• How do we distinguish between parties, religions, interest groups, semi-state bodies, corporations, and social movements?
• How do we distinguish between campaign organisations, advocacy networks, non-governing organisations, peoples’ organisations, and social movement organisations?
• How do we distinguish between ‘pre-modern,’ ‘modern’ and postmodern/late-modern’ social movements?
  

Globalisation and Anti-globalisation: definitions, types and aspirations:

• How do we distinguish between internationalisation, transnationalisation, globalisation, mundialización, and even worldliness and cosmopolitanism?
• How do we interrogate the various processes that cluster under the “global” rubric?
• How do we recognise competing “globalisations” and thus the competing aspirations of social players with regard to those processes?
• What is anti-globalisation, and how are anti-globalisation movements articulated and manifested?
  
• Do social activists who operate in international contexts replicate and/or take advantage of the globalising processes they might critique?
• How do we account for the ambivalences of globalisation, and go beyond a Manichean approach to globalisation?
• How do we distinguish between varieties of internationalism, such as indigenous, diasporic, labour and womens’ internationalisms?

Methodology, Epistemology, and Pedagogy:

• When conducting comparative grounded research, how do we approach questions of involvement and detachment, normative claims, notions of subjectivity, and conceptions of action research?
• How do we negotiate contrasting and/or rival theoretical assumptions and analytical tools, for instance those derived from political sociology, historical sociology, and cultural studies?
• How might those assumptions and tools influence and/or modulate each other?
• In terms of social movement learning, when does activism become a/the site of knowledge production, and how do we generate pedagogies of and through social activism?
• What are the approaches, issues and practical problems associated with such pedagogies?
• How do we learn to question or even dismantle our academic privilege when intervening in the debates about social activism, change and movements?

Activist Identities, Social Movements, and Political Process:

• With regard to cultural autonomy and identification, how do we approach processes of collective identification?
• What are the roles of and interactions between symbolic action, performative identities, and hegemonic processes?
• How do we distinguish between ‘resistance’ versus ‘project’ identities in cultural communities of resistance?
• With regard to the ‘political process’ approach to social movements in politics, how do we approach issues of resources, opportunities, cycles and frames?
• How do interactions between ‘the cultural,’ ‘the political,’ ‘the social,’ and ‘the material,’ constitute social movements?
• What are the cross-sectoral interactions between notions of indigeneity, gender, sexuality, ecology, and regionalism/nationality?
• What roles are taken by communal and fundamentalist movements, and when do such movements become religious, sub-national, diasporic and/or transnational movements?

Nationalism and Borders:

• What are the roles of nationalism in globalism?
• What is the role of social activism in relation to geopolitical borders?
• What tactics and strategies come into play at national borders?
• How does purported border porousness impact on social movements?
• How do indigenous movements address (border-patrolled) nationalisms in the context of globalism?
• What is the role of sub-national and diasporic actors in relation to nationalism?

Technologies of Activism: the WWW

• Is there a need to account for historical precedents and perspectives, such as printing-press activism?
• What is “virtual” social activism?
• What can be done in cyberspace?
• What is the virtual relation to the historical material world?
• Is there a space-time disjunction in virtual activism?To what extent should the virtual be characterised as aterritorial?
• What does cyber-citizenship entail, particularly with regard to microstates and virtual non-states?
• What are the implications for identity of cyber privilege, access, and hacking?