‘We fight for all living things’: countering misconceptions about the radical animal liberation movement

This qualitative content analysis of online documents compiled from the North American Animal Liberation Front (ALF), Earth Liberation Kollective (ELK) and Grassroots Ontario Animal Liberation (GOAL) network websites and Facebook pages explores how activism within the Radical Animal Liberation Movement (RALM) intersects with other social movements. While most literature to date traces the RALM’s (dis)junctures with other forms of social justice activism through analyses of their broad ideological assumptions, or the views of renowned RALM scholars, this research provides authentic insights into the voices of Canadian, American and Mexican activists as they are represented in documents they author themselves. Like activists in anarchistic, anti-capitalist, immigrant rights, Indigenous, prison abolition, prisoner support and radical feminist movements, those in the RALM critique capitalism, colonialism, hierarchy, racism, sexism, state power and the prison industrial complex. Our research calls into question the existing narratives that depict the RALM as an extremist, single-issue movement oblivious to all other forms of social inequality, injustice, marginalization and oppression. Rather, RALM activists are building alliances with other radical social movements to achieve the common goal of ending both human and animal suffering and exploitation.     

Perpetrator or Victim? Relationships Between Intimate Partner Violence and Well‐Being

In national surveys, around half of intimate partner violence perpetrators are also victims of partner assaults. However, data on intimate partner violence victimization and perpetration are rarely examined together. This study examines the relationships between perpetration, victimization, and three psychosocial variables—depression, self‐esteem, and substance abuse—that have been constructed in prior research as both causes and consequences of partner violence. Results indicate that associations between substance abuse and self‐esteem and partner violence perpetration are mediated by controlling for victimization, but depression is associated with both victimization and perpetration. Associations between mutual violence and depression and substance abuse are greater among women than men, supporting the position that gender symmetry in reported violence perpetration does not imply symmetry in outcomes.     

Demonstrating in the internet age: a test of Castells’ theory

ABSTRACT

Some social movements researchers argue that the Internet globalises protest and equalises cross-national inequalities in opportunities for activism. Critics warn against such techno-optimism, highlighting continued individual-level inequalities and country-level variation in protest participation. In this paper, we operationalise Manuel Castells’ theory of social movement development to test the extent to which contemporary demonstrators share the characteristics of global activists. We also examine how country-level economic and political institutions affect levels of protest and moderate the relationship between individual-level predictors and activism. We find support for Castells’ contention that use of online media is a significant predictor of protest. However, we also find that having a sense of global connectedness does not significantly affect one’s likelihood of engaging in demonstrations. Protest participation continues to be stratified by traditional markers of social privilege including education and gender. Moreover, national political and economic contexts have independent effects on protest and moderate how individual-level political and economic grievances affect civic engagement.     

Once in Parkland,a Year in Hartford,a Weekend in Chicago: Race and Resistance in the Gun Violence Prevention Movement

Generally ignoring firearm‐deaths by suicide, “common sense” divides gun violence into two distinct types of phenomena: urban gun violence and mass shootings. At a cursory level, these phenomena seem distinct because of the difference in the number of victims killed during a particular shooting, rather than subtypes co‐creating a master category defined by gun violence. As a result, gunshot deaths of black and brown bodies in urban settings, which constitute the majority of deaths by gun violence after suicide, are viewed as routine whereas gunshot deaths in suburban settings are extraordinary and worthy of outrage. In this article, we draw on ethnographic observation to compare protest vigils in urban communities comprised predominantly of people of color, in suburban areas that are mostly white, and at the national level in order to uncover the racialized processes of symbolic classification by which this “commonsense” view is produced and how it is challenged by activists. We use the framework of cultural pragmatics to analyze these vigils, making visible the racialized forms of domination that structure activism and, we contend, ultimately divide gun violence into two distinct phenomena rather than constituting a master category. We argue that cultural pragmatics provides a way to understand what it means to challenge culture as emphasized by the multi‐institutional politics approach to social movements.     

