TIDE - What happens when the tide recedes? Transformations and Impacts of the Dynamicsof Engagement

The COVID-19 crisis saw countries around the world adopt unprecedented measures. These measures attracted some support, but also led to unexpectedly large gatherings, sparked multiple controversies that developed into a strong wave of protests, and generated alliances between new and established groups in the public political space. Among the European countries, the mobilisation was particularly important in France.Now that the wave has receded, the question is what the tide will leave behind. What happens in the aftermath of a wave of mobilisation characterised by the emergence of new meso-level actors, new demands and new (sometimes unexpected) coalitions, and a high level of participation by first-timers (i.e. people with no previous experience of mobilisation, who often have never been members of parties, trade unions or civic associations, nor used to voting)?Our objectives are twofold: first, to study political reconfigurations at the level of national and regional political space (south-east France, where protests against the COVID measures were particularly strong); and second, to deepen at the regional level the meso- and micro-level analysis by collecting data and repeated biographical accounts from a sample of protesters. This approach will allow us to examine changes in practices (sociality, participation and political behaviour), worldviews (ideology) and socialisation effects, such as the acquisition of (potentially) enduring dispositions. Using a mixed methods approach, we will combine theoretical and methodological literature from social movement studies, political psychology and computational social sciences. Our collaborative team has expertise in these three fields, as well as in socialisation processes, ethnographic observation and topic analysis. Data collection will take place between March 2020 and April 2027 and will include national and local media coverage databases, textual data analysis of social media, interviews with local activists and repeated biographical interviews with 40 grassroots participants. We will also conduct ethnographies of participants' online and offline activities.Theoretically, in the framework of the study of outcomes of social movements, we aim to contribute to the current debate on agency and biography in political participation and protests studies by proposing a structural interactionist route linked to an eliasian epistemology. Three underexplored aspects in the study of social movement outcomes are addressed: (1) time as a variable rather than a mere contextual element; (2) the mechanisms that introduce new actors, remove old ones, and reshape alliances and coalitions across episodes of contention; and (3) the socialising effects of participation in political events or organisations. By viewing individual agency as situated within the social process, we suggest some ways of overcoming the usual analytical distinction made in the social movement studies literature between three sets of factors of engagement or disengagement at the macro, meso and micro levels, and offer a convincing explanation for their joint occurrence over time.From a methodological point of view, this project aims to extend innovative methods in the fields of social movement studies and political sociology. It will develop an analytical strategy to overcome the current limitations of contemporary protest event analysis as a tool for studying the configurational aspects of social movements. The TIDE project will contribute to this field in two ways. First, by developing a replicable tuning strategy to maximise the ability to automatically extract protest events from newspaper articles, to be shared with the social movement studies community. Second, we will create an easy-to-implement series of netbooks, not only for the sake of research reproducibility, but also to disseminate our configurational methodology as a tool for social movement scholars.