This course offers (1) a critical examination of the concepts of ‘people’, ‘power’, ‘social movements and ‘activism, (2) a historical review of key movements in the last century, and through this, (3) also addresses a broad variety of contentious issues ranging from labour to gender and from globalization to migration. In this three week programme, participants will examine bottom-up initiatives ranging from protest movements to self-organised communities as they to disrupt established top-down institutional control, or propose alternatives to it. 

Where possible, the course will pay specific attention to the local dynamics of these social movements in the city of Amsterdam. Potential topics include squatters’ movement, LGBTQ activism, a self-organised community of undocumented people, a project on alternative (Black) history, an advocacy organisation for sex workers’ rights, and more. The thread throughout the course are the dynamics between people and institutions, viewed from the former’s perspective to recenter narrative attention on people themselves. 

The course starts with a thorough overview of social movement theory and work on collective action. Subsequently, we will offer methodological tools to study bottom-up initiatives, after which we will combine the theories and methods to zoom-in on a the range of case studies. 

Dr. Christian Scholl is Assistant Professor at Maastricht University. His research focuses on urban sustainability, participatory and collaborative forms of urban planning and governance, social learning and social movements. He has published widely on these topcis, including “Two Sides of a Barricade. (Dis)order and Summit Protest in Europe” (Suny Press 2012) and ‘Out of Order. The Political Violence of Social Control in the Global Era’ (New York University Press, 2011). Over the past years, he has coordinated several transdisciplinary research projects on Urban Living Labs delivering interactive and reflexive support tools for practitioners and their experimental learning processes. These tools have been widely disseminated and well-received by a wide range of governance actors.

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