U.S. Campus Mobilization Across Waves of Contention, 2012-2018

• In Event: 21066 - Advances in Data and Methods for Collective Behavior/Social Movements Research

Abstract

This study examines institutional and geographic factors leading to protest mobilization in U.S. higher education across different political issues. We utilize a large and unprecedented dataset, the Higher Ed Protest Events Data (HiPED). Created through a combination of machine learning and hand-coding, HiPED contains 4,025 protest events across 512 U.S. universities and colleges in the 2010s, based on student newspaper articles. We integrate HiPED with additional data sets with institutional, local, and off-campus protest measures. The scale of the HiPED data and comparative design of our study enable us to identify factors predicting mobilization across five major waves of higher ed protest, including the anti-Trump protests in late 2016 and early 2017. In each wave, protests concerned different issues and also involved different configurations of activism, from campus-specific campaigns to large mobilizations aligned with off-campus movements. Our initial findings support prior claims that certain institutional histories support further mobilization, but also suggest a complicated relationship between local politics and campus political action.

Authors

• Alex Hanna, Distributed AI Research Institute

• Ellen Berrey, University of Toronto

• Nathan Kim