‘Not that kind of atheist’: scepticism as a lifestyle movement

This article examines atheist activists from a lifestyle movement perspective. I focus on how atheist activists adopt the term ‘sceptic’ as a distinct identity marker to represent their growing interest in other types of activism beyond atheist community building and criticism of religious beliefs. My data come from thirty-five interviews with Canadian atheist activists and participant observation in the province of Alberta. In contrast to previous social movement approaches to atheist activism, I deemphasize the importance of collective identity and instead attend to personal identity as the site of social change. My findings show that being a sceptic is a personally meaningful identity in the context of a relatively weak secularist collective identity. Moreover, atheist activists who also identify as sceptics wish to expand the boundaries of the atheist movement to include individualistic projects of personal affirmation based on science and critical thinking. This work contributes to our understanding of the everyday activities of activists who engage in individual action in the absence of a strong collective identity. In particular, this article expands our understanding of lifestyle movements beyond the current focus on socially conscious consumption. Instead, I return to the roots of lifestyle movement theory, that is, how one’s everyday choices serve as a form of protest. Finally, this work contributes to atheism scholarship, which has neglected the diversity of individual identities within atheist organisations and among atheist activists.     

Learning to feel: the neglected sociology of social movements

This paper discusses the experience and ideology of emotions among animal rights activists, and more broadly, the applicability of the sociology of emotions to the field of social movements. I examine the case of a social movement which relies heavily on empathy in its initial recruitment, and which has been derisively labeled by outsiders as ‘emotional’. I explain recruitment to animal rights activism by showing how activists develop a ‘vocabulary of emotions’ to rationalize their participation to others and themselves, along with managing the emotional tone of the movement by limiting the kinds of people who can take part in debates about animal cruelty. The interactive nature in which emotions develop in social movements is stressed over previous approaches to emotions in the social movement literature, which treat emotions as impulsive or irrational.     

‘Anger is Why We're All Here’: Mobilizing and Managing Emotions in a Professional Activist Organization

The emotions involved in social activism are central factors in the recruitment to, motivation for, and sustainability of social movements. But this perspective on the role of emotions within social movements contrasts with studies of emotions within mainstream organizations where employees are called on to manage their own emotions and those of others. Thus, while much social movement research focuses on how activists actively cultivate emotional expression, these ideas rarely intersect with the organizational research that examines how a diminished quality of working life may result from the need for employees to modify, suppress or emphasize emotions. Using in-depth interviews with activists at Amnesty International, this article bridges this theoretical divide by examining emotional labour and emotional regulation among paid activists in a professional social movement organization. I explore the ways in which employees struggle with the emotional component of their work and the implications of these emotions for the quality of their working life, the stability of such organizations and the maintenance of social movements.     

From Tourists to Anti-Tourists to Tourist Attractions: The Transformation of the Amsterdam Squatters' Movement

Urban social movements are increasingly confronted by the growth in urban tourism and its influence over city development. This growth promises to create new opportunities for mobilization, resistance, and compromise. For both tourists and activists, place matters. However, place matters differently for each group, bringing conflicts over how the city should respond to their different, and sometimes opposing, needs. In this article, I examine the Amsterdam squatters’ movement and its relationship with tourists. I trace four major periods of the interaction between activism and tourism, from initial unity, to separation, to mutual antagonism, up to their ultimate reconciliation. I show that the interplay between tourism and urban social movements is more complex than a relationship of exploitation and resistance. Tourism has both the power to radicalize and depoliticize movements. Likewise, movements can both repel and attract tourists. This analysis emphasizes the role power differential plays in the evolving relationship. A powerful squatters’ movement resisted tourism, but the movement in decline, shifting from political to cultural activism, made the strategic choice to compromise in order to maintain the movement.     

The Mobilization Against the 2005 Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe: A French Mobilization for Another Europe

ABSTRACT

Offering a contribution to cultural approaches to studying social movements, this paper explores how people incorporate social change efforts into broader self-projects. I use the contemporary abstinence pledge movement as an archetypal example of a lifestyle movement, a movement that advocates for lifestyle change as its primary challenge to perceived cultural problems. To capture the public face crafted by this movement, I coded complete website content for ten pledge organizations, as well as their print and social media presence. The data demonstrate: how pledge organizations explicitly target culture, rather than pressuring the state to enact policy change; how participants employ individualized tactics while still believing in their collective power to engender change; and that pledgers craft a moral self, engaging in ‘personal’ identity work. Expanding the lifestyle movement literature to think about outcomes and influence, I then show how pledgers contest perceptions of movement success, redefining effectiveness towards abstract, long-term, and subjective measures. I conclude by locating lifestyle movements in the context of late modernity and suggesting how theorists might use and further develop the concept in the future.     

