Moral Reflexivity and Dramaturgical Action in Social Movement Activism: The Case of the Plowshares and Animal Rights Sweden

Drawing on Durkheim's sociology of morality, which identifies ideals and norms as the key components of morality, this article outlines a theoretical model for understanding how social movements can bring about legitimate social change. Social movement activists, we propose, can be conceptualized as followers and pursuers of sacred ideals. As such, they frequently come into conflict with existing norms in society. To manage this dilemma, activists must downplay their role as norm breakers while emphasizing their identity as followers of ideals. This in turn requires moral reflexivity in the staging of collective action. The article shows how dramaturgical control (Goffman) is exercised towards this end among activists engaged in two social movements in Sweden: the Plowshares peace movement and Animal Rights Sweden. The article further examines the internal stratification, or ‘moral hierarchies’, within the two activist groups in the light of the proposed model. The closer the activists were able to adhere to the sacred ideal, the higher the social status they enjoyed within the group.     

Social media teams as digital vanguards: the question of leadership in the management of key Facebook and Twitter accounts of Occupy Wall Street,Indignados and UK Uncut

Recent protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the US, the indignados/15M movement in Spain, and UK Uncut have witnessed the rise of social media teams, small activist groups responsible for managing high-visibility and collective activist social media accounts. Going against dominant assertions about the leaderless character of contemporary digital movements, the article conceptualises social media teams as ‘digital vanguards’, collective and informal leadership structures that perform a role of direction of collective action through the use of digital communication. Various aspects of the internal functioning of vanguards are discussed: (a) their formation and composition; (b) processes of internal coordination; (c) struggles over the control of social media accounts. The article reveals the profound contradiction between the leadership role exercised by social media teams and the adherence of digital activists to techno-libertarian values of openness, horizontality, and leaderlessness. The espousal of these principles has run against the persistence of power and leadership dynamics leading to bitter conflicts within these teams that have hastened the decline of the movements they served. These problems call for a new conceptual framework to better render the nature of leadership in digital movements and for new political practices to better regulate the management of social media assets.     

Songwriting and Activism: A Young Singer's Efforts to Write Himself into the Traditions of an Activist Group

This article examines how music functions as a vehicle by which people may place themselves in social movements. Centering questions of culture, the article describes how an environmentalist group based in the northeastern USA used music to: (1) assert a collective identity; (2) project a past, present and future; and (3) forge relationships among group members and between group members and the general public. Against this background, the article considers how a young activist used music to take on and adapt a movement identity and position himself within the movement's traditions and social relations. In a discourse analysis of a song this young activist composed and performed at the group's summer music festival, the article shows how he adapted a range of cultural resources to reimagine and place himself within the group's relations of time and social space.     

Practicing Gender and Race in Online Activism to Improve Safe Public Space in Sweden

This article aims to locate the social practices of activist groups online and clarify how they collectively practice gender and race. It draws upon a qualitative study of two locale‐oriented groups that sought to improve safe public space in their respective cities in Sweden. Using Grounded Theory method, I observed and analyzed each group's public Facebook site from initiation until decline or maintenance. The findings captured five routine behaviors done by the groups in a tacit manner: responding to a concrete incident, creating meaningful participation, fostering substantive debate, formulating a long‐term vision, and questioning social hierarchies . Working with theories of social, gendered, and racialized practices, I analyze these behaviors as practices available to the activist groups to do, yet open for social change through their performance. Although all five practices were detected among both groups, the two groups performed them differently and this had consequences for their maintenance as well as their ability to challenge gender and racial hierarchies. The analysis makes an important contribution to social movement scholarship by showing how tacit and routine behavior forms the backbone of any collective action and is a crucial site for the (re)construction of social hierarchies.     

To Be and Not to Be: The Question of Transborder Civic Activism and Regionalization in Mexico. A Critical Account of Neo-Gramscian Perspectives

Abstract

This article analyses how neo-Gramscian IPE and IR traditions look at the transborder agency of civil society actors in the making and re-making of regional orders. In particular, the article identifies key limitations of neo-Gramscian analyses that derive, on one hand, from how agency is understood and, on the other, from an insufficient attention to complex and paradoxical features of transborder collective action. Having as a case study three examples of Mexican TCA opposing market-driven regionalization policies during the 1990s, my empirical observations suggest that diversity and ambivalences of collective transborder action need to be addressed as first order questions. Despite this, neo-Gramscian accounts on transborder forms of collective action have either emphasized that: a) agency is conditioned by powerful structures of the global political economy; or b) that agency is making up these structures. While not rejecting this altogether but attempting to go further, this article advances a critique of both ‘emphases’ on agency and some alternatives.     

