I Was a Teenage Vegan: Motivation and Maintenance of Lifestyle Movements

Recent research has pointed to the rise of socially conscious consumption and of lifestyle movements or social movements that focus on changing one's everyday lifestyle choices as a form of protest. Much of this research addresses how adults maintain socially conscious consumption practices. Using interviews with youths who are vegan—strict vegetarians who exclude all animal products from their diet and lifestyle—I isolate the factors influencing recruitment into and retention of veganism as a lifestyle movement. I show that initial recruitment requires learning, reflection, and identity work, and that subsequent retention requires two factors: social support from friends and family, and cultural tools that provide the skills and motivation to maintain lifestyle activism. I also show how participation in the punk subculture further facilitated these processes. This work contributes to studies of youth subcultures and social movements by showing how the two intersect in lifestyle movement activism.     

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.     

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.     

‘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.     

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.     

Social Movements and Collective Memory

This article summarizes key findings and provides suggestions for further research in the literature that combines social movements and collective memory. Existing reviews of the collective memory literature highlight the macro and micro levels of analysis; studying movements and memory adds a meso level of analysis. This review covers all three levels and for each level discusses research methods, the social consequences of memory activism, recurring patterns, and explanations. Suggestions for future research emphasize the concept of repertoire and its relation to memory. Tactical repertoires and cultural repertoires provide the resources needed to construct collective memories, and repertoires empower memory activists to engage the political sphere, create change, and nurture solidarity within movement organizations. Because the idea of a repertoire uncovers a process of remembering and is already a widely used term in social movement studies, it provides a resonant tool for future movement and memory research.     

Intersectionality and social movements: Intersectional challenges and imperatives in the study of social movements

Intersectionality emerged in the border space between social movements and academic politics as a means of better understanding and confronting interlocking systems of oppression. For scholars studying social movements, it offers a framework for better understanding the power dynamics of movements (the inclusions and exclusions). It is also something to be studied. Women of color, and other groups at the intersection of multiple marginalities conceptualized intersectionality as not only a type of integrated analysis or heuristic, but as an active political orientation to be put into practice. In this essay, I review and discuss the benefits and challenges of studying social movements intersectionally (an analysis that might be applied to the study of any movements), as well as the growing literature focused on social movement intersectionality, that looks for and at intersectionally oriented movements and the praxis of intersectionality within movements. This developing area of study provides new ways of understanding and troubling social movement solidarity.     

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.     

Local Armed Uprisings and the Transnational Image of Claim Making: The Kurds of Turkey and the Zapatistas of Mexico in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore why and how some local armed uprisings are able to go global with a transnational image of ‘social justice’ while others fail to build such image despite becoming transnational. The cases to be analyzed in the article are the pro-Kurdish mobilization in the leadership of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey and the pro-Mayan Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) movement in Mexico. In explaining the relative success of the latter, the study seeks to make connections with the globalization literature in general and the transnational social movement literature in particular. Particularly, the article focuses on the ability of social movements to market their causes in international arena with a good image. Overall, this study lays out several key strategic differences between the two movements such as the holding and the use of arms, duration of armed resistance, and the leadership and organizational structure to unpack why some social movements are more successful to market their causes as a just cause within ‘global civil society’ and why others fail to do so ending with being listed as a terrorist organization.     

How Social Movements Move: From First to Second Wave Developments in the UK Field of Psychiatric Contention1

In this paper I seek to unpack the notion of ‘movement’, addressing the question of what it means to say that social movements ‘move’. The concept of ‘movement’ is often used in social science to refer to change, I note, and this is clearly an appropriate usage in relationship to social movements, which often seek to bring about and/or manifest within themselves social changes. At the same time, however, movements move in the respect that the cultural forms and resources they generate are diffused (they move) across both time and space. The cultural components of a movement move in the way that, for example, a virus moves, between individuals in a ‘vulnerable’ population. The paper explores these ideas by way of an examination of the second wave of radical mental health activism in the UK.     

