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Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- 1: Relationships, Real and Imagined -- 2: Free-Riders and Freedom Riders -- 3: Whom One Owes, with Zaibu Tufail -- 4: Publics, Partners, and the Promise of Dialogue -- 5: The Art of Authentic Connection -- 6: Solidarity without Intimacy -- 7: The Uneasy Balm of Communication -- Notes -- Index.

Activists and politicians have long recognized the power of a good story to move people to action. In early 1960 four black college students sat down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave. Within a month sit-ins spread to thirty cities in seven states. Student participants told stories of impulsive, spontaneous action—this despite all the planning that had gone into the sit-ins. "It was like a fever," they said. Francesca Polletta's It Was Like a Fever sets out to account for the power of storytelling in mobilizing political and social movements. Drawing on cases ranging from sixteenth-century tax revolts to contemporary debates about the future of the World Trade Center site, Polletta argues that stories are politically effective not when they have clear moral messages, but when they have complex, often ambiguous ones. The openness of stories to interpretation has allowed disadvantaged groups, in particular, to gain a hearing for new needs and to forge surprising political alliances. But popular beliefs in America about storytelling as a genre have also hurt those challenging the status quo. A rich analysis of storytelling in courtrooms, newsrooms, public forums, and the United States Congress, It Was Like a Fever offers provocative new insights into the dynamics of culture and contention

Freedom Is an Endless Meeting offers vivid portraits of American experiments in participatory democracy throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on meticulous research and more than one hundred interviews with activists, Francesca Polletta challenges the conventional wisdom that participatory democracy is worthy in purpose but unworkable in practice. Instead, she shows that social movements have often used bottom-up decision making as a powerful tool for political change. Polletta traces the history of democracy in early labor struggles and pre-World War II pacifism, in the.

Drawing on the empirical articles in this special issue and posing further questions, I suggest how movement scholars might move forward in identifying and accounting for movements' cultural impacts. I argue for comparing cases in which movements did and did not have cultural influence, for developing new approaches to public opinion as a measure of movements' influence, for mining theoretical traditions associated with a wider array of cultural concepts than we routinely use, and for paying attention to the institutional norms that mediate movements' impacts—impacts within politics as much as outside it.

Critics of public deliberation as conventionally practiced have charged that it is "just talk" in the sense both that it substitutes sociable conversation for practical deliberation and that it substitutes political talk for political action. I argue that both criticisms rest on unnecessarily restrictive models of talk and politics. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with eighty participants in two forums convened to deliberate about the future of the former World Trade Center, I tease out the variety of models on which people styled their discussions, models that included education, negotiation, and advocacy. In ways not often recognized by deliberative theorists, these models helped participants to hone their own opinions and reach agreement across difference. Participants also perceived less of a conflict between deliberation and advocacy than deliberative theorists have tended to do. Insofar as participants' understandings of what made for good deliberation and appropriate modes of political influence differed from those of forum organizers, they point both to practical challenges in organizing deliberation and to possibilities for organizing it more effectively.

How have social movements fared in an era marked by new enthusiasm for citizen participation? I identify several features of today's participatory landscape that make it different from earlier ones, including its scale and scope, its reliance on the Internet, and its relation to state power that is dispersed among multiple actors. Then I trace the mixed consequences of these features for social movement groups.