Between rebellion and uprising intersecting networks and discursive strategies in rebel controlled Syria

ABSTRACT

In the article I explore how, at the individual level, participation in multiple networks opens up questions regarding the classification of social activism. The central contention is that as mobilization networks increasingly intersect, explicit discursive designations of activism (being ‘political’ or ‘nonpolitical, social’) by individual activists becomes more prevalent. I substantiate this argument with an in-depth exploration of the Syrian uprising. I show that as two distinct networks─one that emerged around nonviolent activism, another that emerged around a violent uprising─increasingly intersected, activists began to use specific discursive strategies. On the one side, a strategy emerged that emphasized the nonpolitical nature of mobilization, distancing activism discursively from intersecting networks. On the other side, a strategy emerged of politicizing collective identities, thereby bridging discursively various mobilization networks. The article thereby adds to existing studies on the intersection between network structure and individual activism. The analysis builds on more than a hundred primary sources from various rebel groups and relevant local actors in addition to thirty interviews with relevant players among activist, rebel and public services organizations.     

Building on Mutual Goals

ABSTRACT

In this era of diminishing federal and state funds for social services, greater attention has been directed toward how social work and the religious sector can cooperate in providing services. This article suggests that social workers should move beyond this focus and begin to identify and join in collective action with local congregations or faith-based organizations, which take an activist approach toward community needs. The author uses a case study of an activist central city church to illustrate how churches can be involved in community change. Social workers are encouraged to consider all methods of collaboration with the religious sector that would lead to the mutual goal of community betterment.     

ASSERTING THE POLITICAL SELF: Community Activism Among Black Women Who Relocate to the Rural South

In this article, I address the collective process of politicization in a group of urban working-class black women who have departed from large cities in the northeast United States and resettled in small towns and scattered, isolated rural communities in the Southeast. The study examines how newcomes became politically involved in their new environment and particularly, how social constraints and opportunities embedded within local political culture influenced their experiences of becoming activists. I employ a critical feminist approach in which an understanding of political agency is grounded in culturally and geographically specific social relations. I argue that activist politics of returnees are framed and formed by unequal gender, race, and class relations resonant in the political culture of the rural South. Localized social conventions define and normalize allowable political roles, discourses, and actions for working-class black women. As newcomers and outsiders, women activists and their actions become politicized in the process of encountering, questioning, and ultimately, subverting these conventions. As the women returnees engaged local political culture, their practices were interpreted as a violation of established paternalist norms of community activism by both white power holders and local working-class black women. This transgression influenced the formation of their identities as political agents and may potentially disrupt the power relations in the surrounding community as well. The study's findings demonstrate the importance of situating race, class, and gender relations in the analysis of activist politics in general and among black working-class women in particular. The study is based on participant observation and interviews with working-class black women activists in three counties in southeastern North Carolina.     

Historical institutional child abuse: Activist mobilisation and public inquiries

The abuse of children in institutional settings is an issue of ongoing social, public, and political concern internationally. While societal responses to historical abuse have been the subject of considerable scholarship in recent years, conceptualisation of the role of activism remains limited. This article aims to advance sociological and interdisciplinary perspectives on nonrecent institutional child abuse through a conceptualisation of activist mobilisation. The article begins by providing context for the emergence of institutional child abuse as a social issue. A brief overview of key themes and debates in the interdisciplinary literature is then offered, and a critical gap in current scholarship is identified in relation to activism. Drawing on illustrative examples of activist mobilisation, both in the form of survivor narratives and strategies aimed at influencing policy, the article sets out how a sociology of activism in the field of historical institutional child abuse might proceed. Through attention to the social dynamics of activism, and conceptualisation of collective action in this domain as a social movement, the article provides new insights for the field and an alternative to sociological theorisation of responses to historical institutional child abuse as simply constituting a public scandal or moral panic.     

Taking Control or Losing Control? Activist Narratives of Provocation and Collective Violence

This article examines the complex relationship between political agency, responsibility, and collective violence in connection with political protest. Contemporary Danish and Swedish left-wing activist narratives of police provocations at political protest events are analysed to clarify how provocation and its relation to the outbreak of violence are retrospectively constructed in radical milieus. Three ‘provocation plots’ are identified that, respectively, present (1) the interaction as purely a matter of attack and defence, (2) provocation as a cause of anger leading to retaliation, and (3) provocation as a trigger bringing about a redefinition of the situation that then offers an opportunity for violence. Subsequent negotiations among political activists regarding the position of moral high ground revolved around the issue of whether responding to the provocation in each of these cases meant taking or losing control of the situation. Internet discussion forums are highlighted as important arenas for debates among members of protest coalitions and in broader social movement milieus in which the interpretation of protest events and their implications for future protest tactics is negotiated. In the cases considered, storytelling after violent events was used to make sense of, and evaluate, often quite chaotic and ambiguous processes of violent confrontation, suggesting itself as a key to understanding the micro-dynamics of how social movement repertoires of action are maintained and developed.     

