Call for Papers: "Contested Transformation: Social Movements at the Intersection of Ecology and Society"

 

 Social movements play a central role in negotiating and shaping social-ecological transformations. They seek to influence public opinion, as well as political and economic decisions, and private lifestyles through protests and campaigns. The spectrum of movements is diverse: while the climate and environmental movement pushes for faster and more far-reaching action to avert ecological disasters, right-wing populist actors are increasingly mobilizing successfully against a social-ecological transformations. Animal welfare and animal rights organizations have long sought to reshape societal relations with animals, and trade unions as well as feminist movements also incorporate ecological issues into their positions. 

Social movements are an omnipresent part of the conflict-ridden negotiation processes of social-ecological transformations. While blockade actions by climate activists are increasingly criminalized in Western countries, the number of murders of environmental activists in the Global South is on the rise (Nixon 2011). Furthermore, research indicates that anti-ecological mobilizations are often intertwined with antifeminist and patriarchal ideologies (Daggett 2018). Such ‚fossilized‘ identity politics not only strengthen reactionary movements but also complicate progressive alliances. Some critics accuse social movements within the ecological spectrum of primarily recruiting from more privileged social backgrounds despite their calls for global justice. Ecological movements in particular often appear in contradictory constellations: while some currents link progressive elements with market-oriented logics of neoliberal capitalism (Fraser 2016), reactionary forces specifically mobilize against this ‘progressive ecology’, which they perceive as elitist. Others diagnose the ultimate failure of the eco-emancipatory project (Blühdorn 2020). At the same time, social movements worldwide have shaped and changed politics, economy, and culture. They are attributed with a prefigurative potential to test new societal and lifestyle models that aim to provide alternatives to the Western industrial model of nature domination (Leach 2013). Social movements are either called upon to address the socio-historical complex of causes behind the ecological crisis or to be the voice of a new ecological class that is defined not by anthropocentric-historical concepts but by the habitability of the planet (Latour and Schultz 2022). 

The public discourse on the engagement of social movements in the context of social-ecological transformations is equally diverse: media reports about climate protests range from portraying young people as honorable saviors of the planet to their discrediting as ‚climate extrimists‘ and ‚eco-terrorists.‘ Policies for implementing ecological measures lead to controversial reactions. Within the political party spectrum, the performative association with 

or, conversely, the distancing from ecological protests is regarded as an indicator of a fundamental stance toward the social-ecological project. 

In sociology and social movement studies, there has traditionally been a strong interest in social-ecological movements (Rootes 2004) and movements of anti-ecological backlash have recently received increasing attention. In particular, organizations within the climate movement, such as Fridays for Future (FFF), have been extensively researched in recent years (Pollex and Soßdorf 2023). Furthermore, contemporary theoretical diagnostics of society make – often critical – references to social-ecological movements as proponents of a conflict-ridden governance phantasma (Nassehi 2024) or avant-gardes of an upcoming technocracy (Staab 2022). 

With the thematic issue „ Contested Transformation: Social Movements at the Intersection of Ecology and Society,“ Soziologie und Nachhaltigkeit (Sociology and Sustainability) aims to provide a forum for current research in this field and to further develop the debate on the 

- Which milieus support (anti-)ecological movements? How can the movements be sociographically described? What intersectional perspectives exist on them? 

- What coalition formations, networks, and distinctions are central within and between social-ecological movements? What about movements of anti-ecological backlash? 

- How do social movements ‚frame‘ social-ecological transformations, and how successful are these strategies? How can the differing resonance of specific frames be explained? 

- In which relation do fundamental social criticism and critiques of societal-nature relations stand in social-ecological movements? To what extent are global and postcolonial perspectives on social-ecological struggles taken into account? What (real) utopias and practices of ecological care and solidarity can be found within the movements? 

- To what extent do social-ecological social movements succeed in influencing politics, economics, law, culture, and society? 

- How can social-ecological movements and protests against social-ecological transformations be interpreted from a sociological perspective? How do gender-critical and power-critical perspectives – for example, regarding progressive neoliberalism or the intertwining of anti-ecology and anti-feminism – affect the understanding of socio-ecological movements and their opponents? 

Interested authors are invited to submit exposés of a maximum of 500 words (including bibliography) by November 15, 2025. Both theoretical and empirical contributions are welcome. In addition to the submission of abstracts for scholarly contributions to the journal SuN, proposals for contributions to the accompanying blog of SuN aimed at a broader audience are also encouraged. All submissions can be sent to sun.redaktion@uni-muenster.de.

 

Bibliography: 

Blühdorn, I. (2020): Nachhaltige Nicht-Nachhaltigkeit. Warum die ökologische Transformation der Gesellschaft nicht stattfindet. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. 

Daggett, C. (2018): Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire. In: Millennium, Vol. 47, Issue 1, pp. 25- 44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818775817 

Fraser, N. (2016): Progressive Neoliberalism versus Reactionary Populism: A Choice that Feminists Should Refuse. In: NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, Vol. 24, Issue 4, pp. 281-284. https://doi.org/10.1080/080387 40.2016.1278263 

Latour, B./Schultz, N. (2022): Zur Entstehung einer ökologischen Klasse: Ein Memorandum. Berlin: Suhrkamp. 

Leach, D. K. (2013): Prefigurative politics. In: della Porta, D./McAdam, D./Snow, D. A. [Eds.]: The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of social and political movements. Oxford: Wiley, pp. 1004-1006. 

Nassehi, A. (2024): Kritik der großen Geste anders über gesellschaftliche Transformation nachdenken. München: C.H. Beck. 

Nixon, R. (2011): Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard: Harvard University Press. 

Pollex, J./Soßdorf, A. (2023): Fridays for Future. Einordnung, Rezeption und Wirkung der neuen Klimabewegung. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. 

Rootes, C. (2004): Environmental Movements. In: Snow, D. A. Snow/Soule, S. A./Kriesi, H. [Eds.]: The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., pp. 608-640. 

Staab, P. (2022): Anpassung. Leitmotiv der nächsten Gesellschaft. Berlin: Suhrkamp.