From Makeover Media to Remaking Culture: Four Directions for the Critical Study of Self‐Help Culture

The popularity of self‐improvement literature has lead to an abundance of scholarly considerations of the self‐help literature and lifestyle media. This interdisciplinary review article considers the dominant trends in these discussions and suggests four new directions for fruitful inquiry: (1) investigating self‐help literature from the global South and the evolving Asian economies in cross‐cultural comparative analyses; (2) more thoroughly assessing the role of religious movements and discourses in these self‐help discourses and practices; (3) exploring more fully the impact of interactive media on self‐help practices; and (4) continued creative explorations of strategies to transform makeover culture into a broader movement to make over our culture.     

A Comparative Framework for the Analysis of International Student Movements

Recent theory and research on revolution indicate that leadership and ideology play crucial roles. Much of the leadership and ideology for contemporary revolutions developed within the context of student movements. But previous research on student movements has often been limited to developed Western societies and has yielded typologies of student activism that have little application to revolutionary movements worldwide. Based on an analysis of student movements in many societies during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a new typology of student movements is formulated. The typology, which allows differentiation among reform student movements, identity radicalism student movements, structural revolutionary student movements, and social revolutionary student movements, appears capable of identifying the essential contrasts as well as key similarities among a wide range of student movements in many societies. Conditions fostering each type of movement are described. The paper concludes with a discussion of case studies in several countries and how these student movements are categorized in the new typology.     

Immigrants as brokers: dialogical diffusion from Spanish indignados to Occupy Wall Street

This article analyses the role played by Spanish immigrants in the diffusion of the indignados movement in Occupy Wall Street (OWS). I argue that Spanish residents in New York City acted as brokers between the two movements, and that their behaviour had a significant impact on OWS’s understanding of itself as an expansive, inclusive and empathic phenomenon. Building on recent theoretical developments, which stress the importance of dialogue and collective learning in the transnational diffusion of historical social movements, this research produces results at different levels. At the empirical level, the problems faced by the immigrants reveal the cultural complexity of transnational diffusion within the recent wave of contention. At the analytical level, the personal contact and intergroup dialogue established between immigrants and local activists challenge accounts stressing the role of social media and the internet within the transnational diffusion of this protest. At the theoretical level, the article develops a process-oriented perspective on brokerage, improving our understanding of its implications concerning diffusion. I argue that a longitudinal analysis of brokerage shows how interaction can modify role identity and movement diffusion: diffusion develops where brokers maintain a coordinating role in the movement, and ceases to do so where brokers are displaced from this central position.     

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.     

Double‐edged swords? Collective identity and solidarity in the environment movement1

Perhaps by virtue of its theoretical slipperiness, collective identity is often hailed as an important feature of social movements for the role it plays in unifying activists and organizations, and so helping them to develop shared concerns and engage in collective action. However, this paper argues that collective identity is the result of group rather than movement level processes, and although it can unite activists within a single movement organization, it is not always beneficial for the broader social movement. Although movements consist of networks of activists and organizations that have a broad shared concern, differing collective identities within the movement can actually be quite divisive. Based on case studies of three organizations in the environmental movement, this paper shows that activists who are most committed to an organization with an encompassing collective identity develop a strong sense of solidarity with other activists similarly committed to that organization. The resultant solidarity leads to the construction of a 'we-them' dichotomy between organizations within the same movement, increasing the chances of hostility between organizations and factions within the movement.     

Social reproduction and the limitations of protest camps: openness and exclusion of social movements in Japan

This paper investigates how activists conduct participatory democracy and realize prefiguration and horizontality in a protest camp setting. Recently, scholars have shown increasing interest in the internal lives of social movements. Anti-G8 direct action in Japan has provided an opportunity to examine how protesters practise prefiguration and horizontality in everyday experiments in alternative ways of living together. In the protest camp in Japan, participants faced institutional and material limitations. This study discusses the social reproduction processes within protest camps that operate according to these limitations. Three key findings emerged: first, the protest camp shows a great openness towards beginners; they can easily find roles in its social reproduction processes. To accomplish this, they use skills developed in their daily habits outside the protest. Second, the collective practice of social reproduction creates and clearly displays a hierarchical partnership between activists, in the sense that beginners are not only politically socialized, but that they learn the limited cultural codes of anti-globalism movements from other activists. The relationship between teaching and taught serves to create hierarchy and exclusion among participants. The third key finding is related to exclusion. For some activists who have experienced discrimination, the protest camp is a frustrating experience because it forces upon them codes and manners constructed in capitalist society. To them, the camp recreates the cleavage between majority and minority protesters. The paper argues that both exclusive and inclusive sides of the protest camps, particularly when discussing collective lifestyle practices, exhibit ambiguity.     