Constructing “Social Change” through Philanthropy: Boundary Framing and the Articulation of Vocabularies of Motives for Social Movement Participation*

I embrace Mills's (1940) conception of motives to offer new insight into an old question: why do people join social movements? I draw upon ethnographic research at the Crossroads Fund, a “social change” foundation, to illustrate that actors simultaneously articulate two vocabularies of motives for movement participation: an instrumental vocabulary about dire, yet solvable, problems and an expressive vocabulary about collective identity. This interpretive work is done during boundary framing, which refers to efforts by movements to create in-group/out-group distinctions. I argue that the goal-directed actions movements take to advance social change are shaped by participants' identity claims. Moreover, it is significant that Crossroads constructs its actions and identity as social movement activism, rather than philanthropy. This definitional work suggests that analyzing the category social movements is problematic unless researchers study how activists attempt to situate themselves within this category. Hence, methodologically attending to organizations' constructions of movement status can theoretically inform research which essentially takes social movements as a given, in exploring their structural components.     

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.     

Clothing and social movements: Tibet and the politics of dress

The ‘cultural turn’ in social movement studies has brought a renewed outlook on new social movements and lifestyle movements. In this development on the symbolic challenge of contemporary movements, research has expanded to both music and art. However, little is known about the role of clothing in movements and how activists use it for social change. In making the case for a greater consideration of clothing’s tactical use in identity work, this paper explores the case of the Tibetan Lhakar movement. I argue that for Lhakar activists, clothing is the materialization of the political consciousness of the movement and symbolically acts as a mechanism of communication in shaping its political goals. By using social media to observe individualized collective actions of wearing Tibetan clothing, the paper demonstrates how activists frame and create new political opportunity structures for civic participation in a one party state that controls all speech and movement.     

Applying Protest Event Analysis to Architecture and Design

This article reports on interdisciplinary research where insights into ‘design activism’ (particularly architecture, product and landscape design) were sought through the use of methods from social movement studies. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the notion of architecture and design as activism, sometimes also called social design, public interest design or design for social innovation. An increasing interest in activism on the part of designers is matched by an increasing interest from geographers and sociologists in the spatial and material aspects of social movements, political resistance and other power relations. Yet, the area where social movements and various repertoires of social and political action intersect with design has not been well explored by any of these disciplines. While the design literature tends to view design activism narrowly and often apolitically, social movement literature, in its discussions of materiality and spatiality, typically skirts the contributions of ‘design’. Exploring this disciplinary gap, this article reports on the empirical research that applies to design the method of protest event analysis from social movement studies. The research uncovers a ‘designerly’ repertoire of action—a set of tactics that designers use in acts of resistance—and allows for an initial bridging of the gap between design and social scientific approaches.     

Cop Rock: Protest,Identity, and Dancing Riot Police in Jordan

Social movement scholars have long studied actors' mobilization into and continued involvement in social movement organizations. A more recent trend in social movement literature concerns cultural activism that takes place primarily outside of social movement organizations. Here I use the vegan movement to explore modes of participation in such diffuse cultural movements. As with many cultural movements, there are more practicing vegans than there are members of vegan movement organizations. Using data from ethnographic interviews with vegans, this article focuses on vegans who are unaffiliated with a vegan movement organization. The sample contains two distinctive groups of vegans – those in the punk subculture and those who were not – and investigates how they defined and practiced veganism differently. Taking a relational approach to the data, I analyze the social networks of these punk and non-punk vegans. Focusing on discourse, support, and network embeddedness, I argue that maintaining participation in the vegan movement depends more upon having supportive social networks than having willpower, motivation, or a collective vegan identity. This study demonstrates how culture and social networks function to provide support for cultural movement participation.     

