CBSM Workshop 2015 Protesters and their Targets

The conference of the Collective Behavior and Social Movements (CBSM) section of the American Sociological Association will take place at Northwestern University at the downtown campus of the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, Illinois, on August 20 and 21, 2015 – immediately prior to the American Sociological Association national conference in Chicago.

The workshop will center around the many kinds of interactions that social movements have with the organizations, populations, and practices that they target for change. These might include corporations, police forces, other state agencies, or consumers who smoke, take drugs, eat meat, or buy clothes from sweatshops. But it might also include bystanders reached through the media. We hope to examine not only the campaigns and actions of protestors, but the strategic responses of their targets, and especially the dynamic interactions among multiple players. In addition to plenary and regular sessions centered on these themes, the workshop will include roundtables with senior scholars and selected regular sessions unrelated to the theme.

The workshop will be organized through three distinct kinds of events – plenary sessions, thematic sessions, and roundtables. Four plenary sessions will be organized with no other events scheduled simultaneously. These forums will anchor the conference with panels organized around the broad themes of the conference, and they are intended to provide intellectual continuity and coherence to the conference as a whole.

Registration closes at 5pm on Tuesday, August 18, 2015.