Call for proposals
From resisting the new
authoritarianisms to the struggle for climate justice, and from community-based
activism to global social change, social movements are playing a dramatic role
in the 21st century. With this has come a renewed dialogue between movement
practitioners and researchers, where engaged scholars meet activist knowledge
and theorising. This series aims to enable activists to “learn from each
other’s struggles” and to enable radical scholarship grounded in movements’ own
learning and discussions.
How do movements win and why do
they lose? What enables them to move beyond their current shape, and when do
they fall back? How do their ideas, structures and practices affect their
outcomes? How can they best handle encounters with the state, police, corporate
wealth, media and cultural privilege? What is at stake in the internal politics
of movements and what can be learnt from past mistakes? What would it take for
movements to bring about another world?
The Social Movements/Activist
Research series brings together activist scholarship of many different kinds
from around the world, covering a wide range of different disciplines, movement
issues and intellectual traditions, reflected in the editorial advisory board.
Books in the series speak equally to university researchers and students and to
movement practitioners and a wider public. They combine the highest standards
of scholarship with a deep commitment to activist and public relevance.
The series is published by Pluto
Press (https://www.plutobooks.com/about/), an independent radical publisher based in the UK and with a
long track record of publishing high-quality intellectual contributions for
radical politics. Since 2018 Pluto is a social enterprise, majority-owned by a
dedicated trust and with staff holding a quarter of the voting rights. Their
books have always been distributed in activist as well as academic contexts and
come out in paperback and ebook at the same time as hardback. Pluto are
currently investing in expanding distribution in North America.
Criteria
We are happy to work with new
authors and those new to this kind of writing. The editing process is set up to
be as supportive as possible and to bring your arguments and research out as
strongly as possible. We are looking for proposals for books which:
- Represent high-quality thinking on social movements
- Are useful reading for well-informed activists
- Explicitly identify the practical implications of their research or argument
- Are written so they can be read not only by specialists but also by social movement participants, by students and academics in other fields, and a general educated audience
- Clearly explain the context (issue, national politics, movement history etc.) so that unfamiliar readers will be able to learn from the book
- Are consciously speaking to a wider audience. We are particularly interested in authors who are willing to make an argument for the book in activist, academic or public contexts.
Most books in the series will be
70,000 – 100,000 word “monographs” (ie a single argument running throughout).
We will consider occasional edited collections. We also hope to publish some
shorter books (around 50,000 words) written for a wide audience (activists,
students, general public) and in more of an overview or essay style.
Please consider including some
visuals that will help readers get a different sense of the subject of the
book, as well as online material (eg websites, good social media accounts to
follow, etc.) for people who want to go deeper.
For expressions of interest, please
email both series editors: Laurence Cox laurence.cox@mu.ie and Alf Gunvald Nilsen alfgunvald@gmail.com with your idea and we can work together on developing a book
proposal.
Series description
The Social Movements/Activist
Research series is dedicated to engaged research on social movements, including
research on street activism and online conflict, feminist and GLBTQ+ movements,
ecological alternatives and radical culture, labour activism and community
organising, anti-racist and indigenous politics, radical political parties and
“identity politics” among others. Such forms of organising, with varying levels
of institutionalisation but all involving collective participation in conflict
that goes beyond the routine, are a widespread feature of the social world and
raise a wide range of intellectual and ethical questions. Some of these are of
very widespread public interest: how can politics, economics and culture be changed
so as to effectively tackle climate change, poverty, gender inequality or
racism in the face of entrenched interests and institutional inertia?
Dialogue between researchers and
practitioners is an established feature of many academic fields, from nursing
to architecture and from social work to design. However, while research in
social movement studies naturally developed from this form of dialogue – and
more specifically from student activists who became researchers in the field –
the period from the later 1970s to the early 2000s saw it becoming increasingly
distant from practice as this generation aged. There are field-specific reasons
for this which were not shared in other disciplines, so that engaged research
of many kinds is widespread in the academy (from feminism to Black Studies and
from history to anthropology), often referencing social movements but rarely
studying them directly. Conversely, “social movement studies” refused to pay
attention to these other forms of theory and research, which it saw as largely
irrelevant to its own self-understanding as a subfield.
