Organizers: Maja Kutlaca, Özden Melis Uluğ and Helena Radke

August 29th to 31st, 2024 at Durham University, UK

Collective action is increasingly a central feature of our ever-changing society. In this year alone, Europe has seen collective action in response to the cost-of-living crisis, climate change, ongoing wars, and authoritarian regimes. The uptake in collective action within society is reflected in this growing area of research.

Given the importance of this topic, some of the questions we sought to address in this meeting included: What insights from the field can inform our theoretical and empirical contribution and vice versa? What are the key gaps in theorising and research in collective action that need to be addressed? How can our research facilitate positive social change in an increasingly more complex and fragmented world? In what contexts is our current understanding of collective action no longer applicable and perhaps outdated? And how can we learn from and contribute to practitioners working for social change? By exploring these questions, the meeting aimed to 1) bring together collective action researchers to build connections and showcase the growing research on this timely and important topic, and 2) serve as a catalyst for driving forward new directions in the field of collective action research.

We were happy to see that our community cares about this topic, and we received around 100 excellent submissions. The selection was very tough, but in the end, a diverse group of seventy-eight researchers attended this meeting, which was the first to be held by the Collective Action Network (CAN). For anyone interested in joining the network please sign up here: https://forms.gle/wdhryzndAn4w5FgB8. The event spanned three days and took place at Durham University, UK, between 29-31 August 2024. We chose to hold a hybrid meeting to ensure participation regardless of institutional funding, visa requirements, ability to travel and/or caring responsibilities. To further inclusivity and interdisciplinarity, we invited colleagues from Durham University from Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy and Geography (about 20 or so joined the conference over the course of 3 days). Moreover, we shared the webinar invitation with all members of the Collective Action Network (about 300), and we will share the recorded session on the network’s YouTube channel to increase the visibility of our participants’ fantastic talks (with their permission).

The talks delivered at the meeting were both informative and inspiring, offering valuable insights that sparked productive debate and discussion. The topics covered in the presentations were groups around 14 issues including:

● Violent, extreme, reactionary, and confrontational collective action
● Initiation and sustainment of collective action
● Contact and collective action
● Collective action and well-being
● Solidarity-based collective action and allyship
● Environmental collective action
● LGBTQIA+ collective action
● Morality and emotions in collective action
● The role of inequality in collective action
● The role of ethnic-racial-national relations in collective action
● Applications of SICMA to strikes and professionals
● Collective action for gender rights
● Forms and typologies of collective action
● Interdisciplinary lenses and teaching of collective action

The research presented covered a diverse array of topics (e.g., different forms of collective action, the antecedents and outcomes of collective action, collective action for different causes), methods (e.g., qualitative interviews, big Twitter data analyses, systematic reviews, experimental studies), and contexts (e.g., Turkey, Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, Hungary, Australia, and Nigeria).

The meeting not only featured presentations and discussions but also included roundtable event on solidarity with Palestine within and outside of academia, which included local activists and colleagues. The sharing of ideas continued with a tour of Durham Cathedral, dinner and drinks, and a visit to Newcastle. We also did not forget social media and decided to share all the speakers’ presentation topics on Twitter (@CANetwork). We gained more attention and followers after the CAN Meeting in Durham (we have 314 followers right now).

We, the organisers of the meeting (Maja Kutlaca, Özden Melis Uluğ, Helena Radke), would like to express our thanks to the presenters, students who helped organise the conference, Durham University and funders (European Association of Social Psychology with additional support from the British Psychological Society Social Psychology section and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues). It was an absolutely wonderful experience to bring so many diverse scholars from various career stages and host them at Durham University. We, the organisers, have learned a lot from this experience and received valuable feedback from our attendees on how to do an even better job in future. Whilst the overall experience was fantastic, we also faced many challenges in bringing everything together due to financial difficulties and having to apply to multiple sources to cover the basic costs. We are happy and grateful to our sponsors for their support. Still, we want to take this opportunity to also reflect on the necessity of properly resourcing small group meetings as unfortunately the financial costs of holding meetings are quite high. Our attendees expressed that future meetings should take place in more affordable, easier-to-reach locations, and we hope to deliver that promise with more support from our associations.