Bringing the Masses Back In: Explaining Spontaneous Uprisings from the French Revolution to Black Lives Matter
Tuesday 7 November 12.30 – 14.00 | Seminar Room, Department of Sociology, Free School Lane
Speaker: Dr Benjamin Abrams, Lecturer in Sociology and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University College London
Chair: Professor Hazem Kandil, Professor of Historical and Political Sociology, University of Cambridge
In 2020, millions of Americans rose up against police brutality, as part of an enormous wave of Black Lives Matter protests. This surge of protest is but one of the most recent examples of spontaneous mass mobilization, a phenomenon that stretches back long into the history of social contention.
Dr Abrams examined why and how ordinary people spontaneously protest, riot, and revolt en masse. Drawing on comparative historical research that puts the 2020 uprising into dialogue with cases such as the Egyptian Revolution, Occupy Wall Street, and the 1789 French Revolution, he showed how people may organically mobilize when a cause speaks to their pre-existing dispositions and when social conditions facilitate their participation.