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I'll be tweeting with #CMN538 for @JDCis's Social Movement Rhetoric(s) class this semester @IllinoisComm. Glad to see some public-facing elements integrated into our seminars, and hope we can all shed some light on different social movement scholarship this semester.
So, for the first #CMN538 thread, we've got Cox & Foust on the history of SM rhetoric, re: the question of effects: "The move to describe oppositional acts or texts as 'resistant' or 'destabilizing' assumes a theory of effectivity still largely absent from SMR scholarship" (622).
The question of effects has of course been consistently debated in rhetorical criticism, but the turn to describing specific resistant *acts* in lieu of SMs writ large parallels a focus on specificity over generalizations throughout the field (for reasons I won't discuss here).
MeGee too addresses the question of effects, albeit implicitly: "'Social movement' ought not to be a premise with which we begin research...Rather, 'social movement' ought to be a conclusion" (244, "Phenomenon or Meaning?")
That is to say, the "conclusion," in McGee's language, of something being a social movement is predicated on observable effects of said social movement, a detectable shift in public "consciousness."
That's part of why we should be okay calling #BlackLivesMatter 
a "social movement"--detectable change in public support over time. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21306771/black-lives-matter-george-floyd-protest-michael-kazin
a "social movement"--detectable change in public support over time. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21306771/black-lives-matter-george-floyd-protest-michael-kazin
Thanks to SM studies sociological roots for that insistence on observation and detection.
Arrive at Cox's use of McGee: social scientific approaches treat SMs as phenomena, "empirical entities that are directly experienced in the world, prior to ascriptions of meaning," while humanistic/hermeneutic alternatives "posit movement as meaning" (47, A Critical Genealogy)
I.e., specificity, not generalizations = what rhetorical studies has added and still can add to studies of resistance, social movement, and change