Early activism and work arrangements of young feminists in Mexico City

The study investigates the relationship between the activism and later work life of young Mexican feminist activists in the context of social movements’ institutionalization and the precarious employment situation. Using the biographical narratives of fifteen feminists in Mexico City who were core activists during the period of high mobilization of the abortion rights movement from 2007 to 2009, this study aims to answer two questions: How does activism impact contemporary activists’ work life in an era of professionalized and institutionalized social movements? And how do their feminist identities and practices differ according to the workplace? The results reveal that (1) young feminists joined women's movement institutions through their activism, although those employment opportunities were unstable, and (2) they used reflexive strategies to manage their feminist identities amidst the uncertainty and to reconcile their work life conditions and their feminist activist identities.     

The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights: frame contestation and the exploitation of disability

Nonhuman Animal rights activists are sometimes dismissed as ‘crazy’ or irrational by countermovements seeking to protect status quo social structures. Social movements themselves often utilize disability narratives in their claims-making as well. In this article, we argue that Nonhuman Animal exploitation and Nonhuman Animal rights activism are sometimes medicalized in frame disputes. The contestation over mental ability ultimately exploits humans with disabilities. The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights activism diminishes activists’ social justice claims, but the movement’s medicalization of Nonhuman Animal use unfairly otherizes its target population and treats disability identity as a pejorative. Utilizing a content analysis of major newspapers and anti-speciesist activist blogs published between 2009 and 2013, it is argued that disability has been incorporated into the tactical repertoires of the Nonhuman Animal rights movement and countermovements, becoming a site of frame contestation. The findings could have implications for a number of other social movements that also negatively utilize disability narratives.     

Unobtrusively Stretching Law: Legal Education,Activism, and Reclaiming Title IX

We often understate the work that activists put into crafting movement tools. This article examines the space between legal texts and movement resources in a study of early activism surrounding Title IX. Though often hailed as a feminist law, the Title IX statute and regulations lay out a narrow set of individual rights and incorporate several conservative principles. In an analysis of early social movement mobilization surrounding Title IX by the Connecticut Women's Educational and Legal Fund (CWEALF), we identify a distinctive legal framing technique tied to the often overlooked practice of lay legal education. In a legal education campaign that targeted schools, CWEALF placed Title IX's actual requirements alongside broader feminist ideas about gender socialization and civic responsibility to imply that the law mandated substantially greater reforms, a tactic we call unobtrusively stretching law. This article contributes to research on social movements and legal mobilization by illustrating how legal education can serve as part of the tool-making kit for social movements as they struggle to transform legislative compromises into movement resources.     

Rethinking Activism and Expertise within Environmental Health Conflicts

This review presents the contributions of research on the intersection of science and social movements, its theoretical and methodological limitations, and potential solutions for its further development. Three different types of relationships between activism and knowledge have been identified within environmental health conflicts: (i) lay – activists requesting help from sympathetic scientists in order to conduct independent studies; (ii) expert – activists promoting new research agendas and sub‐fields within established scientific disciplines; and (iii) expert – activists acting beyond the limits of the academic community and partnering with social movements. In this review, I argue that much of the existing literature considers expertise as “something” possessed by individuals, and heavily emphasizes the difference between “lay” and “expert” activists. This entails two main theoretical reductionisms: (i) reification of knowledge; and (ii) overlooking the contribution of activism to expertise and vice versa. I propose considering expertise as the property of a network and focusing future research within environmental health conflicts on the co‐emergence and construction of a network of expertise (Eyal 2013) or ethno‐epistemic assemblage (Irwin & Michael 2003) and social movements. Through this symmetrical network approach, we will be able to develop a more consistent theory of the co‐production of activism and expertise, as well as its political implication to fight environmental health injustice.     

