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- From demanding equality and justice to reshaping political systems, these movements represent the voices of people standing up for their rights and values. While each movement arises from unique circumstances, their impacts often extend far beyond their origins, influencing cultures, policies, and even global perspectives.
rarest.org/history/social-movements-that-transformed-societies-around-the-globe18 Social Movements That Transformed Societies Around the ...
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Aug 31, 2022 · Here's what she thinks. Social movements are behind the most powerful changes around the world. From voting rights, to political upheavals and the fight for racial equality – social movements can change mindsets, enact laws and shift policies. But only if they succeed. So what are the features of a movement that can hold the attention of ...
- Black Lives Matter. With the killing of George Floyd by a US police officer in May 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement is an important one to support right now.
- Schools Strike for Climate. One girl with a protest sign outside Sweden’s parliament every Friday inspired a worldwide movement in less than one year.
- Indigenous land rights movement. The struggle for Indigenous land rights spanned decades. In 1963, the Yolngu people from Yirrkala in Arnhem Land presented parliament with the Yirrkala bark petitions, protesting to have their land and their rights returned.
- Girls’ rights to education. Malala Youfaszai grew up in the Swat Valley in Pakistan at a time when the Taliban had banned girls from attending school.
Oct 21, 2024 · Social movements have been a driving force behind significant changes in societies across the globe. From demanding equality and justice to reshaping political systems, these movements represent the voices of people standing up for their rights and values.
- Overview
- Characteristics of social movements
- Social movements and social change
- The membership
social movement, a loosely organized but sustained campaign in support of a social goal, typically either the implementation or the prevention of a change in society’s structure or values. Although social movements differ in size, they are all essentially collective. That is, they result from the more or less spontaneous coming together of people whose relationships are not defined by rules and procedures but who merely share a common outlook on society.
Collective behaviour in crowds, panics, and elementary forms (milling, etc.) are of brief duration or episodic and are guided largely by impulse. When short-lived impulses give way to long-term aims, and when sustained association takes the place of situational groupings of people, the result is a social movement.
A movement is not merely a perpetuated crowd, since a crowd does not possess organizational and motivational mechanisms capable of sustaining membership through periods of inaction and waiting. Furthermore, crowd mechanisms cannot be used to achieve communication and coordination of activity over a wide area, such as a nation or continent. A moveme...
All definitions of social movement reflect the notion that social movements are intrinsically related to social change. They do not encompass the activities of people as members of stable social groups with established, unquestioned structures, norms, and values. The behaviour of members of social movements does not reflect the assumption that the ...
The quixotic efforts of bold, imaginative individuals do not constitute social movements. A social movement is a collectivity or a collective enterprise. Individual members experience a sense of membership in an alliance of people who share their dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs and their vision of a better order. Like a group, a social movement is a collectivity with a common goal and shared values.
The sense of membership suggests that individuals are subject to some discipline. In addition to shared values, a social movement possesses norms. These norms prescribe behaviour that will symbolize the members’ loyalty to the social movement, strengthen their commitment to it, and set them apart from nonmembers. The norms prohibit behaviour that may cause embarrassment to the movement or provide excuses for attacks by opponents. Commitment is strengthened by participation in group activities with other members and by engaging in actions, individual or collective, that publicly define the individuals as committed members.
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A social movement also provides guidelines as to how members should think. Norms of this kind constitute something resembling a “party line”—a definition of the “correct” position for members to take with regard to specific issues. There is subtle pressure on individuals to espouse this position even in the absence of personal knowledge of the arguments for it. Not every member can be expected to study and think through the philosophy that justified the movement and its values. Ideology provides them with a ready-made, presumably authoritative set of arguments.
One of the defining characteristics of a social movement is that it is relatively long lasting; the activity of the membership is sustained over a period of weeks, months, or even years rather than flaring up for a few hours or a few days and then disappearing. A social movement is usually large, but, like duration, largeness is only relative. Some social movements, lasting many decades, may enlist hundreds of thousands of members. Some movements take place within the boundaries of a specific secondary group, such as a religious association or a local community, and may include only a few score or a few hundred members.
Social movement politics are formed from the premise that the world is socially constructed and that it is both possible and necessary to change it to achieve a movement’s vision of a just society and of power relations within it.
Jul 12, 2022 · From 19th-century abolitionism to Black Lives Matter today, progressive social movements have been at the forefront of social change. Yet it is seldom recognized that such movements have not only engaged in political action, but also posed crucial philosophical questions about the meaning of justice, and about how the demands of justice can be ...
Oct 20, 2020 · At their core, social movements advance when people act collectively by rising in solidarity with a shared purpose to address injustice and inequality. Drawing on insights from consumer psychology, this review investigates how social movements succeed in creating social change.