Collaborative Frame Construction in Social Movement Campaigns: Bisphenol-A (BPA) and Scientist–Activist Mobilization

Previous research has explored the definitional features of the processes of scientific expert activism but has been less clear regarding the dynamics of this scientific activism. This paper addresses these gaps in understanding by using an exploration of the state-based efforts and mobilizations to regulate the chemical Bisphenol-A (BPA) to identify and analyze the dynamics of interactions between scientists and activists as they collaborate in pursuit of movement objectives. Drawing primarily from interview data and participant observation, I explore how scientific experts—through collaboration and work with activists—impact the processes of movement framing, and how, in turn, the collaborative dissemination of these frames may contribute to movement goals. I argue that the relationships and coordination that developed between BPA scientists and activists resulted in a collaboratively crafted set of frames that were both scientifically rigorous and highly resonant to a public audience.     

Return to Freedom: Anti-GMO Aloha ‘Āina Activism on Molokai as an Expression of Place-based Food Sovereignty

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of food sovereignty on the island of Molokai, where the Hawaiian value of aloha ‘āina, or love for the land, guides local efforts to preserve and promote local food production. This organizing concept also has political undertones—food sovereignty requires access to land and resources, both of which Native Hawaiians have historically been dispossessed of since colonial contact. In the paper, I examine current anti-genetically modified organism (GMO) activism as one example of the uniquely Hawaiian food sovereignty efforts taking place on Molokai. I present two key arguments. First, I show how the anti-GMO platform, which has garnered support from both native Hawaiians and more recent settlers, reflects a strategic alliance that gives greater momentum to Hawai‘i's food sovereignty movement, which in turn is viewed by a growing number of Native Hawaiians as a pathway toward Indigenous sustainable self-determination. I also draw from the Molokai case to illustrate a perceived tension between community-based work and political engagement that exists within both the food sovereignty paradigm and the contemporary Indigenous sovereignty framework. I argue that aloha ‘āina as a cultural and political praxis suggests ‘ways out’ of this apparent paradox, by showing how Hawaiians have historically engaged simultaneously in both community-based practices and political activism as a means to care for their land and people. While food sovereignty on Molokai calls for the privileging of place-based knowledge, there are lessons to be learnt for social movements elsewhere that are also struggling internally to deconstruct and define what is meant by food sovereignty, and how best to achieve it.     

Love of Land: Nature Protection,Nationalism, and the Struggle over the Establishment of New Communities in Israel

Although there is burgeoning research on environmental activism, few studies have examined the interrelationship between nationalism and nature protection in detail. This article examines how groups manage the tension between national commitment and caring for the environment. It focuses on two opposing Israeli activist groups: a settler movement that aims to establish new communities in the fast-dwindling Israeli open expanses and a “green” movement intent on preserving open spaces. Our observations, interviews, and textual analysis show that both groups believe themselves to be committed to the protection of nature, and that both groups see environmental responsibility as an integral aspect of their Zionist identity. However, the Israeli green movement sees abstaining from interventions in nature and adhering to sustainable development as Zionist because it preserves Israel for future generations. Conversely, the settler movement sees active intervention in nature—by building new communities, planting trees, and hiking—as the proper way to protect Israeli natural expanses and to maintain the livelihood of Israeli society. Our case study demonstrates that, although environmental movements often aspire to universalism, local movements also interlace environmentalism and nationalism in ways that generate multiple (and even contradictory) interpretations of the appropriate way to care for nature.     

From Resistance to Activis m: The Emergence and Persistence of Activism among American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada

The concept of ‘emergent ties’ is often used to refer to the role of social networks in activating social movements. Yet pre-existing network ties were usually not a factor in initiating decisions of 50,000 draft-age American youth to migrate to Canada during the American Vietnam War. These youth often learned about the possibility of migrating to Canada through the news media and a widely distributed draft resistance manual. Once in Canada, they often became involved in networks that directed and sustained their movement activity. This suggests that the emergence and persistence of activism may often be distinct. This paper argues that a transformation process that leads to activism is often a life stage specific process, usually in late adolescence or early adulthood, whose explanation requires detailed attention to everyday behavioral activity; while the evolution and persistence of activism is often a life course persistent process that covers a longer period and involves the influence of more generically structured network ties. These patterns are demonstrated in a fuzzy set analysis (FSA) of early and longer term political activism in the lives of Americans who migrated to Toronto during the Vietnam War. We find that for both men and women, helping others was a necessary experience in transforming the resistance involved in this migration into collectively organized anti-war activism, and that a longer term tendency of the women who migrated to Canada to remain more involved than men in social movements is a product of their continuing contacts with the persons involved in their earlier activism. The results of our research underline the importance of distinguishing life stage specific and life course persistent processes in the study of social movements, and more generally that the study of social movements and the life course have much to contribute to one another.     

