Movement texts: materiality, social practice, and discursive genre

Abstract This article aims to conceptualize movement texts as a crucial yet often overlooked phenomenon in the articulation of collective identity and narratives in the context of social movements. We define movement texts as symbolic acts that publicly manifest a social movement as a collective actor. Against the backdrop of the “narrative turn” in social movement studies and adjacent fields, we argue that the concept of movement text can be understood as the “missing link” in the analysis of narratives and their social contexts. We conceptualize the movement text through three interrelated dimensions: as a material artifact, a social practice, and a discursive genre. We then suggest a methodological framework for the analysis of how movement texts produce meaning, focusing on how ambivalences in the texts can be analyzed as reconciliations or negotiations of both internal tension and systemic contradiction defining the social context in which the movement acts. The contribution of this article is simultaneously theoretical, historical, and methodological, as it shifts from a one-sided focus on the “immaterial” dimensions of narratives and storytelling to an emphasis on the socio-materiality of movement texts within collective action and social change.