Resources

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Protest data collection

Crowd Counting Consortium: a data collection project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut recording information on public demonstrations and rallies in the United States.

Elephrame: database of Black Lives Matter demonstrations and other topical waves.

Dynamics of Collective Action: Protest database covering events from 1960 to 1995.

Archival projects on social movements

Project STAND (Student Activism Now Documented): Collective of researchers and activists with multiple archiving projects for student activism.

The Demands: archived collection of student demands from 2015-2016 anti-racism protests in the United States.

Global fossil fuel divestment database: records commitments by institutions, including universities, to fossil fuel divestment

Reclaiming the University for the People: Archival project and critical history of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Michigan in the World exhibits: Several websites curated by students and faculty at the University of Michigan, of particular note are exhibits detailing U-M’s anti-apartheid campaign and antiwar activism.

Collectives and organizations

Black Liberation Collective: Network of Black students organizing around racial justice and safety for Black students in higher ed.

Cops off Campus: In their terms, an abolition network to get cops off campus and cops off the planet.

Campus Abolition Research Lab: a research incubator that collaboratively uses data, evidence, and critical analysis to disrupt the carceral university

Writing and analysis

A shortlist of writing on social movements, the 2010s, and the political economy of higher education.

Berrey, Ellen, Alex Hanna, Nathan Kim, and Kristen Bass. 2024. “U.S. and Canadian Higher Education Protests and University and Police Responses, 2012 to 2018.” Socius.

Andrews, Kenneth T., and Khoi Ngo. 2026. “The Scope, Issues, and Disruptiveness of Campus Protest in the United States, 2017–2024.” The Sociological Quarterly.

Asal, Victor, Alexander Testa, and Joseph Young. 2017. “Occupy This: Why Some Colleges Had Occupy Wall Street Protests.” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 10(2–3):81–103.

Ferguson, Roderick A. 2017. We Demand: The University and Student Protests. University of California Press.

Conner, Jerusha O. 2020. The New Student Activists: The Rise of Neoactivism on College Campuses. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Bevins, Vincent. 2023. If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. PublicAffairs.

Crowd Counting Consortium. “An Empirical Overview of Recent Pro-Palestine Protests at U.S. Schools.” Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center.

Boggs, Abigail, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein. 2019. “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation.”

Boggs, Abigail, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein. 2023. “Marx, Critique, and Abolition: Higher Education as Infrastructure.” In The Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education.

Davis, Charles H. F. 2019. “Suppressing Campus Protests and Political Engagement in U.S. Higher Education: Insights from the Protest Policy Project.” Currents 1(1).

Milkman, Ruth and Joseph van der Naald, 2023. The State of the Unions 2023: A Profile of Organized Labor in New York City, New York State, and the United States. CUNY’s National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College.

Morgan, Demetri L., and Charles H. F. Davis, eds. 2019. Student Activism, Politics, and Campus Climate in Higher Education. New York: Routledge.