About the Project
Research grant: Activism and knowledge production. Archives and protest data in contentious politics field.
Funded by: NCN (National Science Centre, Poland) UMO-2023/49/B/HS6/00053. (PI): Dr hab. Maciej Kowalewski, prof. US
Project start date: 2024-01-03
Project end date: 2028-01-02
Activism and knowledge production. Archives and protest data in contentious politics field
How is knowledge and memory of protest produced? How do protest/social movement archives expand the understanding of “archive” and “protest”?
Contemporary protest actions are being documented and disseminated with new technologies/social media on a scale never seen before. Classic, paper-based archives coexist with online collections, quantitative protest event databases and almost countless photos of protest actions published on social media platforms. In an effort to better understand the politics of contestation and industrial disputes, we analyze the ways in which archives and datasets documenting protests and social movements activities.
The following research questions emerge from the outlined area of study:
Q1: Are protest data important knowledge models in the field of contentious politics?
Q2: What mechanisms and instruments are used with archives/protest data collections to accumulate knowledge?
The expected outcome of the research work is an in-depth assessment of the mechanisms of knowledge production in the field of contentious politics and the addition of theoretical and empirical knowledge on the role of protests. Project will provide insight into the role of archives in the study of social movements and (public) political history, revising theories about the social construction of learning and knowledge distribution mechanisms in social movement networks.
How do we conduct our research?
We compare archives, collections and datasets in terms of both content and interface, in relation to issues such as data collection rules, access rules and ethical regulations, funding.
In order to study how data are collected, interpreted and interacted with in the political field, it is necessary to refer to two perspectives: those who manage and create the data and experts who will be able to assess the extent to which specific data are used.
The next stage of the research is a multidimensional analysis to answer the two research questions (analysis and interpretation of the collected data to assess the mechanisms of knowledge production and its impact on the politics of contestation, and reconstruction of the structure and architecture of the archives).