The prospectus of activism: discerning and delimiting imagined possibility

This article aims to articulate a new agenda in the scholarship of social movements. Specifically, it seeks to turn attention to the assumptions that undergird activism. Rather than studying movements themselves, we can study them as the embodiment of collective expectation in a particular public. We can learn more about the broader society in which movements are embedded by asking how activists and the public they seek to engage determine what is within the realm of possibility. I refer to the imagined horizon of possibility as the activist prospectus. To illustrate the importance of prospectus, I draw upon a case study of environmental activism in Samara, Russia. Ethnographic observation and analysis yield insights into subjective perceptions that help explain the weakness of civil society within Russia.     

HERBERT BLUMER'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOCIOLOGY

Herbert Blumer's work has had considerable impact on the growth of twentieth-century sociology. He kept alive an interest in George Mead at a time when Pragmatism floundered. Although it is unlikely that Mead's work would have been overlooked, there can be no question that Blumer's forceful advocacy helped bring it to the forefront of modern social thought. Park first organized the subfield of collective behavior, but it was Blumer who kept it going in the face of opposition from structural-functionalism. Whether or not collective behavior endures as a separate area of specialization, sociologists will have to concern themselves with the manner in which human beings adapt to problematic situations. Although his views on methodology have been controversial, some of his positions will probably prevail. His insistence on the direct observation of people in their indigenous settings and his contention that human agency must be taken into account in explanations of social processes are difficult to counter.     

Gendering in the Holistic Milieu: A Critical Realist Analysis of Homeopathic Work

Increasing attention is being paid to the economic sector known as the holistic milieu, in which alternative or New Age spiritualities are transformed into commercial products and services. Made up of a wide variety of activities and products, many marketized, this milieu is dominated by women as producers and consumers. The discourses of holism and wellbeing that underpin activity offer promises of gender equality and the freedom to develop subjectivity according to individual preferences. Despite its economic and cultural significance, little is known of why women in particular enter this sector. This article presents a critical realist analysis of how five women negotiated structural conditions and agency when leaving a mainstream occupation or organization to move into homeopathy, a key activity in the holistic milieu. I suggest that while there are numerous tensions and contradictions involved in this move, it is nonetheless a form of action that offers a different subject position and altered gender relations, based on embodied identity and exercise of agency. Whether the holistic milieu offers more equitable gender relations is less clear, but this seems less important for respondents than the other benefits the move implies.     

Is Sex Work Sex or Work? Forming Collective Identity in Bangalore

While sex worker activism grows increasingly vibrant around the world, the forms and practices of sex work vary widely, and are often secret. How do sex workers come to see themselves as sex worker activists? What tensions emerge in the formation of collective identity within sex worker activist organizations, especially when the term “sex work” has often traveled linked to transnational organizations and funding? To answer these questions, this article analyzes in-depth interviews and participant observation on sex worker activism in Bangalore, India. Focusing on an organization I call the Union, I argue that it was first within the “shop floor” of transnationally funded HIV prevention organizations, and then within the activist work of the Union, that sex workers came to identify collectively as activists at a large scale. However, distinct configurations of practice among gendered groups of sex workers in Bangalore meant each group related differently to the formation of a sex worker activist collective identity. Two aspects of sex workers’ practice emerged as particularly central: varying experiences of sex work as “sex” or as “work,” and varying levels of anonymity and visibility in public spaces. Organizing through transnationally funded HIV prevention programs helped solidify these categories of differentiation even as it provided opportunities to develop shared self-hood.     

Networks of Contention: The Shape of Online Transnationalism in Early Twenty-First Century Social Movement Coalitions

The study of new media use by transnational social movements is central to contemporary investigations of social contention. In order to shed light on the terrain in which the most recent examples of online mobilization have grown and developed, this paper combines the interest in the transnational dynamics of social contention and the exploration of the use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) for protest action. In specific terms, the study investigates how early twenty-first century social movement coalitions used Internet tools to build symbolically transnational collective identities. By applying a hyperlink network analysis approach, the study focuses on a website network generated by local chapters of the World Social Forum (WSF), one of the earliest social movement coalitions for global justice. The sample network, selected through snowball sampling, is composed of 222 social forum websites from around the world. The study specifically looks at hyperlinks among social forum websites as signs of belonging and potential means of alliance. The analysis uses network measures, namely of cohesion, centrality, structural equivalence and homophily, to test dynamics of symbolic collective identification underlying the WSF coalition. The findings show that in early twenty-first century transnational contention, culture and place still played a central role in the emergence of transnational movement networks.     

