Contention

Many important methodological questions remain open in the study of social movements. Methodological questions are also intimately tied to researchers’ position in relation to the research, including what the research aims to achieve, what impact it is expected to have, and for whose benefit it is being undertaken (Cox et al., 2024). The study of social movements has long included activists seeking answers to questions of praxis, broadly supportive scholars acting as critical friends, social theoreticians aiming to understand the nature of societal change, and those unsympathetic or directly opposed to the movements they study, as well as a host of other positionalities.

This article argues that emotional reflexivity is a critical methodological and epistemological resource in qualitative political research, particularly in repressive and eventful contexts. Drawing on fieldwork with food cooperatives in Istanbul, it examines how emotions such as discomfort, grief, and anger function as interpretive signals that enable deeper access and co-produced knowledge. Through two fieldwork vignettes, one centered on mistrust within a cooperative and another responding to the devastating February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey, it demonstrates how shifting to embodied, affective co-presence transformed research relationships and analytical insight. Engaging feminist epistemology and the emotiona turn in qualitative research, it reconceptualizes objectivity as accountability rather than detachment and positionality as encompassing affective disposition alongside categorical identity. It concludes that practicing emotional reflexivity constitutes a broader epistemological orientation to knowledge production.

This article addresses the role of emotions and positionality in research on protest repression in the context of states of emergency in France. The analysis is based on a qualitative study (2023–2025) concerning the experiences of protest repression among activists of antiracist, environmental, and social justice movements in Marseille. Drawing on emotion-based and performativity approaches to research methodologies and ethics, the article shows how contexts of protest repression and states of emergency are shaped by a politics of fear, which poses specific emotional challenges to activists and researchers, as well as ethical challenges to researchers. It focuses on the researcher-activist positionality and the emotion work performed by both activists and researchers, showing how emotions function as (de-)mobilizing factors in contexts of repression.

This article advances a methodological intervention centered on the negotiation of boundaries between academic research and movement work. Drawing on eight in-depth interviews with activist-scholars in Italy (2024–2025), it examines how knowledge is produced when researchers are simultaneously embedded in political movements and academic institutions. Rather than treating activist engagement as a source of bias or a purely biographical condition, the article conceptualizes positionality as a collective, relational, and evolving methodological practice that continuously shapes research design, participation, interpretation, and accountability. Situated within debates on engaged scholarship, academic labor, and care, the Italian case serves as an empirical site for reflecting on the methodological implications of conducting research from within political engagement. The article shows how activist-scholars navigate shifting boundaries between research and organizing, while responding to institutional expectations and movement responsibilities.

We mobilize Sara Childers's concept of “getting in trouble” when studying social movements to argue that researcher decisions that result in unintended consequences provide opportunities for reflection: what happened and why; what ethical issues or risks arose; and how the research can move forward ethically and responsibly. We apply this concept to reflect on an incident when the first author, a scholar-activist undertaking research with an Extinction Rebellion chapter, found himself in conflict with some members of the group following a meeting with a police officer. We argue that understanding the incident as getting in trouble does not disengage researchers from questions around researcher decisions and their effects on participants; the use of this incident extends the ethical dilemmas beyond data collection and into the process of writing; and getting in trouble can raise heretofore invisible issues. We therefore suggest that ‘getting in trouble’ can be of value to social movement scholars, but that it does not extinguish the ethical concerns that are raised.

Acknowledging the fragmentation and polarization of civil society, social movement scholars face methodological, ethical, and epistemological challenges in studying movements with opposing or incompatible claims. This article explores how traditional movement–countermovement frameworks can obscure the complexity of conflicts among grassroots actors, particularly when contention occurs in horizontal spaces rather than between movements and institutional powerholders. Drawing on a strategic interactionist perspective, it critically examines how researchers’ assumptions and positionality shape what is seen in the field, and how analytical frames may privilege one side over others. It highlights the tensions involved in engaging with movements the researcher does not align with, and considers the practical and ethical implications for reciprocity, bias, and participation.

This article advances theoretical, methodological, and ethical debates in social movement research by proposing a reflexive framework for studying conservative youth politics. It centers on the methodological and ethical challenges of capturing nonprogressive youth communities within predominantly progressive academic environments. Using data from the European Social Survey as an illustrative case shows how conventional representations risk bias and oversimplification. The illustrative analyses highlight cross-national variation and contradictory patterns that complicate monolithic readings. The article posits theoretical lenses and design principles—methodological pluralism, researcher positionality, and ethical safeguards—to capture a multifaceted phenomenon, avoid caricature, and ensure balanced representation.

In this brief article, I argue that digital recruitment and online participation hold the potential to identify and amplify the voices of a broader cohort of activists than traditional approaches. Drawing on a study of youth climate activism (YCA) in the United Kingdom, I contend that who gets included within the scope of the term “activist,” and what repertoires are considered “activism,” changes substantially across different sampling and recruitment strategies. In my research, drawing on a digital sampling and recruitment strategy resulted in and facilitated a wider conceptualization of the YCA movement. My recruitment strategy was particularly effective in foregrounding quieter forms of activism than prior research, which heavily relied on protest surveying conducted at YCA mass mobilizations.

This article rethinks methods for the longitudinal study of social movements by confronting a central limitation of mainstream media–based protest event analysis (PEA): its tendency to privilege highly visible mobilization peaks over low-key actions and the latent phases in which activist networks, repertoires, and frames are incubated. It proposes a mixed-source, longitudinal research design supported by an explicit linkage protocol that integrates two layers: (1) an event-level PEA archive of protest in Spain (2000–2020); and (2) a qualitative database built through systematic content analysis of movement-aligned media. The layers are linked through shared temporal and spatial keys (date, municipality, campaign), enabling meso-level processes (internal debates, alliances, organisational norms, framing work, and responses to repression) to be traced alongside event dynamics without reducing interpretive evidence to event counts.