Bridge Leadership: Gendered Consumerism and Black Women’s Political Power within Early 20th Century “Don’t Buy” Campaigns

This research surveys the literature around black consumerism and social movements, exploring the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” (DBWYCW) campaigns of the 1920s-1940s. The author examines the integral roles women played (as organizers, agitators, and beneficiaries) in various economic boycotts within the context of Belinda Robnett’s theory of bridge leadership, with a particular focus on consumerism as a major vehicle through which African-American women engaged in movement work during the DBWYCW campaigns. This article challenges the erasure of women’s leadership by reframing “Don’t Buy” as a women’s movement. Applying Robnett’s bridge leadership theory to different eras, regions, and movements, we see how the Great Depression combined with activism in the gendered sphere of consumerism and facilitated the activism of black women. This paper also expands Robnett’s conceptualization of professional and indigenous bridge leaders by identifying urban working class women within the “Don’t Buy” movement who fit these leadership categories.     

Recruiting High‐risk Activists: Exploring the Roles of Structural and Cultural Factors

What motivates activists to leave the security of their country and the comforts of home to risk their lives on someone else's behalf? This paper summarizes the current literature on how individuals get involved in transnational social movements, including those that require them to put their lives on the line. I begin by outlining structural explanations for participation and specifically discuss how prior contacts and biographical availability draw new recruits into activism. Then, I discuss cultural explanations, which emphasize meaning‐making and collective identities in the recruitment process. Finally, I outline scholarly attempts to bridge structural and cultural explanations as well as offer recommendations for future research.     

Intersectionality and coalitions in social movement research—A survey and outlook

Over the last 30 years, intersectionality has become a prominent concept, but in social movement scholarship, its adoption has yet been limited. So far, the concept is primarily employed to analyze the mobilization of women of color and other gendered mobilizations. In this article, I argue that intersectionality matters for all social movements—both as an analytic and as a political strategy. It is important to understand that all social movements and movement organizations are shaped by multiple axes of privilege and discrimination, which influence who participates in these movements and how, what demands are pursued and which are neglected, and how the issues of the movements and movement organizations are framed. My review starts out with defining and distinguishing between structural intersectionality and political intersectionality. Then, I survey a range of social movements from an intersectional perspective. This is followed by a discussion of coalitions and other strategies to achieve political intersectionality. The article concludes with an outlook on future directions for intersectional analyses in social movement scholarship.     

Risk and Recruitment: Patterns of Social Movement Mobilization in a Government Town

Abstract

Based on document analysis and in-depth interviews with 80 respondents, this paper examines the importance of risks associated with activism in shaping recruitment and participation patterns in a government town. Residents have a history of involvement in civil rights activism, peace activities, and environmental organizing outside their community. However, citizens have not mobilized around local environmental problems despite a 50-year legacy of contamination from nuclear weapons production. I examine two organizing efforts in the community and analyze how residents' perceptions of risk associated with activism contributed to the relative success and failure of each. I argue that risk is an important variable that is critical to our understanding of social movement recruitment and participation patterns.     

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.     

Environmental Justice Grantmaking: Elites and Activists Collaborate to Transform Philanthropy

The rise of environmental justice activism since the 1980s provides an exceptional opportunity to study the relations between a grassroots movement and philanthropic foundations. I utilize archival documents and interviews with activists and funders to pose two guiding questions. One, to what degree has the environmental justice movement gained access to foundations? Two, to what degree does this movement maintain self‐determination in its relations with foundations? This paper shows that the movement successfully established connections with a few key foundations. I also show how environmental justice grantee organizations maneuvered around some of the foundation‐related constraints that might otherwise present very real threats to their self‐determination. This analysis builds on, but also goes beyond, the channeling and co‐optation literatures that emphasize the potentially negative influence of foundation funding on grantees. It also contributes to the newly developing social relations perspective which conceptualizes social movement philanthropy as a relationship that is mediated by many factors (for instance, the political orientation of the funder and grantee, among others).