Contested Cosmopolitanisms: Global Meetings and Local Mobilizations

This article analyzes the ways that Pittsburgh anarchist activists, politicians, and journalists framed the 2009 G‐20 meetings and protests through a content analysis of newspaper articles and activist documents. Our analysis found that cosmopolitanism was a central discourse, but it was also contested. Pittsburgh anarchists introduced an open‐community cosmopolitanism that prioritizes the local over the global as a site of struggle and also embraces expansion of rights and commitment to diversity and inclusivity. Somewhat unexpectedly, this open‐community cosmopolitanism was successfully transmitted beyond activist discourse into the public and the local media. The anarchist activist open‐community framing challenged Pittsburgh residents to question whether increased global corporate investments were best for Pittsburgh and, in doing so, fostered connections between local anarchist activists, local journalists, and local Pittsburgh residents. To reflect on the ways that activists contribute to ideas of cosmopolitanism, this article presents a theoretical model that incorporates individual and collective dispositions and multiple ideological standpoints. We also show how movement groups may strategically draw on these shared cosmopolitan dispositions to expand their movement base, communicate their messages, and challenge the hegemony of global capitalism.     

Actor-Network Theory, Gabriel Tarde and the Study of an Urban Social Movement: The Case of Can Ricart, Barcelona

This article explores the possibilities that a deeper engagement with the work of Gabriel Tarde opens for Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It argues that the combination of ANT’s methodological and analytical orientation and Tarde’s neo-monadology offers a useful framework for the study of new forms of political activism. Findings from an ethnographic project on the conflict surrounding the eviction and demolition of the Can Ricart factory in Barcelona are used to discuss: a) how ANT transforms the objects of inquiry into performative, relational entanglements (or monads); and b) how Tarde’s neo-monadology helps to re-imagine the political in ANT, moving away from the design of new parliamentary forms and towards a politics of invention. Three key moments of invention in the conflict of Can Ricart are examined: the assemblage of a new activist collective, the fabrication of the very factory the movement was trying to save, and the generation of a bifurcation in the conditions of possibility in which the conflict was taking place.     

Candidate emergence as movement mobilization: An analysis of Women's post-2016 electoral engagement

Political science scholarship argues that women's underrepresentation in American politics stems from a persistent shortage of female candidates. Women are less likely to run because they often perceive individual and structural obstacles that negatively impact their electoral interest. Such barriers remain intact, yet thousands of women have signaled their interest in running for office since the 2016 election by participating in candidate training programs (CTPs). Though running for office is not commonly defined as an activist activity, this article argues that theories of collective action and movement mobilization, rather than those focusing on the psychological aspects of candidate emergence, are better equipped to explain the recent increase of electoral interest. Using EMILY's List—an elite political entity that began as a grassroots social movement organization—as a case, this article integrates scholarship from sociology and political science to examine how feminist activist organizing can impact women's interest in running for public office. I first review the research on women's candidate emergence and CTPs before discussing the electoral movement strategies and the mobilizing impact of the media and collective action frames. The article reviews recent scholarship on the Women's March and the Resistance, then synthesizes the literature to examine EMILY's List and their electoral movement strategies leading up to the 2018 midterm elections. I conclude by suggesting avenues for future research that can bridge the relationship between movements and electoral politics and advance scholarly understanding of how, when, and why women run for office.     

What's Wrong with Being Poor? The Problems of Poverty,as Young People Describe them

This article explores how young people living in low‐income neighbourhoods problematise their own lives, using data generated as part of a participatory policy project with five groups of young people, aged 11–21. Three common problems were identified; housing, education and crime, as well as one common silence around their own agency. This silence is perhaps substituted by a focus on collective agency and politics, suggesting that perhaps young people can see poverty as a more collective problem than previous research may highlight.     

THE PRESENTATION OF POLITICAL SELF:

This article asks how the cultural environment shapes activist claims making. Using data from a grassroots antitoxics/anti-incinerator movement field study, I show how activists modify their political claims as they shift their discussion from the interpersonal level (back region) to the wider public (front region). Each region has distinct constraints and opportunities that shape the construction and potency of activists' claims.
I begin by describing the interrelations between movement frames and the cultural environment; I then argue that the concept of "cultural resonance" captures these interrelations. Next, I describe the front region and back region collective action frames that activists constructed. Despite their denial, they presented claims that differed between regions. I use the ideas of region and cultural resonance to argue that distinct region specific conventions shaped activist frames into conventional styles, forms, and themes. I conclude by discussing processes of intramovement solidarity, and prospects for intermovement cooperation.