These potential topics indicate the kind of research that I am keen to supervise (some are compact enough for a MSc dissertation; some may stretch to a DPhil) ...

Social movements/political protest

• In 2013 the collapse of Ranal Plaza factory in Dhaka killed over a thousand people, mainly garment workers. This brings to mind the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York just over a century before, which killed over a hundred garment workers. In that case the tragedy aided the union and spurred legislation enforcing safety regulations. Under what conditions do such workplace tragedies lead to positive changes?  


• Raphael Samuel's Lost Worlds of British Communism evocatively portrays the positive value that communists placed on obedience to their organization. Similar discipline was found more generally in leftist social movements: one was loyal to one's trade union, for example. From the 1960s, this sense of discipline has evaporated, to the point where there is suspicion of organization itself--manifested recently in the Occupy movement. How can this shift be explained? Although it is a general trend across the political spectrum (fewer people now identify with any party, Conservative and Labour alike), could it be argued that this shift has particularly hurt movements on the left?  


• It is fashionable to emphasize how the internet has transformed political mobilization. Did improved postal communication in the first half of the nineteenth century, enabling the circulation of periodicals and the exchange of correspondence, have a discernible impact on social movements?  


• Industries like tobacco and logging have created 'astroturf' organizations (especially in the United States), which masquerade as a popular movement. Has this stratagem had any success? Compare this phenomenon with the use of staged 'demonstrations' under authoritarian regimes.
  

• The marginal contribution of any single individual to a social movement is effectively nil, and so an instrumentally rational individual should not participate. How do participants themselves justify and explain their participation? Rather than just asking the question and getting a conventional response, it would be valuable to forcefully explicate the logic of the argument and see how participants argue against it. Do they articulate the Kantian principle? Do they adhere to magical thinking ('if I go to the demonstration, then others will')?


• Surveys have recorded increasing participation in political protest since the mid 1970s, across most Western countries (see Pippa Norris' Democratic Phoenix). However, these surveys do not include questions about participation in strikes, which has fallen over the same period. Can official strike statistics be used to estimate whether participation in all forms of collective protest has increased or decreased?


• Olson's problem of collective action has provoked an enormous theoretical literature. Can the problem be solved if we assume "strong reciprocity" as advocated in Gintis et al.'s Moral Sentiments and Material Interests? Or does that make it too easy to explain collective action—predicting far more collective action than is actually observed?


• Scott's Domination and the Art of Resistance argues that subjugated groups do not internalize the inferiority ascribed to them by the ruling ideology. His cases include blacks in the American South under Jim Crow. Yet there is evidence that African Americans created their own status hierarchy based on color (dark skin was considered inferior to light skin). Can Scott's argument be sustained? Investigate using autobiographical accounts.


• There is an extensive literature on food riots in England and France in the 18th and 19th centuries. E. P. Thompson points out, by way of contrast, that there was relatively little protest in Ireland during the great famine. Is this true? If so, why?


• In England traditional food riots became very rare after 1818, largely because food prices were no longer subject to dramatatic fluctuations. Yet there were some later examples, including one in Oxford in 1867. Why did they persist in some places?


• Workers in the 18th and early 19th century would often physically attack employers' houses or destroy machinery during disputes. Such attacks became rare after 1830, replaced by strikes and other non-violent methods of protest. What explains this shift in tactics? (Cf. Tilly's Popular Contention in Great Britain.)


• Has the International Solidarity Movement been successful in aiding Palestinians? If so, how?


• In India in 1990, more than two hundred students killed themselves—or attempted to kill themselves—in protest against the proposed implementation of the Mandal report. Why?


• The struggle against British colonial rule in India (as it was then) was notable for non-violent protest (Satyagraha), as advocated by Gandhi. To what extent were these tactics—and the doctrine informing them—adopted by Muslims in India? (Excluding the North West Frontier, the subject of Mukulika Banerjee's The Pathan Unarmed.)


• Within some movements, a small minority turn to violence. Contemporary examples include the pro-life movement in the United States and the animal liberation movement. What explains this turn to violence? Has violence helped or hindered the movement?

Other topics

• A new ethnic identity has been officially created in the United Kingdom: 'Irish traveller'. It first appeared as an option in the 2011 Census. What explains this creation? Compare, for example, the absence of 'Jew' from all official classifications of ethnicity.


• Contemporary Western societies have perverse responses to risk. Consider two recent British examples: official panic after the Hatfield rail crash virtually shut down therailway system, shifting passengers on to the roads and thereby ensuring more fatalities; unfounded panic over the MMR vaccine caused parents to refuse vaccination, creating a pool of susceptible infants, which is now likely to cause an epidemic. Changing attitudes to risk could be investigated by looking at railway accidents over the last 150 years. Compare 'public' concern (manifested in the Times and parliamentary enquiries) with the number of passenger fatalities per year. My hypothesis is that public concern used to have beneficial consequences: terrible accidents in the 19th century led to important safety measures (e.g. signal interlocking, automatic brakes on passenger trains). As fatalities have fallen dramatically, however, there has been no corresponding reduction in the total amount of public concern (the 'ratio' of outrage per death has multiplied). The risk of train travel is now so low in absolute terms that further safety measures are counterproductive—and yet public concern forces politicians and officials to implement such measures.


• Why did Irish Republicans not carry out mass-casualty attacks (what Goodwin calls 'categorical terrorism') in the United Kingdom, whereas Muslim jihadists have done so? Answers could be found by looking at the ideology articulated by each group, or analyzing survey evidence on the attitudes of the communities (Irish Catholics and British Muslims) from which they emerged.


• It is frequently asserted that the British Army has unique expertise in winning ‘hearts and minds’, earned from its campaign in Northern Ireland. Such expertise, the argument went, will be invaluable in the occupation Afghanistan and Iraq. How was this analogy deployed to gain support for the occupation? The model here is Yuen Foong Khong’s Analogies at War.

Michael Biggs, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford