Mobilizing in transnational contentious spaces: linking relations,emotions and space in migrant activism

Despite proliferation of political protest by migrants in recent years, analyses from a social movement perspective remain scarce. This lacuna is not coincidental, but theoretically grounded. According to dominant movement theories, migrants are unlikely subjects of mobilization due to legal obstacles, scarce resources and closed political and discursive opportunities. The article therefore explores how marginalized migrants organize transnational political protest against all evident odds. Drawing from extensive fieldwork and bridging transnational migration and social movement studies, it is argued that migrants mobilize within transnational social spaces, which link relations and emotions acquired on the move with the relational qualities at the locality of arrival. The article illustrates how the transnational spaces most migrants inhabit can be politicized and transformed into particular social formations, for which the term ‘transnational contentious spaces’ is suggested.     

On Movement Frames and Negotiated Identities: The Case of Poland's First Solidarity Congress

How do participants in a social movement come to agree on goals and strategies? Recent scholarship has moved in two theoretical directions. Some writers focus on movement leaders and their efforts to excite and attract potential supporters by formulating a vision that conveys optimism and moral outrage, yet is congruent with long-standing popular beliefs. Other writers focus far less on leaders and their frames and insist, instead, that movements are organizationally decentralized and typically lack consensus on goals and strategies. From this second perspective, programs are best seen as the byproducts of ongoing clashes and messy negotiations between a myriad of local activists with different beliefs, diverse values, and frequently divergent interests. Using the First Solidarity Congress as a historical case study, this article argues for the utility of combining both approaches – one that focuses on leaders’ ongoing efforts to build consensus around a seemingly effective frame, and the other that stresses the extent of intra-movement discord and the decentralized nature of movement organizations.     

Practicing Birchism: The Assumption and Limits of Idiocultural Coherence in Framing Theory

Social movement theory and research over the past twenty years have utilized the concepts incorporated under the rubric of Framing Theory in order to draw attention to the cultural ‘meaning work’ within a social movement or social movement organization. Underlying Framing Theory is an assumption of what I term idiocultural coherence – that for a movement organization to be successful, its members must come to agree cognitively with its cultural understandings and identify collectively with it. Drawing on an example of the John Birch Society, a very successful conspiratorial, anti-communist organization, I show how people may join a social movement organization not because they necessarily or fully agree with its collective action frames but because it provides an opportunity to act collectively and publicly perform a collective identity. I argue that a narrow focus on idiocultural processes obfuscates important cultural processes ‘outside’ of a movement organization that have an impact on how and why people join an organization and maintain membership.     

The Construction and Mobilization of Unemployed Interests: The Case of Sweden in the 1990s

In this paper, using a case of unemployed mobilization in Sweden in the 1990s, we examine the interpretive process by which unemployment interests emerge and evolve in public interactions with other political actors, especially unions, and argue that unemployed mobilization episodes cannot be fully understood without attention to interpretive processes. More specifically, we show how unemployed interests during the unemployment crisis in the 1990s initially were aligned with the labor movement at large, later became aligned with unions against the Social Democrats, and eventually gave rise to an independent federation of unemployed groups, which subsequently collapsed.     

Pursuing Political Persuasion: War and Peace Frames in the United States after September 11th

Despite the prominence of framing analysis in social movement research, the ways that power-holders and challengers attempt to persuade the general public remain under-theorized. We develop a multidimensional typology of what content producers frequently anticipate will make their frames potent. Moreover, we argue that several contextual factors influence which of these dimensions are emphasized in frames. To assess these propositions, we conducted an analysis of statements issued by President Bush and 10 US peace movement organizations following the September 11th attacks. Both sides touched upon all dimensions. President Bush's statements took advantage of discursive and emotional opportunities in crafting messages supportive of war and repression. Illustrating their strategic nature, PMO statements either appropriated or rejected dominant discourses for any single dimension. While peace groups took advantage of emotional opportunities, oppositional cultures curtailed their use of discursive opportunities. Lacking democratic legitimacy and rational legal authority, peace groups devoted a higher proportion of text to establishing the empirical credibility and the moral authority of their claims. The study advances social movement theory by highlighting the interplay of culture, power, and agency in the production of public collective action frames.     

The rural arena: The diversity of protest in rural England

In the past 15–20 years, the rural areas of England have been used by a wide diversity of groups as the stage for their protest activities. Some have argued that this is due the rise of a rural social movement; this paper contends that rural areas have become both available and advantageous as the locale of protest through a range of interlocking factors. Firstly, that the rise of the network society has repositioned the societal importance of rural areas. Secondly, that the governance of rural areas has changed, allowing the social stake of rurality to be more widely contested. Thirdly, that opportunities to protest have shifted in favour of rural spaces, in terms of technology and policing. Through a discussion of recent changes in rural England and three case studies, The Land is Ours, Farmers for Action and the Organic Food and Farming Movement, this paper examines these changes and what they mean for the future of rural England.     

