Breaking free from siloes: intersectionality as a collective action frame to address toxic exposures and reproductive health

ABSTRACT

There has been increasing interest in collaborative approaches between the environmental justice (EJ) and reproductive justice (RJ) movements to address the higher burden of toxic exposures and associated reproductive health outcomes in vulnerable communities. This study examined the collective action frames (CAFs) of advocates at the EJ/RJ nexus. CAFs highlight how advocates identify problems and solutions, and motivate action. The use of intersectionality was identified as a main CAF used in three key ways: breaking free from identity-based, issue-based, and movement-based siloes. First, interviewees described breaking free from identity-based siloes by identifying risks of toxic exposures that result from intersecting social locations (e.g. gender, race/ethnicity, income, immigration status) and by equally prioritizing multiple aspects of their identities as they engage in advocacy. Second, they described breaking free from issue-based siloes by developing multi-issue agendas that address a complex web of interrelated problems impacting health. Third, they described breaking free from movement-based siloes by developing cross-movement collaborations to address issues of mutual concern. Among multiple reasons given for cross-movement collaborations, advocates perceived them as valuable in order to disrupt social, political, and economic power imbalances that shape environmental reproductive health inequities, as well as other health and social inequities. Based on these findings, we suggest that intersectionality is a master frame, and thus may be useful to advocates in other social movements addressing intersectional issues. Understanding an intersectionality frame can help to inform advocacy approaches to promote health and health equity, particularly those focused on policies and structural drivers of health.     

Women against the state: Political opportunities and collective action frames in chile's transition to democracy

While transitions to democracy have been hailed as the most important phenomena of this century, few scholars understand the role that women have played in these metamorphoses. This article uses an historical in-depth case study to examine how and why women mobilized against the state in Chile. Previous social movement theories have not attended adequately to cultural and ideational elements (e.g., gender ideology), much less these factors in the Third World and authoritarian context. In contrast, the present study modifies and extends the concepts of political opportunity structure and collective action frames, suggesting that the manner in which ideology and cultural themes are framed may provide opportunities for protest, especially in the authoritarian context. Specifically, the rise and fall of broader mobilizational frames or master frames shapes how movement-specific frames compete, decay, and transform, as some master frames create space for certain ideas (e.g., feminism) while others do not. New hypotheses regarding the use of collective action frames in a nondemocratic setting are offered.This article was presented at the American Sociological Association annual meeting, Miami, Florida, August 1993.     

Labor‐Environmental Coalition Formation: Framing and the Right to Know1

This article examines the formation of a cross‐movement coalition between elements of the labor and environmental movements in New Jersey. We explain the successful formation and initial political campaign of the New Jersey Work Environment Council with an expansion of the theoretical perspective of frame analysis. We propose a model of a coalition collective action frame that offers several important insights into the active role coalition actors play in the construction of a common frame uniting union and environmental activists. Using qualitative data gathered from interviews, observations, and document analyses of two major campaigns, we argue that the coalition frame allowed new political opportunities to be created, leading to the establishment of the most sweeping right‐to‐know laws in the United States. We conclude the discussion of coalition framing by examining political constraints on the framing possibilities of coalitions, specifically by exploring how the discursive shift from the right to know to the right to act failed to expand the influence of the cross‐movement coalition as originally expected by its members.     

The Interpretative Dimension of Transformative Events: Outrage Management and Collective Action Framing After the 2001 Anti-G8 Summit in Genoa

By focusing on the aftermath of the 2001 G8 counter-summit in Genoa, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive insight into the interpretative dimension of transformative events leading to backfire. First, in line with the existing literature on transformative events, the study shows that after the violent events, Italian authorities employed all possible strategies to inhibit public outrage (i.e., cover-ups of the situation, stigmatizations of targets to legitimate repressive action, reinterpretations of police violence as different from direct attacks, presence of authoritative assessments and intimidation of participants and witnesses). Second, a multidimensional scaling of symbolic devices from 70 social forum websites shows that after 2001, Italian social movement actors used the narrative of the Genoa events in deliberative (i.e., bridging, extension) or negotiating (i.e., punctuation, articulation) framing processes to build new collective action frames.     

Political activation and social movements: Addressing non-participation in Aotearoa New Zealand

The decline of participation in traditional civic political processes, like voting in elections and writing to elected representatives, continues to deepen in contemporary liberal democracies. However, civics comprise only one avenue for political participation. Social movements also play a key role in influencing political affairs by exerting pressure on established institutions from outside rather than within. ‘Political activation’ is key to understanding and addressing non-participation in both movement and civic settings alike, yet activation in movement settings, like non-participation more generally, remains under-researched. This article seeks to address this imbalance by exploring ways of using political activation theory to synthesise research on the fields of political participation and non-participation, in both civic and social movement contexts. After reviewing the literature on activation, which favours political participation in civic settings, I then juxtapose this existing scholarship with a case study focused more on non-participation and social movements as they are understood by movement organisers in Aotearoa New Zealand. In so doing, I demonstrate how civics, social movements, participation and non-participation can be better understood together to advance scholarship on why people do or do not engage with politics.     

