Social movements and political communication: theoretical connections and syntheses in the case of animal rights

Abstract

Although they share a common social transformation project, the animal liberation, animal rights’ activists adopt different political communication strategies in interactions with the mass media, transmitting diverse public images. This work aims to propose a theoretical framework that gathers contributions from the study fields of collective action and political communication to make possible the comprehension of this emergent social movement in Brazil in its unity and conflicts, illustrated by three cases of interaction with the mass media analyzed in this article. It is proposed a synthetic framework through the concept of “logics of action combination”, that presents the possibility to connect and synthesize theories that emphasize different postures of social movement activists, without denying the empirically experienced dilemmas.