Social Movements

During the struggle against the Qajar tyranny, struggling leaders went to the Shah Abdul Azim Shrine to hold a sit-in against the Shah Mosque Case and foot whipping of Tehran sugar merchants. The demonstrators in Paragraph 4 of their demands, as mentioned by Nazem al-Islam Kermani, the initial demands of refugees , called for the establishment of a justice system. According to this report, and many other evidences, justice, always has been a lasting and permanent matter for the Iranian society. Recent surveys show that justice should still be considered as one of the main demands of the Iranian society. The debate about justice and social movements is constantly changing, and thinkers in this area are constantly revising their ideas. The aim of this study is to elaborate these changes and to discuss the place of justice in new social movements that refers to a range of collective actions with purpose of changing in one or all of the institutions. The emergence of new social movements brought about new ways of expressing demands and protests, and a wide range of collective behavior forms, which, in terms of goals, nature and method of struggle, had a fundamental difference with earlier movements. In fact, with the advent of modernity, the calculations of traditional society were collapsed and, with the advent of postmodernity, new demands were created largely due to development of higher education and autonomy of individuals. Accordingly, new social movements emerged in a broader context of discourses, subcultures, ideological straggle, and identity diversity, and were spread in the form of new discourses.

Recent years have witnessed a surge in research on the impact of the cyberspace on social movements. The feminist movement has built a vocal platform online which attempts to underscore sexual violence against women. Scholars have begun to suspect that the internet has ushered in a new wave, the fourth wave of feminism. The fourth wave’s main feature is its reliance on social media. The accessibility, reach of a widespread audience, low costs and user-friendly environment have encouraged women to use social media to speak out against various forms of sexual violence directed against women. It is also assumed that going forward; the movement will also tackle issues such as the gender pay gap, neoliberal policies, maternity leave, and cultural sexism. Moreover, the internet-based movement is striving to bring to the fore the topic of intersectionality, that is, the intersection of oppressive institutions, and the attempt to rectify the failings of past waves by representing those oppressed by multiple institutions such as sexism, classism, and racism. This commentary provides an overview of the emerging academic literature on the fourth wave of feminism and critically reflects the lack of social realism in its existing form of knowledge production.

Framing is a familiar concept but with a scattered history in several fields of the humanities and social sciences, which seems can be widely used in socio-political studies in the case of a conceptual-operational revision. In this paper, after conceptual rethinking of the term in several theoretical contexts, and especially in the media domain, the author strived to present a consistent and uniform understanding of it to the reader and provide it at the level of a powerful guide concept for social and political research by reviewing the types, strategies, models, and consequences of the framing.