Understanding Social Movements: Research Tips and Examples
Databases are effective if you know the kind of items you want to look for. Films, articles from a specific discipline, Newspapers...all have material that will be helpful as you seek to learn about and from social movements. Using keywords like "social movement" "social change" "political movement" or "grassroots" can yield some initial results. From there you can get more specific as you find which movements you want to know more about. Explore all of our databases here.
Reference Databases
Use these to understand what a social movement is, as well as a general overview of specific ones. Examples include: Credo Reference and
Oxford Reference
Primary Sources
Primary (first-hand) resources are ideal for understanding what the motivations, hopes, and fears of peoples involved in various movements experienced (or continue to experience). Examples include: Archives of Sexuality and Gender, Women's Studies Archive, and Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America. See the "Primary Sources" section of the guide for more on how to find and use primary sources in your research.
Secondary Sources
Scholarly sources are typically secondary (second-hand). Looking at databases focused on communication, political, sociological, historical, gender, and ethnic studies will be helpful in finding more information about certain social movements. Examples include American History and Life, Black Thought and Culture, Chicano Database, Communication Source, GenderWatch, and Sociological Abstracts (to name just a few!)
Newspapers
Sometimes primary sources, other times secondary, newspapers are another great way to get a "boots on the ground" perspective of social and political movements. Examples include African American Periodicals and Hispanic American Newspapers
Film
Media has always been a powerful tool to share perspectives. Fresno State students can stream videos, documentaries and other movies through databases like Kanopy, Docuseek2, and American History in Video.
For interdisciplinary research, you can search for specific types of journals through our "journals by title" feature on the library catalog. Looking for journals that relate to the movement(s) you're most interested in learning about can help make the search results more digestible, since it'll only look within a specific journal.
For example, if you're interested in women's suffrage, you might search for "women" and "history" to find Journal of Women's History. Within that journal you might just type the word "suffrage."
If you're interested in movements in California, you might look at "California" and find California History. From there, type in something like "movements" or "social change."
Librarian Sample Sources
The politics of the near : on the edges of protest in South Africa by ISBN: 0823299988Publication Date: 2022
- Communication & Social ChangeCommunication and Social Change is an annual review which offers the best researches and reflections about the transforming effects of human communication. In the middle of the technological revolution of the information and knowledge society, this review offers a common framework to all the researches which focus on the social impact of the growing channels of human communication: professionals from Education, Audiovisual Communication, Journalism, Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, Social Policy, Social Work, Telecommunications and Human-Computer Interaction -among other- will be welcome to our publication. It is, then, an openly interdisciplinary review which accepts all those papers that try to answer to the main aim of this publication: to show empirically all those experiences which state the transforming power of human communication and of the media offered in the XXI century.
- ContentionContention is dedicated to research on social protest, collective action and contentious politics. As a multidisciplinary journal, Contention’s mission is to bridge scholarly divides and promote knowledge exchange across a diverse audience of scholars in the social sciences and humanities. The journal publishes articles by academics and practitioners on topics spanning the full range of social and political contention.
- Journal of Social ChangeThe Journal of Sustainable Social Change's (JSSC) mission is to foster sustainable social change by adding to the body of research used by future scholars and to serve as a repository from which academics, practitioners, and policy makers can draw. We believe that positive social change that lasts and moves toward a more just and healthy world is a deliberate process of creating and applying ideas, strategies, and actions to promote the sustainability, worth, dignity, and development of individuals, communities, organizations, institutions, cultures, and societies. Positive social change results in the improvement of human and social conditions.
- Social Movement StudiesSocial Movement Studies is an international and inter-disciplinary journal providing a forum for academic debate and analysis of extra-parliamentary political, cultural and social movements throughout the world. Social Movement Studies has a broad, inter-disciplinary approach designed to accommodate papers engaging with any theoretical school and which study the origins, development, organisation, values, context and impact of historical and contemporary movements active in all parts of the world. We understand our inter-disciplinary approach to include both contributions that engage with particular schools of thought relevant to social movements and popular protest and contributions that extend across disciplinary boundaries. Social Movement Studies aims to publish soundly researched analyses and to re-establish writing as intervention.
- Ufahamu : journal of the African Activist Association.Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies is an interdisciplinary journal of African Studies. Named after the Swahili word for comprehension, understanding or being, Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies is committed to publishing views about social issues, addressing both the general reader and the scholar. Since its establishment in 1970, Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies continues to challenge and correct misconceptions about Africa, thereby creating relevant criteria for African Studies. It publishes material supportive of the Africa and socially significant works of African history, politics, economics, sociology, anthropology, law, planning and development, literature, culture, and other topics about the continent and the African Diaspora.
- The Commons Social Change LibraryAll materials are free, digital, and directly available. The Commons Library includes 1000+ educational resources in a range of formats. Topics include campaign strategy, community organising, working effectively in groups, justice and diversity, creative activism, and much more.
- Global Social Protest Research Group (Johns Hopkins)The Global Social Protest Research Working Group of the Arrighi Center includes faculty, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students. The group is in the process of creating a new database on global social unrest from 1851 to today from events reported in the international press, including The New York Times and The Guardian, with the goal of mapping the spatial-temporal distribution of events and forms of protest and grievances. The working group is also using the database to systematically compare the current period with past analogous periods of widespread global unrest.
- Mapping Social Movements Project (University of Washington)This project produces and displays free interactive maps showing the historical geography of dozens of social movements that have influenced American life and politics since the late 19th century, including radical movements, civil rights movements, labor movements, women's movements, and more. Until now historians and social scientists have mostly studied social movements in isolation and often with little attention to geography. This project allows us to see where social movements were active and where not, helping us better understand patterns of influence and endurance. It exposes new dimensions of American political geography, showing how locales that in one era fostered certain kinds of social movements often changed political colors over time.