In this episode, meet Dr Benjamin Abrams, who has just released his brand-new book about mass mobilisations called "The Rise of the Masses".  Listen if you are interested in:

• Why mass mobilisations such as protests happen
• The Black Lives Uprising, Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, or even the French Revolution
• The emotions of protest
• How physical space can support mass mobilisations
• Ben's admiration for guillotines

Buy the book at theRiseoftheMasses.com.

About Dr Abrams:

Benjamin Abrams is Lecturer in Sociology and Leverhulme Fellow at University College London. Alongside the study of mobilization, Benjamin also works on revolutions, resistance and contentious politics broadly considered. His approach to these topics focuses on exploratory macro-causal comparisons and case studies, designed to generate new, durable theoretical insights. Much of his work fuses these macro-level techniques with in-depth investigative within-case methods, with a specialism in the analysis of ethnographic interviews and archival sources.

In addition to authoring The Rise of the Masses, Benjamin's second book is called Symbolic Objects in Contentious Politics. Written in collaboration with Peter R. Gardner and bringing together an international and interdisciplinary community of scholars, the book was published open access by the University of Michigan Press in 2023.

Benjamin is also Chief Editor (with Giovanni A. Travaglino) of Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest.

More information about Benjamin's scholarly work can be found on his faculty page at UCL. He tweets at @bdmabrams.

About the host:Laura is a facilitator, people and culture director, and former Executive Director of the International Mediation Institute.  Her doctoral research asked “in what ways does blame make villains in politics” and covered the gamut from literature studies and linguistics to psychology and neuroscience, victimology to political science.  Her expertise includes emotions, polarization, blame, and international politics.  Feel free to connect with her on  LinkedIn or ResearchGate—or even both!