Accounting for Victimization: Social Constructionist Perspectives

This paper reviews research and theory on the social construction of victims and victimization. There are four areas of inquiry: victims’ self‐processes, the collaborative accomplishment of victimization, social problems claims‐making, and social movement framing. Scholars in each area take a symbolic interactionist perspective. Because victimization is potentially stigmatizing, much of this research and analysis draws on the literature on vocabularies of motive, aligning activities, and accounts. Literature on self‐processes examines how victims come to see themselves as victims and their situations as deviant. Often, when they try to establish their victim identities with others, they can be discredited or blamed if they do not meet expectations of typical victims. When people want to show that a social problem exists, they use images of victims to evoke sympathy and other emotions. Sometimes, collective identities may not be sympathetic, and also need to be managed, through the framing work of activists.     

When corporate actors take over the game: the corporatization of organic,recycling and breast cancer activism

Social change endeavors are increasingly shaped by corporate interests and, in some instances, large corporations take over ideas and practices initiated by social change advocates. We label this process ‘corporatization’ and argue that, while it is clearly a variant of co-optation, it has specific qualities that warrant a separate analytical framework. Using existing research to examine the cases of breast cancer activism, organic food, and recycling in the United States – all extreme examples of corporatization – we conceptualize corporatization as a subset of co-optation in which: (1) corporations come to dominate fields initiated by activists; (2) corporatized versions become widespread; and (3) alternative, ‘response,’ movements emerge to oppose corporatized versions. We posit that, in each case, ‘corporate takeover devices’ allowed corporate entities to ‘join the game’ and eventually come to dominate fields initiated by social movements.     

The American Civil Rights Movement Reconsidered: Teaching the Role of Women

Abstract

This article examines coverage in social studies curriculum and U.S. history textbooks, specifically, of women in the American Civil Rights Movement (CRM) and considers how social studies teachers can broaden the narrative they teach to include more gender-related issues and the work of women activists. The author found that despite a rich body of scholarship focused on women in the CRM, textbooks, which still serve as the central curriculum documents in most secondary social studies classrooms, provide a relatively cursory treatment of women’s roles in the movement. The context of women’s activism and the intersections of race and gender, particularly around sexual violence and sexism within the movement, are rarely examined. To address this problem, the author provides examples of critical issues confronted by African American women in the era of the CRM as well as examples of activists that teachers could incorporate into their CRM units. In addition, the author argues that an inclusive study of the American CRM provides an excellent opportunity for students to develop an understanding of the many ways in which women and girls—often in the face of great personal danger—acted with courage and skill in the fight for racial justice.     

Habitus and social movements: how militarism affects organizational repertoires

2010–2012 were years of global protests. This wave of mobilization has been celebrated for its horizontal, leaderless, and participatory character. But this was not the case in all countries. In Israel, which saw the largest social contention in its history, the protest was marked by a dominant and centralized leadership and by cooperation with institutional actors and corporate media. Based on the study of the Israeli case, this research seeks to contribute to explanations of how movements’ organizational forms develop. Social movement scholars have shown that activists’ forms of organization are limited to a familiar repertoire of action. Building on previous scholarship, I argue that activists’ organizational repertoires are shaped by a habitus that familiarizes and routinizes certain practices. But while existing scholarship focuses on how organizational habitus develops within the field of activism, I expand the applicability of habitus and show how movement repertoires are also influenced by habit in fields unrelated and even antagonistic to activism. Based on participant observations and interviews, I show how in the Israeli case, militarism formed part of activists’ organizational habitus and contributed to the 2011 protests’ centralized and hierarchical character.     

Parenting as Activism: Identity Alignment and Activist Persistence in the White Power Movement

This article addresses the relationship between identity and activism and discusses implications for social movement persistence. We explain how individuals negotiate opportunities as parents to align and extend an activist identity with a movement's collective expectations. Specifically, we focus on how participants in the U.S. white power movement use parenting as a key role to express commitment to the movement, develop correspondence among competing and potentially conflicting identities, and ultimately sustain their activism. We suggest that parenting may provide unique opportunities for activists in many movements to align personal, social, and collective movement identities and simultaneously affirm their identities as parents and persist as social movement activists.     

