David S. Meyer

David S. Meyer is professor of sociology, political science, and urban planning and policy at the University of California, Irvine. He’s written extensively on social movements and social change and is the 2017 recipient of the John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Behavior. Meyer is author or editor of nine books, most recently How Social Movements (Sometimes) Matter (Polity Press, 2021). Meyer produced more than 100 scholarly publications as well as many magazine, newspaper, and online commentaries, often on the salient social movements of the moment. His research has been funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York, the National Science Foundation, the American Sociological Association, the Urban Child Institute, and UC Irvine Jack W. Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy, among others. He is the lead editor of the Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics series, and a founding coeditor of the Cambridge Elements series in Contentious Politics. He also serves on the editorial committee of the University of California Press. Meyer holds a PhD in political science from Boston University, and an undergraduate degree in literature from Hampshire College.

His Andrew Carnegie Fellows project, “Against Apocalypse: Protest, Policy, and Polarization,” considers how social movements and protest campaigns polarize to make political progress, but polarization can undermine the capacity of government to make policy effectively. By looking at both historical and contemporary protest movements, Meyer assesses strategies that activists and authorities can employ to manage the polarization that successful movements respond to and create, offering prescriptions to political organizers inside and outside government.