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

• Who took part in the English anti-immigrant riots of 2024? If postcodes of the arrested can be obtained, then they could be mapped onto the 2021 Census (repeating the analysis of Kawalerowicz and Biggs 2014).


• Williamson et al. (2018) show that Black Lives Matter protests in 2014-15 were more likely to occur in cities where blacks had been killed by police. Can their findings be replicated for the massive 2020 wave of BLM protest?


• Use biographies of prominent activists to construct a historical social network of movements. For example, Sylvia Pankhurst connects the feminist, labour, and anti-colonial movements. Links could be defined broadly by participation in the same movement or narrowly by membership of the same organization. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has about 400 biographies with 'activist' or 'movement' in the article title.


• Using survey data, sociologists (e.g. Klandermans) often prefer to analyze the respondents' willingness to protest rather than their actual reported protest behaviour. One motivation is to overcome the constraint of small numbers: only a small proportion of people have actually protested recently, but many more indicate a willingness to protest. I'm intuitively suspicious of questions about hypothetical actions, and Rootes long ago developed a theoretical critique. But we lack empirical evidence on the validity of this measurement strategy. Can we find longitudinal data to test whether willingness in one wave predicts actual behaviour in subsequent waves? Are there systematic differences (as Rootes conjectured) between people who say they protested and those who say that they might in the future?


• The race riots in American cities in the late 1960s generated several research projects using sample surveys or arrest records (see references in Kawalerowicz and Biggs 2014). Analysis of these data was inevitably crude by today's standards, bivariate rather than multivariate. Can the original data be recovered and reanalyzed? ICPSR has several relevant datasets (e.g. 3500, 7002, 7312, and 7324).  


• 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 reforms?  


• 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')?


• 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.)


• 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 lethal violence. Recent 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

• Surveys in the United States and Britain recorded a slight decline in support for gay and lesbian rights in the last few years, apparently contradicting the long-term trend. Is this real or an artifact of survey design? If real, which social groups have declined in tolerance?
  


• 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.

Michael Biggs, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford