Beyond Student Protest: Program Creation and the Struggle to Institutionalize Academic Fields with Movement Origins

• In Event: 20861 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: How do Movements Change Individuals, Relationships, and Organizations?

Abstract

Social movements research often focuses on contentious events though also notes less disruptive ways that activists try to change institutions. Applying this insight to the context of US higher education, this qualitative paper explores the establishment and growth of academic fields with movement origins. To do so, I compare both early and top college/university academic programs in several areas–black studies, women’s studies, peace/conflict studies, and environmental studies–that all initially gained traction during the campus upheaval of the 1960s and early 1970s. Despite the tendency to emphasize a student-driven protest model based on black studies, I argue that an institutional channel model with a wider range of actors that facilitate or block efforts via bureaucracy is more reflective of how programs in these fields are set up. Looking at the more mundane and protracted aspects of program development helps explain divergent program offerings and suggests paying more attention to periods of both quiet and political unrest for movement-related academic fields.

Author

• Elise Wolff, Pennsylvania State University