Narrative and Frame Alignment in Social Movements: Labor Problem Novels and the 1929 Gastonia Strike

Research on social movements and frame alignment has shed light on how activists draw new participants to social movements through meaning making. However, the ‘framing perspective’ has failed to interrogate how the form or genre in which frames are deployed affects the communication of meaning. The burgeoning literature on social movements and narrative would seem to point to one discursive form of importance to meaning making in social movements, but scholars have failed to connect their insights with the literature on framing. In this article, I analyze five novels published in response to a 1929 communist-led strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. I argue that labor movement activists deployed these long-form narratives for the purposes of ‘frame alignment,’ specifically ‘frame amplification’ and ‘frame transformation,’ and I show how these narratives conveyed frames in ways that other discursive forms could not. The study raises new questions about the selection and reception of discursive forms in social movements.     

The New Anti-war Protests and Miscible Mobilizations

This paper analyzes the factors contributing to the relative success of the recent mobilizations against war despite the peace movement organizations' weakness and unfavorable political opportunity structures. I argue that these anti-war protests were shaped by two factors: first, by trigger events which created new grievances and, second, by the use of new information technologies such as the Internet. These factors contributed to what I call miscible mobilizations, or simultaneous mobilization efforts by movements with compatible ideologies and shared activist communities and SMOs. Results from an extensive study of the anti-war protests from September 2001 in the USA support this notion and call attention to the need to develop a synthesis between traditional resource mobilization, political process, and new social movement theories of mobilization and to focus research on the fluid processes of miscible mobilizations.     

Organizing survival and resistance in austere times: shifting disability activism and care politics in Ontario,Canada

Following the 2008 financial crisis, all levels of Canadian government implemented austerity measures that dramatically restructured welfare, employment, and social service infrastructures. This has significantly affected how disabled people access services. We argue that this restructuring has been an impetus for new forms of disability activism and care politics in Ontario as disabled people fight for services necessary for survival. We discuss examples of politicized forms of care and resistance in Ontario, namely self-care, the Ontario Direct Funding programme, and collective forms of care. We contend that while these examples of care can be practical modes of resistance, they can all be co-opted and restructured to suit neoliberal ideologies and must therefore be continually interrogated.     

Armed activism as the enactment of a collective identity: the case of the Provisional IRA between 1969 and 1972

This paper argues that micro-mobilization into armed activism is strongly motivated by the enactment of an identity that people already have prior to their mobilization as a way to strongly assert and emphasize individual agency in the face of major changes in the political context. Empirically, it advocates that those who joined the Provisional IRA between 1969 and 1972 did so in order to respond to a need for action by a northern nationalist community that stemmed from a perceived, alleged or actual, sense of second-class citizenship. We suggest that the importance of identity rather than ideology can also help us to explain why IRA members and former members overwhelmingly accepted the compromise peace settlement of the 1990s despite the fact that core ideological goals had not been realized. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research outside the Irish context.     

A Calmly Disruptive Insider: The Case of an Institutionalized Advocacy Organization at Work

Through a case study of a leading service provider organization in Philadelphia, this paper explores the advocacy work of a publicly funded, professionalized, institutionalized nonprofit organization. In this article I relate how in the spring of 2002, staff at the organization responded to a recurring political issue: local business groups were again calling for official action against “aggressive panhandlers” in the downtown district. I use ethnographic and historical data to show that the organization’s institutionalization and ties to the public sector have allowed staff to develop resources and skills for being both contentious claim-makers and influential actors in the institutional political arena.

The voice of lived experience: mobile video narratives in the courtroom

Video is overtaking other modes of communication in new media. Whether from a smartphone, a wearable device or surveillance camera, video is being made, stored and shared in unprecedented ways. Once the exclusive territory of institutions becomes large enough to finance video production and its storytelling power, technology’s contemporary democratization is changing the landscape of visual narrative. This project explores the discursive nature of video based on a case study of a courtroom trial that was both about the legality of filming crime scenes and the evidentiary use of videos from crime scenes. This unique intersection of surveillance, counter-surveillance, word and image, body and text allows for deeper understanding of how video serves human purposes. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and textual analysis, we build upon Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm by identifying significant attributes of unedited, evidentiary video that distinguish it from other forms of visual documentation. Raw video’s hard-edged timeline presents narrative coherence in a way that resists discursive contextualization. This has important implications for public policy and citizen-generated video evidence.     

The twenty-first century revolutions and internationalism: a world historical perspective

ABSTRACT

In his essay, ‘It is imperative to reconstruct the Internationale of workers and peoples’, Samir Amin (2018) suggested that in order to ‘deconstruct the extreme centralization of wealth and the power that is associated with the system’, we should seriously study ‘the experience of the worker Internationales […], even if they belong to the past. This should be done, not in order to “choose” a model among them, but to invent the most suitable form for contemporary conditions’. In this paper, I will follow Amin's suggestion and provide a brief examination of the past experiences of first Internationales in the nineteenth century, and conditions that produced them, with an eye to the present moment. By comparing the political climate of the early twenty-first century to analogous comparable periods in world history, I will argue that today we need two distinct forms of global political organizations. First one should serve as a horizontal ‘movement of movements’ that reflects the spontaneous and creative energy of mass movements from below; the second one should serve as a hierarchically organized international party which points out, brings to front and represents the global and long-term interests of the movements against their local/short-term interests.     

