Social Movements...

Author : Hamsika Mudireddy

Conventionally, social movements have broadly been perceived as organised efforts to bring about changes in the thought, beliefs, values, attitudes, relationships and major institutions in society, or to resist changes in any of the above structural elements of society. Social movements are viewed as intended and organised collective actions based on certain defined aims, methodology for collective mobilisation, distinctive ideology, identified leadership and organisation.

However, since the late 1960s, especially in the wake of the proliferation of new forms of collective protest, resistance and mobilisation, like the students, environmental, Black civil rights, women’s, etc., movements in the United States and Western Europe, efforts have been made to identify new elements in social movements.

It has been widely recognised that social movements help to generate a sense of collective identity and new ideas that recognise the reality itself. And redefine modes of collective existence and Melucci has emphasised on collective identity formation. To him, social movements grow around relationships of new social identity that are voluntarily conceived “to empower” members in defense of this identity. Eyerman and Jamison highlight that:

By articulating consciousness, the social movement provides public spaces for generating new thoughts, activating new actors, generating new ideas. Thus by producing new knowledge, by reflecting on their own cognitive identity, by saying what they stand for, by challenging the dominant assumptions of the social order, social movements develop new ideas that are fundamental to the process of human creativity. Thus social movements develop worldviews that restructure cognition, that recognise reality itself. The cognitive praxis of social movements is an important source of new social images and transformation of societal identities.