Comparing Protest and Conflict: A Time-Series Analysis of Peasant Unrest in Japan, 1800-1877

Abstract  The objective of this study is to explore the mechanisms of peasant political protest and social conflict in nineteenth-century Japan. While political protest and social conflict have often been referred to as constituting two major categories of peasant unrest throughout feudal Japan, past studies on nineteenth-century peasant uprisings, based mainly on a class conflict paradigm, did not treat them as such. This study aims at examining differential mechanisms between protest and conflict, and at assessing the applicability of the class conflict paradigm.
A time-series analysis is performed using the annual data of peasant uprisings and antecedent socioeconomic and political conditions during the period 1800-1877. The study results strongly suggest that differential mechanisms between political protest and social conflict existed in the nineteenth-century, and that the applicability of a class conflict paradigm is, at the very least, dubious. Based on the results, combined with historical-contextual knowledge, an alternative explanation is also suggested.     

Pesticides,Migrant Farm Workers,and Corporate Agriculture: How Social Work Can Promote Environmental Justice

Since Rachel Carson’s exposé on harmful pesticides in the 1960s, the use of these contaminants has multiplied. In a neoliberal system of agriculture, corporate agriculture dominates the cultivation and production of most foods available for purchase and consumption. With profit being the primary goal, environmental and human concerns are not priorities. This article discusses the consequences of pesticide use, both for the environment and for migrant farm workers who cultivate most crops in the United States. Social work concerns are discussed in relation to social and environmental justice, and alternative approaches are considered that are consistent with ecological social work principles.     

Certainty,Fairness, and Balance: State Resonance and Environmental Justice Policy Implementation1

Little research has examined how and why institutional context and framing dynamics shape the institutionalization of movement claims into the state’s formal policies, and what the implication of these processes might be for movements attempting to mobilize on the same conceptual terms after institutionalization. In this study, I explore the role institutional context and framing play in the institutionalization of movement claims in a case: the implementation of environmental justice policy in the California Environmental Protection Agency from 2002 to 2007. I ask: How and why were aspects of the environmental justice frame institutionalized into regulatory policy while others were not? I use ethnographic field methods and content analysis of archival data to answer this question and offer two contributions to previous research. First, I add to previous scholarship on the environmental justice movement by identifying the character of newer problems faced by movement actors as they engage in regulatory policy processes with opponents in the United States. Second, I extend social movement framing theory by developing the notion of “state resonance” to understand how and why a collective action frame is institutionalized and implemented in regulatory policy.     

Memories of Conflict and Present-Day Struggles in Europe: New Tensions between Corporatism,Class, and Social Movements

This lecture addresses the connection between the production in the present of particular memories of the past and the ability to frame present-day conflicts in ways that render certain possibilities legitimate while excluding others. Through the ethnographic material I have gathered during my career I will show how different projects of the future (personal and collective) appeal to memories of conflict that link responsibilities and generations at different scales. Taking as my object of observation the transformations in economic relations in a heavy industrial region of northwestern Spain I will trace the connections between the languages and practices of contention, the reconfigured structures of production and governance, and the production of diverse memories (and silences) of conflict. Diverse memories produce struggles framed in class terms, or struggles framed in terms of corporatist interests, or in terms of contingently defined social claims. Through this often ambivalent delimitation of conflicts between past and present, the field of possible futures gets configured and with it the spectrum of possible political action.     

Images,Ideology, and Praxis in the Environmental Movement: Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis Project

This article is part of a panel discussion addressing the sociological relevance of Sebastião Salgado’s work as well as documentary photography in general. ² I focus specifically on environmental sociology.     

The Sociology of Unequal Exchange in Ecological Context: A Panel Study of Lower‐Income Countries, 1975–20001

The structural theory of ecologically unequal exchange posits that through the vertical flow of exports from lower‐income countries, the stratified world economy enables higher‐income countries to misappropriate global environmental space. Tied to their unsustainable consumption levels, this misappropriation by higher‐income countries leads to the suppression of resource consumption in lower‐income countries, well below globally sustainable thresholds, which negatively impacts the well‐being of domestic populations. To evaluate key aspects of the theory, I test the hypothesis that lower‐income countries with elevated levels of exports sent to higher‐income countries exhibit lower consumption‐based environmental demand, measured as per‐capita ecological footprints. Findings for generalized least squares panel regression analyses of 66 lower‐income countries from 1975 to 2000 confirm the hypothesis, providing support for the theory. Additional results indicate that the strength of the hypothesized relationship increased in magnitude during the 25‐year period. These findings hold, net of the effects of economic development, ecological conditions, and other structural factors.