Community Activism in the USA: Catholic Hospital Mergers and Reproductive Access

This article analyzes how grassroots organizing diminishes the potential loss of reproductive services in communities affected by Catholic hospital mergers. The empirical contribution of this study is to highlight changing patterns of pro-choice social movement mobilization and approaches to conflict resolution in the reproductive rights arena. To discover how Catholic hospital mergers threaten access to reproductive services, five case studies based in diverse regional and demographic areas throughout the USA are developed. From the case studies, we analyze which organizational factors most strongly influence the preservation of services. Among the variables which may affect outcomes are: characteristics of the acquiring institution, the type of coalition created to terminate the merger, the failure of pro-life activists to counter-mobilize, incentives for compromise on both sides, and regulatory intervention by government or state action. The study concludes that this new phase of the abortion struggle represents renewed vigor among local pro-choice activists and demonstrates that grassroots coalitions who oppose the curtailment of services often preserve reproductive healthcare options in their communities by creating alliances with professionals and other coalition partners.     

Now and again: Eventful experience as a resource in senior activism

ABSTRACT

Shared memories shape relations among social movement participants and their organizations. However, scholars often ignore how experience operates as a means of solidifying attachment in group contexts. In contrast, I argue that activism depends on how participants publicly recall events. In this, I integrate a social memory perspective with the examination of activist movements. Through narrative, participants build engagement by presenting the self-in-history as a model for collective action. I refer to this as eventful experience, utilizing memorable moments as a resource for generating commitment. Movements depend upon members communicating the critical moments of their lives, embedding personal timelines in group culture. The linkage of personal experience and public events is a strategy by which individuals motivate collective action. Drawing on a thirty-month ethnography of a progressive senior citizen activist group in Chicago, I examine how members use an awareness of temporality to build a culture of action. Each movement group uses the past experiences of participants to build their culture – what Jasper refers to as taste in tactics, incorporating past successes, present plans, and imagined futures into a call for direct action.     

Social Movement Studies,Social Movement Studies,and the Challenges of Parochialism: A Rejoinder to Poulson,Caswell and Gray

In this short rejoinder, I briefly contextualise and discuss the implications of Poulson, Caswell and Gray's article for Social Movement Studies.     

Beyond the Activist Ghetto: A Deductive Blockmodelling Approach to Understanding the Relationship between Contact with Environmental Organisations and Public Attitudes and Behaviour

Current research on the behavioural impacts of social movements tends to focus on their influence on those most intensely involved. Consequently it overlooks the impacts that social movement organisations might have on those outside the activist ghetto. To begin to address this gap in the literature, this article examines the relationship between contact with environmental organisations and public attitudes and behaviour. Monitoring the electricity use of 72 households has facilitated analysis of its association with their environmental attitudes and contact with environmental organisations. Although standard statistical approaches fail to uncover a relationship between contact with environmental organisations and attitudes and behaviour, a deductive blockmodelling approach tells a different story. Low household electricity use is associated with households sharing pro-environmental attitudes and contact with environmental organisations. High energy use is associated with households not sharing any of these; and moderate energy use is associated with a moderate degree of sharing. Our findings reveal the need for systematic studies of environmental movement organisations' impact on the public's pro-environmental behaviours.     

The Impacts of State Surveillance on Political Assembly and Association: A Socio-Legal Analysis

Based on group interviews conducted in 2006 that included 71 social justice organizations, this paper analyzes the impact of surveillance on the exercise of assembly and association rights. We link these protected legal activities with analytic frameworks from social movements scholarship in order to further a socio-legal conception of political violence against social movements.

Hybrid social and news media protest events: from #MarchinMarch to #BusttheBudget in Australia

Public protest events are now both social media and news media events. They are deeply entangled, with news media actors – such as journalists or news organisations – directly participating in the protest by tweeting about the event using the protest hashtag; and social media actors sharing news items published online by professional news agencies. Protesters have always deployed tactics to engage the media and use news media agencies’ resources to amplify their reach, with the dual aim of mobilising new supporters and adding their voice to public, mediatised debate. When protest moves between a physical space and a virtual space, the interactions between protesters and media stop being asynchronous or post hoc and turn instantaneous. In this new media-protest ecosystem, traditional media are still relevant sources of information and legitimacy, yet this dynamic is increasingly underpinned by a hybrid interdependency between traditional news and social media sources. In this paper we focus on an anti-austerity government movement that arose in Australia in early 2014 and was mobilised as a series of social media driven, connective action protest events. We show that there is a complex symbiotic interdependency between the movement and the traditional media for recognition and amplification of initial protest events, but that over time as media interest wanes, the movements’ network becomes disconnected and momentum is lost. This suggests that the active role traditional media play in protest events is being underestimated in the current research agenda on connective action.