Francesca Polletta is professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She studies social movements, experiments in radical democracy, and culture in politics. She is the author of Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Univ. Chicago, 2002), It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Univ. Chicago, 2006), and editor, with Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper, of Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Univ. Chicago, 2001). She is currently working on a study of the conditions in which people are able to reflect on the frames underpinning positions on controversial policy issues, and a genealogy of contemporary understandings of participation in politics.
Mobilizing Ideas 