Humour and Social Protest

Combining recent developments in the field of social movement theory regarding framing, collective identity, and emotions with insights from humourology, the seventeen essays show the power of humour in framing social and political protest across a wide range of historical and spatial settings. The authors explore under what conditions laughter can serve the cause of the protesters; how humour has strengthened social protest; to what degree humour has been an effective tool for contentious social movements; and how humour can further the development of the collective identity of a social movement. The essays deal with a broad variety of historical and spatial settings, in quite different political structures, from open democratic societies to harsh repressive regimes, from the Zapatistas in Mexico to Vietnamese garment workers, from sixteenth-century Augsburg to Madrid and Stockholm in the 1990s.