Temporalities of collective action

Ritual, eventful, exceptional: the conceptualisation and symbolic articulation of time is central in the development and in the study of collective action. Collective action cannot be analysed only at a certain moment in the present and is often understood as constituting sequences, such as in the concepts of “cycle of protest” and “wave of mobilisation”. Social movement studies have been referring for a long time to the fact that social actors engage with time in different ways, such as in the analyses of the ritualistic nature of the repertoire of contention, of the role of events and critical junctures, of latency and abeyance, of the narrative construction of spontaneity, and so on. Furthermore, analyses of the role of time in shaping collective action have been characterising fields like social history or works at the crossroads between history and social science for decades. Memory, rituality, millenarianism: the course aims at analysing these issues, addressing the temporalities of collective action from different points of view and drawing on different literature, providing both readings that draw on this multidisciplinary tradition and examples rooted in contemporary collective action.