one of the central questions raised in the class about the origins, development and decline of social movements in the US and abroad. You may do this by investigating a particular social movement (SNCC: Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Greenpeace, Moral Majority, etc.) a type of social movements (the labor movement, the women’s movement, etc), a particular movement theory (resource mobilization, political process, cultural analysis). Regardless of what you study, your paper must include a critical review (a literature review) of the competing schools of thought within social movement theory as they apply to your topic. You need to situation your analysis within the existing literature and theoretical debates:
How does the theory of resource mobilization or social networks, or our readings on the civil rights movements inform your analysis, for example?