Network social capital as an outcome of social movement mobilization: Using the position generator as an indicator of social network diversity

In the social mobility literature, the position generator (PG) has been used to examine the relationship between the structural location of individuals, and outcomes such as obtaining a high status job. Diversity of occupational ties (as measured by the PG) is also a significant predictor of an individual's cultural capital. A great deal of work has also been done in the field of social movements examining the relationship between networks and mobilization. However, only limited attention has been given to the position generator in this literature. Also, while past research has demonstrated that prior network ties to activists is one of the most important predictors of current activism, relatively little research has been devoted to examining network structure as an outcome of activism. The present paper builds upon these insights by utilizing data collected with the position generator on a sample of environmental movement members, and examining the relationship between individual activism (as an independent variable) and diversity of occupational ties (as a dependent variable). The result of key theoretical significance is that those who are more active in the environmental movement develop a greater diversity of occupational ties to other environmentalists. Results suggest that this process occurs over time. These findings provide evidence that social capital (as indicated by network diversity) is one outcome of social movement mobilization.     

Toward an integrated analysis of social movements and new religious movements research

Despite calls from researchers for intersectional studies between religion and social movements over the past few decades, scholars have not engaged in fruitful conversation about integrating the two disciplines. This article aims to facilitate such discussion by examining the topic of new religious movements (NRMs). I first review the existing literature on NRMs and discuss why NRM research has been neglected in social movement studies. Then, I explore a few research areas where both NRM studies and social movement research could intersect and benefit from a synthetic approach. Specifically, I suggest that social movement studies could advance through the examination of some relatively ignored subjects of research, such as persistent participation and disengagement, by drawing on empirical cases of NRMs. I also propose ways in which the application of social movement theories would enhance our understanding of different aspects of NRMs, such as their leadership and coalition practices. In making these arguments, I refer to one of the prominent, long-term NRMs, the Unification Church or Movement, to help illustrate my ideas.     

Contending Stories: Narrative in Social Movements

Study of stories and storytelling in social movements can contribute to our understanding of recruitment that takes place outside formal movement organizations; social movement organizations' ability to withstand strategic setbacks; and movements' impacts on mainstream politics. This paper draws on several cases to illuminate the yields of such study and to provide alternatives to the overbroad, uncritical, and astructural understandings of narrative evident in some recent writings. It also urges attention to the role of literary devices in sociological analyses of collective action.     

LIBERATION FREQUENCY: The Free Radio Movement and Alternative Strategies of Media Relations

A crucial element of struggle for any social movement is the ability to convey its message to both movement participants and the broader public. Movements frequently deal with problems of reframing and reinterpretation of their messages by mainstream media by trying to build relationships with mainstream media actors. But this is not the only way that movements can gain positive media coverage. This article reveals two little-discussed media strategies that movements may adopt in order to mitigate the problem of how to best get sympathetic news coverage. First, movements can circumvent mainstream media altogether by using alternative media. Second, movements can work to reform the media, thereby changing the rules and structures that govern movement–media relationships. I use data from interviews with participants in the free radio movement to illustrate these two media strategies and how their use helped the movement achieve moderate successes. I argue that control of (or access to) alternative media can help a social movement overcome the difficulties of gaining sympathetic mainstream media coverage. I also argue that the media reform movement, if successful, could further help social movements overcome this problem. This case study suggests that scholars' preoccupation with mainstream media coverage may have caused us to underestimate the power of social movements to generate positive media coverage.