Social Movements in Higher Education, 2012-18

This project examines social movements on university campuses during 2012 to 2018, a period with high levels of social movement activity. Through social movement participation, students and campus community members engage in free speech and civil life, develop their identities and leadership skills, and influence university policies and practices. This study investigates: 1) the factors that encourage higher education social movements and their spread across campuses and countries; and 2) the strategies and rhetoric that universities use to respond.

The project contributes to the sociological study of social movements, organizations, higher education, and social media. Explanations of movement activism and university responses inform how campus communities may work more effectively to make universities inclusive and supportive of expression. Beneficiaries include students, staff, and university administrators.

To understand social movements in the 2010s, this project constructs an innovative quantitative dataset that documents higher education social movements and university administrations’ responses. Using machine learning and hand-coding, researchers draw from more than 16,000 news articles from 550 different student newspapers across two countries. Researchers reconcile different accounts of the same social movement.

Data on social movements are merged with secondary datasets on the organizational characteristics of post-secondary institutions, off-campus events, and social media. The dataset is made available to the public through an interactive website that illustrates and maps social movement patterns. A new open-source browser-based tool for reconciling differences across sources improves the ability of researchers to collect and use high quality social movement event data.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.