Michael Biggs

Researcher in residence at the Maison Suger in September 2026

Michael Biggs is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Cross College. His research on social movements and collective protest appears in American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, British Journal of Sociology, European Sociological Review, Politics and Society, and Mobilization. A recent interest is the transgender movement and its consequences. His critique of the 2021 Census of England and Wales forced the Office for National Statistics to retract its figures on the trans population.

The project

Title: Theorizing acts of collective protest such as strikes, riots, and demonstrations

"This new project will theorize acts of collective protest such as strikes, riots, and demonstrations. Catalogues of these protest events are fundamental for the study of social movements, from the labor movement in the nineteenth century to the Yellow Vest movement in the twenty-first. A large methodological literature examines how to compile and analyze these data (e.g. Biggs 2018). What is lacking is an equivalent theoretical literature on the conceptualization of protest. There are a few perfunctory definitions, most famously Tilly’s ‘contentious gathering’. More important in practice are definitions implicit in publicly available databases, like PolDem (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, 1975–2011) and DCAUS (United States 1960–1995). Different datasets employ different criteria for inclusion and exclusion. Lawsuits and press conferences make up a significant fraction of events in DCUAS, for example, but are omitted from other datasets. Definitions are relegated to appendices and codebooks and lack theoretical justification. If ‘protest’ is a meaningful category of social life and a suitable subject for sociological generalization, then it requires coherent definition."

Hosting institution(s): Sciences Po