Della Porta Donatella - Transnational Protest and Global Activism

W. Lance Bennett is professor of political science and Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor of Communication at the University of Washington. He has published widely on media and politics, with an emphasis on press-government relations, citizen engagement and opinion formation, and the political impact of global media systems from commercial conglomerates to personal digital networks. Current interests include how social technologies can engage citizens in conventional and contentious politics at local and transnational levels. He is director of the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement ( www.engagedcitizen.org ), where many of these projects can be found.

Donatella della Porta is professor of sociology at the European University Institute, Florence. Among her publications in the field of contentious politics are: Social Movements, Political Violence and the State (1995); Policing Protest (1998, edited with Herbert Reiter); Social Movements in a Globalizing World (1999, edited with Hanspeter Kriesi and Dieter Rucht); Social Movements: An Introduction (1999, with Mario Diani); and Global, Noglobal, New Global (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming, with Massimiliano Andretta, Lorenzo Mosca, and Herbert Reiter).

Mario Diani is professor of sociology at the University of Trento and honorary research professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Recent books include Social Movements and Networks (with Doug McAdam, 2003) and Social Movements (with Donatella della Porta, 1999). Current research interests include the network structure of civil society in British cities and the structure of overlapping memberships in recent antiwar protests.

Erik Johnson is a doctoral student in sociology at The Pennsylvania State University. His research areas include social movements, organizations, and environmental sociology. These interests are reflected in a dissertation project that traces the evolution of the modern environmental movement in the United States, focusing on time-series analyses of national environmental movement organization foundings and disbandings.

Felix Kolb is a PhD candidate at the Free University of Berlin working on his dissertation on the policy outcomes of social movements. He is the recipient of a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. He is also an experienced activist and campaigner and one of the founding members of ATTAC Germany.

Doug McAdam is professor of sociology at Stanford University and director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is the author or coauthor of eight books and more than fifty articles in the area of political sociology, with a special emphasis on the study of social movements and revolutions. Among his best-known works are Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, a new edition of which was published in 1999; Freedom Summer (1988), which was awarded the 1990 C. Wright Mills Award as well as being a finalist for the American Sociological Associations best book prize for 1991; and Dynamics of Contention (2001), with Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly. He was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.

John D. McCarthy is professor of sociology and director of the Graduate Program at The Pennsylvania State University. His research interests continue to include social movements and collective behavior, the sociology of protest, the policing of protest, and the sociology of organizations. Currently he is collaborating with Andrew Martin and Clark McPhail on a study of campus community public order disturbances, and with Frank Baumgartner on a study of the expansion of U.S. interest organizations during the last four decades.

Christopher Rootes is reader in political sociology and environmental politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He is joint editor of the journal Environmental Politics, and convenor of the Green Politics Standing Group of the European Consortium for Political Research. Publications include The Green Challenge (with Dick Richardson, 1995); Environmental Movements: Local, National and Global (1999); Environmental Protest in Western Europe (2003); and Environmental Movements in Snow, Kriesi, and Soule (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (2003).

Kathryn Sikkink is the Arleen C. Carlson Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. She has an MA and PhD in political science from Columbia University. Her publications include Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina; Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (coauthored with Margaret Keck); The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (coedited with Thomas Risse and Stephen Ropp); and Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms (coedited with Sanjeev Khagram and James Riker).

Sidney Tarrow is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government and professor of sociology at Cornell University. His first book was Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (1967). He continued working on contentious politics with Democracy and Disorder (1989). His most recent books are Power in Movement, with Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly (1994, 1998); Dynamics of Contention (2001), with McAdam and Tilly; and Contentious Europeans, with Doug Imig (2001).