For the past decade and a half
this situation has increasingly been criticised from within social movement
studies, using phrases such as movement-relevant research, activist scholarship,
practitioner research, engaged research etc. while various forms of
collaborative research methodologies such as feminist research, participatory
action research, co-research etc. have become widespread. This approach to
social movement studies is increasingly influential not only across different
academic disciplines and networks, but also among funding bodies both pure and
applied and in different countries. Such research does not set out to celebrate
(or condemn) the movements it works with, but rather to treat their
practitioners seriously in terms of their own practical / tacit knowledge as
well as in relation to what are often substantial movement-linked education and
training programmes, internal research and theoretical or strategic writing.
The books in this series will
speak both to academic researchers and to practitioners working in these
contexts – who are, increasingly, often the same individuals at different
stages in their careers, as movement practitioners enter the academy and as those
with graduate degrees in social movements return to activism. They will engage
with the explanatory and analytical questions that are the meat and drink of
any serious intellectual work; at the same time they will consistently ask what
the practical implications of these discussions are, and will engage in
dialogue with the debates that matter to practitioners. Without in any way
dumbing down, they will be written for the multiple audiences (different
academic disciplines, different movement traditions of knowledge, different
countries etc.) this implies.
Series editors
Laurence Cox (Associate
Professor in Sociology, National University of Ireland Maynooth. Has published Why Social Movements Matter: an Introduction,
Rowman and Littlefield 2018 etc.)
Alf Gunvald Nilsen (Professor
of Sociology, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Has published Adivasis and the State: Subalternity and
Citizenship in India’s Bhil Heartland, Cambridge University Press 2018 etc.)
Editorial Advisory Board
John Chalcraft (Professor of
Middle East History and Politics, London School of Economics. Has published Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern
Middle East, Cambridge 2016 etc.)
Ana Dinerstein (Associate
Professor of Sociology, University of Bath. Has published The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: the Art of Organizing Hope,
Palgrave 2014 etc.)
Christina Heatherton
(Assistant Professor of American Studies, Barnard College. Has published Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis
Led to Black Lives Matter, Verso 2016 etc. )
Dolly Kikon (Senior Lecturer,
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Has published
Living with Oil and Coal: Resource
Politics and Militarization in Northeast India, University of Washington
Press 2019 etc.)
John Krinsky (Professor of
Political Science, CUNY Graduate Center. Has published Who Cleans the Park? Public Work and Urban Governance in New York City,
Chicago 2017 etc.)
David Landy (Assistant
Professor of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin. Has published Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights:
Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel, Zed 2011.)
Ching Kwan Lee (Professor of
Sociology, UCLA. Has published The
Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa,
Chicago 2018 etc.)
Xochitl Leyva Solano
(Professor, Center for Higher Research of Social Anthropology,
Chiapas. Has published Remunicipalization
in Chiapas. Politics and the Political in Times of Counter-Insurgency,
CIESAS 2013 etc.)
Alice Mattoni (Assistant Professor, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence. Has
published Media Practices and Protest
Politics: How Precarious Workers Mobilize, Routledge 2016 etc.)
Geoffrey Pleyers (Professor of Sociology, Université de Louvain and
Researcher, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris. Has published Alter-globalization: Becoming Actors in the
Global Age, Polity 2011 etc.)
Srila Roy (Senior Lecturer in
Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand. Has published New South Asian Feminisms: Paradoxes and Possibilities, Zed 2012
etc.)
Anna Szolucha (Research
Fellow, University of Northumbria. Has published Real Democracy in the Occupy Movement: No Stable Ground, Routledge
2017 etc.)
Karl von Holdt (Director of
the Society Work and Development Institute, University of the Witwatersrand.
Has published Conversations with
Bourdieu: the Johannesburg Moment, Wits University Press 2012 etc.)
Lesley Wood (Associate Professor
of Sociology, York University Toronto. Has published Crisis and Control: the Militarization of Protest Policing, Pluto
2014 etc.)
