WS24/25

This introductory course aims to provide students with basic sociological knowledge about the relationship between digital technologies and social movements. As a recently developed interdisciplinary research field, which was mainly born out of the intersection of social movement studies and media and communication studies, the area of study this course introduces might help students not only to acquire specific knowledge about the current conditions of social movements and the novel forms of collective action that occur by virtue of the ubiquity of digital technologies, but also to enlarge their previous understanding of contemporary societies in general as well as the main dynamics that change them in particular. 

By learning a set of cutting-edge theories and methods, moreover, students will acquire elementary theoretical and methodological knowledge on this topic, which enables them, in turn, to apply it in practice and be able to sociologically analyse different instances of recent social movements. 

 

The lecture series begins with providing the fundamentals of this interdisciplinary area of study by giving a broad overview of the basic issues such as what a social movement is and what the concept of social movement actually refers to, how important the process of mediatization is and how significant it is that digital technologies increasingly penetrate into and become part of almost all kinds of social action in contemporary societies. After this, a set of innovative theories and methods that are applicable to and useful for the sociological examination of contemporary social movements will be introduced; these include chiefly the theory of communicative constructivism and a combination of certain ethnographic strategies (e.g. multi-sited ethnography, focused ethnography, videography). Finally, the practical applications of two methods of analysis, namely “membership categorization analysis” and “sequential video analysis”, will be introduced to students in an applied manner by using a piece of (textual as well as audiovisual) naturally occurring data obtained from the Internet in the example of a social movement. Learning this particular combination of specific theories, methods, and methods of analysis will provide students, therefore, with a ready-to-use toolkit with which it is possible to examine any instances of recent social movements in a comprehensive and truly sociological way. 

The content of the course, in this sense, also intends to make a difference in that, unlike the dominant tendency in the field (i.e. restricting the focus mainly to networks, one specific medium, and quantitative methods), the primary focus of this course will be on social (inter)action, multiplicity of media, and qualitative methods instead. Therefore, the course will offer students a considerably new perspective in the field, the acquisition of which might give them the opportunity to make further contributions to this recently developed area of study. 

 

The examination achievement in the module is based on “term paper” whereas the course achievement will be based on “analytic exercises”, which students carry out by working on naturally occurring data obtained from the Internet (either chosen by themselves or given to them) in the example of a social movement that still operates today.