Book Launch: Understanding European Movements: New Social Movements, Global Justice Struggles, Anti-Austerity Protest With James Jasper

James Jasper is a leading social movements researcher and author or editor of ten books including The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography and Creativity in Social Movements,  Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, Contention in Context: Political Opportunities and the Emergence of Protest, and Nuclear Politics: Energy and the State in the United States, Sweden, and France.  His lecture will launch the first publication from the CES social movements research network, Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Laurence Cox's Understanding European movements: new social movements, global justice struggles, anti-austerity protest, with chapters from CES network members. This book is the first sustained scholarly engagement with the new wave of European social movement mobilizations, and situates them in historical perspective. It situates individual movement waves within the longer term of national and international movement histories, and stresses the importance of engaging with the specificities of national political and cultural contexts. Topics range from Italian social centres to the Icelandic "saucepan revolution", from French anti-capitalist peasant movements to the Hungarian and Romanian reception of the global justice movement and from the long history of the European anti-nuclear power movement to collective learning among Spanish Indignados. James Jasper's many contributions to the cultural analysis of social movements make this semi-plenary session an intellectual highlight.