Youth,activism, and social movements

There has been considerable debate over the extent and role of young people's political participation. Whether considering popular hand‐wringing over concerns about declines in young people's institutional political participation or dismissals of young people's use of online activism, many frame youth engagement through a “youth deficit” model that assumes that adults need to politically socialize young people. However, others argue that young people are politically active and actively involved in their own political socialization, which is evident when examining youth participation in protest, participatory politics, and other forms of noninstitutionalized political participation. Moreover, social movement scholars have long documented the importance of youth to major social movements. In this article, we bring far flung literatures about youth activism together to review work on campus activism; young people's political socialization, their involvement in social movement organizations, their choice of tactics; and the context in which youth activism takes place. This context includes the growth of movement societies, the rise of fan activism, and pervasive Internet use. We argue that social movement scholars have already created important concepts (e.g., biographical availability) and questions (e.g., biographical consequences of activism) from studying young people and urge additional future research.     

‘What kind of abuse is him spitting in my food?’: reflections on the similarities between disability hate crime,so-called ‘mate’ crime and domestic violence against women with intellectual disabilities

Domestic violence against women with learning disabilities is a wholly under-researched topic. A recent study indicated that there are strong parallels between domestic violence, disability hate crime and ‘mate’ crime. This article explores these similarities and argues that rather than treating them as discrete phenomena, we need to make the connections and re-affirm the commitment that feminist scholars and activists made long ago, namely to take violence committed in private as seriously as that committed in public.     

Shifting Symbolic Boundaries: Cultural Strategies of the Animal Rights Movement1

How do activists create cultural change? Scholars have investigated the development and maintenance of collective identities as one avenue for cultural change, but to understand how activists foster change beyond their own movements, we need to look at activists’ strategies for changing their targets’ mindsets and actions. Sociologists need to look at activists’ boundary work to understand both the wide‐sweeping goals and strategies that activists enact to generate broad‐based cultural changes. Using data from participant observation and interviews with animal rights activists in France and the United States, and drawing on research on ethnic boundary shifting, I show how activists used two main strategies to shift symbolic boundaries between humans and animals, as well as between companion and farm animals—(1) they blur boundaries through focusing and universalizing strategies and (2) they cross boundaries physically, discursively, and iconographically. This study contributes a new theoretical and empirical example to the cultural changes studied by scholars of social movements, and it also provides a useful counterpoint to studies of symbolic boundary construction and maintenance in the sociology of culture.     

Social media time,identity narratives and the construction of political biographies

ABSTRACT

The question of identity narrative is at the core of the interaction between social movements and temporalities. In this paper, we draw on long-term qualitative research amongst activists engaged in Italian social movements and argue that identity narratives are often the result of a complex mnemonic, contradictory and open-ended process that spans through a life-time of engagement with multiple collectives. We then question whether the use of social media reshape these dynamics. The analysis shows that the construction of identity narratives on social media tends to take place with knowledge of the complexity and overlaps that characterise these processes online. Nevertheless, the temporality of social media, based on immediacy, archival and predictive time, challenges the unpredictable, contradictory, and open-ended nature of political identity construction offline. The need to escape the hegemonic temporalities of social media poses new challenges to activists in their creative agency.     

A movement divided: SlutWalks,protest repertoires and the privilege of nudity

The use of the corporeal female body in social protest has a long and complex history, particularly in anti-gender based violence movements. From early 20th Century suffragists in international coalitions circulating images of women protesters withered by hunger strikes to the more contemporary staging of nude protest by groups like FEMEN, women’s bodies have certainly functioned as powerful symbols. But such repertoires have also been controversial within the movement, as conceptualizations, norms and security surrounding female bodies can vary so much depending on culture and socioeconomic status. This paper uses the 2011–2014 SlutWalk movement to explore the use of female bodies in mobilizations staged by actors across those differences. It investigates the varying degrees of privilege associated with the choice – or choicelessness – protestors encounter when collectively considering effective repertoires. As the discourse unfolded around Slutwalk and who had the ‘right’ or ‘privilege’ to practice nudity as a protest repertoire, it illuminated deep divisions within anti-sexual violence and feminist activism. I argue this created important opportunities for the movement to integrate analysis of structural inequalities beyond gender, particularly in attempts to improve processes of deliberation.