Community-engaged research on environmental problems has reshaped researcher-participant relationships, academic-community interaction, and the role of community partners in human subjects protection and ethical oversight. We draw on our own and others' research collaborations with environmental health and justice social movement organizations to discuss the ethical concerns that emerge in community-engaged research. In this paper we introduce the concept of reflexive research ethics: ethical guidelines and decision-making principles that depend on continual reflexivity concerning the relationships between researchers and participants. Seeing ethics in this way can help scientists conduct research that simultaneously achieves a high level of professional conduct and protects the rights, well-being, and autonomy of both researchers and the multiple publics affected by research. We highlight our research with community-based organizations in Massachusetts, California, and Alaska, and discuss the potential impacts of the community or social movement on the research process and the potential impacts of research on community or social movement goals. We conclude by discussing ways in which the ethical concerns that surface in community-engaged research have led to advances in ethical research practices. This type of work raises ethical questions whose answers are broadly relevant for social movement, environmental, and public health scholars.

This article contributes to the growing field of studies on party-protest linkages that highlight the dynamic nature, complementarity and fuzziness of the parliamentary arena and protest arena. Taking the policy field of asylum, it investigates, first, the conditions for the permeability of the protest arena for party activism and, second, the ways in which party activism shapes and transforms the protest arena. The empirical observations refer to Austria, which has a political framework with highly politicized immigration, strong political parties and a weak protest culture. Methodologically, the paper combines a protest event analysis with two in-depth case studies on protests. The authors argue that the openness of the asylum protest arena for parties is characterized by modest protest demands, and depends on the dominant political position as well as the decision making structure regarding the protest issue. The article demonstrates that pro-asylum protests are less open to political parties than anti-asylum protests, which are in tune with the dominant political position on asylum in Austria. The findings also show that anti-asylum protests are not only more likely to attract the involvement of political parties, but also tend to become instrumentalized for party-competitive ends. Pro-asylum protests, in contrast, keep their substantive, grievance-focused orientation even when political parties step in.

This paper discusses 1) how #MahsaAmini has become a significant hybrid movement in Iran and 2) how it is taking Twitter activism into the post-fake news era. I will begin by reviewing the existing literature on Twitter and democracy. Then, I will discuss the roots of the #MahsaAmini, which make it a hybrid movement. Further, I will show how Iranians have circumvented the regime's fake news campaigns and cyber army. This paper argues that while non-democratic regimes have developed more complex methods of suppressing digital protests, these efforts are ineffective in large-scale protests.

This article explores how young activists in Portugal and Finland negotiate the value of social media in their practices. Considering the near ubiquitous intertwinement of online-offline environments, and its contradictory promises for social movements, we look at these negotiations through the moral principles drawn upon to critique and justify social media practices. Based on ethnographic data from Portuguese climate activists and Finnish mental health activists, we build on pragmatist sociology as an analytical frame to investigate value and meaning-making within these social movements. Results show how activists predominantly criticize social media for its fame-valued logic, which they consider leading to the and the . These challenges are managed with reference to the groups' civic values through two sets of practices: 1) and 2) . Yet these practices reveal different compromise strategies in each country to accommodate social media demands and core group values, highlighting different interpretations of civic values that materialize in competing stances in relation to 'political' content and 'individual' action. We argue that an analytical framework focusing on values as they unfold in everyday practices is particularly apt to understanding meaning construction in social movements, whose very essence is the evaluation and critique of existing justifications within certain socio-political arrangements.

Engagement with science is a prominent feature for many social movements, yet the dimensions of that scientific engagement and bidirectional relationships between science and advocacy are incompletely theorized in social movement scholarship. While social movement scholarship has previously demonstrated the importance of external political and economic factors for social movement processes and efficacy, we show that the emergence and success of environmental health activism is also dependent on dynamic relationships between scientific evidence and lay demands for particular types of knowledge production and application. Despite decades of industrial production and widespread contamination, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) were a politically obscure class of chemicals until a recent spike in attention from activist, regulatory, and scientific circles. Drawing from in-depth interviews with activists of PFAS-impacted communities, we develop the concept to examine how activists create and mobilize scientific factors to support their goals, and how scientific factors, in turn, support the emergence of further activism. Dimensions of scientific opportunity include availability of funding streams, openness and receptivity of institutionalized scientific spaces, presence of collaborative or community-led research, methodological and technological advancements aligned with activist demands, availability of relevant scientific findings and datasets, and presence of prominent scientific allies. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our concept to a wide range of social movements addressing science and technology.