Exploring Social Movements: Theories, Experiences, and Trends

This book introduces the readers to the dynamics of various kinds of social movements. It examines how social movements have become an instrument of social change including assertion of identity and protest against marginalisation. This book describes three major domains – conceptual, experiential, and the impact of globalisation on social movements. The volume begins by locating social movements within broad and contemporary social processes and explores the intrinsic and complex patterns of dynamics among state, market, and social movements from a critical sociological perspective. It explains the meaning, basic features, origins and types, leadership and ideology, and perspectives of social movements and probes into major experiences of eight social movements in India, namely, peasant and farmers, tribal, Naxalite and Maoist, Dalit, working class, women, ethnic, and environmental movements. This book also analyses the role of information technology, media, and civil society in the spread and continuation of such movements. The experiences of queer, new religious, anti-systemic, and anti-displacement movements would also help readers understand how globalisation has offered new avenues of protest to diverse sections of the population. Lessons of anti-globalisation movements across the world provide a futuristic perspective in assessing the strength of social movements in a global society.

This book will be useful to the students, researchers, and faculty working in the field of political science, sociology, gender studies, and post-colonial contemporary Indian politics in particular. It will also be an invaluable and interesting reading for those interested in South Asian studies.

Biswajit Ghosh has recently retired as the Vice Chancellor of The University of Burdwan, West Bengal. Being a Professor of Sociology, he taught, supervised, and conducted research on certain emergent issues of the discipline of Sociology for 37 years. He studied in The University of Calcutta and Jawaharlal Nehru University. He also served as a Visiting Faculty in many universities. He has authored 107 articles, including reviews, e-contents, and study modules, and written three major policy documents of UNICEF, Govt. of West Bengal, and Save the Children. He has edited/written the following five books: Social Movement: Concepts, Issues and Experiences from India (2020), Methodology of Research in Sociology (2018, Inflibnet e-book), Social Movements (2018, Inflibnet e-book), Interrogating Development: Discourses on Development in India Today (2012), and Pariveshvidya (2012, The University of Burdwan). He was a Module Coordinator of UGC E-Pathshala e-content on Research Methodology and Social Movement Courses in Sociology. He is in the editorial board of many reputed journals.