2025 COSMOS Summer school: Studying protest. Methodological practices in social movement research

Organized by the Center on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) based at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the Scuola Normale Superiore, the School is funded by the PNRR through the MERITA, the network for talent project*.
 
Time: 8 September - 12 September 2025
Location: Scuola Normale Superiore, Palazzone di Cortona
Max participants: 20
Language: English
Target audience: Graduate/Master’s/PhD students and early-career researchers
Deadline for applications: 31 May 2025
Contacts: cosmos@sns.it  
 
The Summer School is open to 20 graduate and master students as well as early career researchers with a specialised interest in protest from different fields of study, including political science, political sociology, political communication, and political anthropology from Europe and beyond.
 
Description
The School aims at disseminating knowledge on how to investigate processes and mechanisms that sustain mobilisation. Grassroots participation has been at the centre of the public and political debate in the last decade (covering a range of issues, from anti-austerity to climate, from feminist to solidarity with Palestine). Massive popular protests have deeply impacted national and global politics. The emergence of new protest movements requires scholars to reflect on the research strategies and methodologies that are employed to study grassroots participation. The summer school addresses this gap discussing how to apply the main methods in the social sciences to investigate social and political mobilisation.

Five teaching days, including thematic sessions, presentations and feedback on participants’ projects, and two keynote speeches by leading scholars on social movements and research methods: Donatella della Porta (Scuola Normale Superiore) and David Snow (University of California— Irvine). Instructors will include Lorenzo Bosi, Martín Portos and Lorenzo Zamponi (Scuola Normale Superiore) and Swen Hutter (WZB/Freie Universität Berlin), among others.

Application procedure and requirements
Applicants must email a cover letter in which they explain how the Summer School would be beneficial for their research, a 250-word abstract of their proposed paper, and a curriculum vitae no later than May 31st, 2025 to: cosmos@sns.it
Applicants will be informed of the outcome by email as soon as possible. Those offered places must confirm their participation within 7 days, after which places may be offered to applicants on the reserve list.

Students will be required to write and submit a 7,000-8,000 word paper before the Summer School begins. The paper will be then presented and discussed during the Summer School. Students will be also required to complete the mandatory readings for lectures and method sessions and to actively participate in the discussion.
Successful participation in the Summer School will be fully accredited with a certificate of participation.

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* MERITA, the network for talent project is the result of a collaboration between five Italian academic institutions: the Scuola Normale Superiore, the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, the Collegio Superiore dell’Università di Bologna, the Scuola Galileiana di Studi Superiori dell’Università di Padova and the Scuola Superiore di Studi Avanzati della Sapienza Università di Roma.
The MERITA project is funded within the Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR), Missione 4 – Istruzione e Ricerca, Componente 1, Investimento 3.4 "Didattica e competenze universitarie avanzate"- "Rafforzamento delle Scuole universitarie superiori". (National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), Mission 4 – Education and Research, Component 1, Investment 3.4 "Advanced university teaching and competences" - "Enhancement of the institutions for higher education").

Photo by Alexandre Brondino on Unsplash