Upcoming Talks
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Connective Resource Mobilization: A Relational Approach to Movement Continuity in Transnational Activism
Date: November 13, 2026
Time: 10 pm Hong Kong Time ; 8 am Central Time; 9 am Eastern Time; 6 am Pacific Time
Speaker: Pamela Tsui, University of Toronto
Discussant: Ming-sho Ho, National Taiwan University
Registration Required
Social movement studies have long centered social movement organizations (SMOs) as the primary vehicles of mobilization. Yet contemporary movements are increasingly decentralized and digitally mediated, challenging SMO-centric frameworks such as resource mobilization theory (RMT). As contention becomes more individualized and non-conventional, organizationand event-centered approaches struggle to explain how movements persist, evolve, or dissolve under shifting conditions. Drawing on RMT and economic sociology, this article advances a relational resource mobilization framework through four propositions: resource mobilization (1) is historically contingent; (2) translates into tactics differently across organizational configurations; (3) is relational; and (4) provides an analytic for examining movement continuity across time and space. Within this framework, I introduce the model of connective resource mobilization to theorize how digitally mediated movements generate strategic capacity through personalized earmarking practices across borders and phases of contention. Based on 179 interviews and observation at 187 events in Hong Kong and Canada, I trace how the Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Movement evolved from its 2019 protest peak through its subsequent downturn across domestic and diasporic contexts. The analysis demonstrates how a relational approach to resource mobilization can illuminate divergent trajectories of movement continuity across historical, geographic, political, and socio-technological contexts.
Speaker
Pamela Tsui is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research examines how people pursue commitments, aspirations, and desires amid political repression and heteronormative expectations, moving beyond a focus on compliance or resistance. Bridging economic, political, and transnational sociology with gender and sexuality studies, her current project uses money to trace the transnational afterlife of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Her work appears in American Sociological Review, Gender & Society, Sexualities, and Law & Society Review, and has received paper awards from the American Sociological Association and the Hong Kong Sociological Association.
Discussant
Ming-sho Ho is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology and Director of the Global Asia Research Center at National Taiwan University. He is the author of Making Reform in Taiwan: Social Movements, Political Parties, and the Logic of Coalition Building (forthcoming) and Be Water: Collective Improvisation in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Protests (2019).
More to Come
To Be Announced.