"The Diffusion of Social Movements"

Internet activism, the 1960 Birmingham sit-ins, union organizing, John Kerry's presidential candidacy, transgenic crops, creationism.

"The Diffusion of Social Movements: Actors, Mechanisms, and Political Effects" touches on these and other areas in framing how change is mobilized and spread.

ILR faculty members Rebecca Givan and Lance Compa will discuss the book, published this fall by Cambridge University Press, at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday in The Cornell Store on campus.

Givan, an ILR assistant professor, is an editor of the book. Compa, a senior lecturer at ILR, wrote one of its essays, "Framing Labor's New Human Rights Movement."

The Wednesday event is free and open to the public. Compa and Givan will be joined by other Cornell faculty members who contributed essays.

Compa, in his essay, explains how human rights-based thinking influences the labor movement, traditionally motivated by wage and other economic arguments.

The book grew out of a 2007 Cornell conference sponsored by Cornell's Institute for the Social Sciences.

The conference, "Contentious Knowledge: Science, Social Science, and Social Protest," drew on scholars' interests in studying diffusion of mobilizing tactics and frames across activist networks.

The primary purpose of the book, according to its introduction, is "to promote a more integrated understanding of the diffusion process."

Diffusion, it said, "... often plays a central role in shifting the scope and scale of contentious politics. It can transform a local protest into a national movement, or a national movement into a transnational one."

Givan's co-editors were Kenneth Roberts, a Cornell professor of government and the Robert S. Harrison Director of Cornell's Institute for the Social Sciences, and Sarah Soule, the Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Essayists from Cornell include Valerie Bunce, the Aaron Binenkorb Professor of International Studies and professor of government; Ronald Herring, professor of government, and Sidney Tarrow, the Maxwell Upson Professor of Government and Sociology.