The book fills a gap in the English language market on social movements through using a historical lens to examine social movements' outcomes in Brazil. Chapters offer various methodological approaches and perspectives vital to understanding social movement scholarship. This includes network analysis, collective memory, trajectories, and quantitative techniques of event-in-history analysis. Author research, case study analyses, and interviews with key figures are deployed to provide new and differing perspectives to the field. The book brings together a new and diverse range of voices to the field of social movements.

For three months Biel, Switzerland, hosted a special kind of sculpture. It was special not simply because it was by one of Switzerland's most famous contemporary artists-Thomas Hirschhorn-and dedicated to one of the most prominent authors in the history of Swiss literature, Robert Walser. Beyond that, this sculpture was a redefinition of sculpture itself, because what takes on a plastic form here is not made of stone, steel, or bronze. It is society itself that helped to develop this work of art. In 2016 Thomas Hirschhorn and the curator Kathleen Buhler began doing field research in Biel, the city of Robert Walser's birth, connecting with residents, clubs, artists, literati, and experts. This resulted in a multifaceted agenda. Every day the two offered events such as readings, walking tours, lectures, and children's activities. All of this ultimately comprised the Robert Walser-Sculpture. Never before has an entire city been integrated into a temporary work of art in this way.