Cristiana Olcese’s research while affiliated with University of Exeter and other places

Hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) was a controversial issue in the United Kingdom that sparked national and community-led groups to organise protest mobilisations. To date, however, the social science literature has largely focussed upon general anti-fracking discourse rather than on the physical, community-led mobilisations that emerged from the frustrations of people directly affected at a local level by threats to their community. This paper develops and applies a novel conceptualisation of political opportunity structures at the nexus of the national and local levels to more fully explore the usually overlooked role of local-level structures in interaction with the national level in shaping protest. It uses protest event analysis with data derived from two key activist-specific sources. The analysis draws on data from over 1,400 protests occurring across 69 counties from 2011 to 2019. In so doing, this paper observes and accounts for variance in the form and frequency of community-led anti-fracking protest events within and between different areas of England across the life course of the protest episodes. This paper finds that trends in protest frequency and form over time correlate to shifts in opportunity structures, particularly regarding local and national-level interactions, and that this can be usefully conceptualised through a local-national-state-nexus.

There is an emerging 'aesthetic turn' within sociology which currently lacks clear focus. This paper reviews the different issues feeding into this interest and contributes to its development. Previous renderings of this relationship have set the aesthetic up against sociology, as an emphasis which 'troubles' conventional understandings of sociality and offers no ready way of reconciling the aesthetic with the social. Reflecting on the contributions of recent social theorists, from figures including Bourdieu, Born, Rancière, Deleuze, and Martin, we argue instead for the value of a social aesthetic which critiques instrumentalist and reductive understandings of the social itself. In explicating what form this might take, the latter parts of the paper take issue with classical modernist conceptions of the aesthetic which continue to dominate popular and sociological understandings of the aesthetic, and uses the motif of 'walking' to show how the aesthetic can be rendered in terms of 'the mundane search' and how this search spans everyday experience and cultural re-production. We offer a provisional definition of social aesthetics as the embedded and embodied process of meaning making which, by acknowledging the physical/corporeal boundaries and qualities of the inhabited world, also allows imagination to travel across other spaces and times. It is hoped that this approach can be a useful platform for further inquiry.

Using survey data collected at 52 major street demonstrations across five European countries during 2009–2012, this article contributes to the debate on the (contentious) politics of the highly educated in Europe. In particular, it explores which of the theories explaining student activism better capture differences in motivations and ways of engaging in protests between protesters who have a university education and those who do not. The findings build on the literature explaining student participation in protest in terms of campus-based politicization. Some support for the liberal education theory comes from the finding that protesters with a university degree are more likely to be left-wing than those without a university education. The article also provides some insights on the importance of political generations.

This chapter first addresses the ideology and policies aiming to transform the English higher education system in a competitive global market. It then focuses on the motivations and identity of protest participants who attended the two major student demonstrations which occurred in the UK, in the 2010 Winter. At the centre of the demonstrations organised by the National Union of Students (NUS) were the Coalition Government's plans of making "unprecedented funding cuts across higher education". Students were concerned with what has been publicly discussed since the release of the Browne Report : a review to consider the future direction of higher education funding in England, launched on 9 November 2009 and published on 12 October 2010. The student movements emerged in Europe and the US in the 1960s inspired a new approach to the study of social movements: the New Social Movement (NSM) theory. Keywords: Coalition Government; English higher education system; National Union of Students (NUS); New Social Movement (NSM) theory

Although Occupy has received extensive media and scholarly attention, there has not yet been systematic research on its activists' recruitment pathways and modes of participation. In this article, we focus on the mobilization success (Staggenborg 1995) of Occupy and adopt the concepts of 'free space' and 'modes of association' (Polletta 1999) to understand how individuals came to participate in Occupy. We consider biographical and structural availability and make distinctions between those more or less involved. By drawing on qualitative and quantitative data gathered in November and December 2011 in London we find that Occupy activists take a range of pathways into differential forms of involvement (more or less visible or time-consuming, offline and on-line). Some participants had previously been involved in social movement and 'indigenous' organisations, like the church. Yet at the same time Occupy attracted novices lacking prior engagement in indigenous or social movement organisations. But what Occupy activists shared was an interest in creating inclusive prefigurative structures where the 'path was the destination'. In contrast to the mass media's scepticism of the success of Occupy, our focus on mobilization processes and outcomes shows Occupy to be successful in this regard.

Protest participation scholarship tends to focus on the special characteristics of novices and the highly committed, underplaying the significance of those in between. In this article, we fill a lacuna in the literature by refocusing attention on four different types of protesters: novices, returners, repeaters, and stalwarts. Employing data from protest surveys of demonstrations that took place in seven European countries (2009-2010), we test whether these types of protesters are differentiated by biographical-structural availability and/or psychologicalattitudinal engagement. Our results suggest that biographical availability distinguishes our four groups, but not as a matter of degree. Few indicators of structural availability distinguish between the groups of protesters, and emotional factors do not distinguish between them at all. Some political engagement factors suggest similarity between novices and returners. This confirms the need to avoid treating protesters as a homogenous group and reinforces the importance of assessing the contributions of diverse factors to sustaining "protest politics.".