300753 Digital Technologies in/of Social Movements (S) (SoSe 2024)

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, several case studies on different social movements which occurred in different parts
of the world will be discussed in terms of the role that digital technologies play in their
constitution and development. Then, 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
and audiovisual) naturally occurring data obtained from the Internet in the example of a
social movement.
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 lecturer understands German well. Therefore, German-speaking students who understand English well but do not yet speak it very well are also welcome.

Requirements for participation, required level

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.