Social Movement to Address Climate Change: Local Steps for Global ...

board and the blog. Using LexisNexis, we gathered local and national mainstream-media coverage of SIU. Research teams also looked for nontraditional media coverage of their local events, such as coverage in podcasts, blogs, and online networking sites. Finally, we interacted with local and national organizers, including interviewing local organizers before and after the events, attending organizing meetings before the events, and attending a postevent meeting with a congressman. We also held conference calls with several of the national organizers after the day of action to learn their assessment of SIU and the ideas that informed their leadership of the national event. Finally, we talked to McKibben directly about SIU and its place in the ongoing climate movement.

All of the above materials were available to chapter authors through a shared database. Some chapters focus on a particular geographical area (e.g., Texas in chapter 1 and Salt Lake City in chapter 4) and use all of the available materials pertaining to their site. Other chapters analyze multiple locations (e.g., chapter 10 on identity construction and chapter 11 on new social movements), drawing on particular types of data (e.g., speeches and interviews). In the chapters, quotations from interviews or speeches are identified by location and the type of speaker (e.g., the mayor of Austin), but individuals are not named to protect confidentiality. Unless otherwise cited, all of the materials come from our database of interviews, field notes, and speech transcripts.

Theoretical Foundation

This book centers on a fundamental question: what does it take to build a movement in the twenty-first century? We examine SIU as a case to answer this question, considering how SIU provides a guide for what to do and what not to do. The following chapters are grounded in our empirical observations of what happened at SIU. Many chapters begin with observations from local actions, quotations from interviews, claims made by national organizers, or photographs from events. However, this book does not aim to simply describe and catalogue SIU. Instead, we seek to use SIU as a touch-point for understanding the processes of movement