‘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.     

Social Structural Location and Vocabularies of Participation: Fostering a Collective Identity in Urban Agriculture Activism

Contextualized within the visible inequality that permeates its local food landscape and the broader elitist food culture of California's San Francisco Bay Area, Oakland's urban agriculture movement comprises actors with rich vocabularies of motive for participation. Drawing from 25 in‐depth interviews with movement activists, I uncover a racial and social class homogeneity among participants that contributes to the formation of a collective identity but also limits the movement's outcomes in important ways. This research draws from Bourdieu's theory of class distinction and social movement theories of collective identity formation to contribute to literature on the reproduction of class and racial privilege in alternative food activism. I find that narratives for movement involvement converge on three discourses: possession of education‐derived knowledge to contend with the agroindustrial complex, the conflation of the creation of community through urban food growing with inclusivity, and a missionary‐like desire to educate others as to the benefits of growing their own food. I argue that the movement could benefit from a more diverse repertoire of action generated from a greater integration of racially and economically diverse actors working together to reorient the food system toward local food production alternatives.     

Place,space, networks,and the sustainability of collective action: the Madres de Plaza de Mayo

This article provides a framework for analysing social movements and explaining how collective action can be sustained through networks. Drawing on current relational views of place and space, I offer a spatialized conception of social networks that critically synthesizes network theory, research on social movements, and the literature on the spatial dimensions of collective action. I examine the historic and contemporary network geographies of a group of human rights activists in Argentina (the Madres de Plaza de Mayo) and explain the duration of their activism over a period of more than two decades with regard to the concept of geographic flexibility. To be specific, first I show how, through the practice of place‐based collective rituals, activists have maintained network cohesion and social proximity despite physical distance. Second, I examine how the construction of strategic networks that have operated at a variety of spatial scales has allowed the Madres to access resources that are important for sustaining mobilization strategies. Finally, I discuss how the symbolic depiction of places has been used as a tool to build and sustain network connections among different groups. I conclude by arguing that these three dimensions of the Madres’ activism account for their successful development of geographically flexible networks, and that the concept of geographic flexibility provides a useful template for studies of the duration and continuity of collective action.     

Everyday politics,social practices and movement networks: daily life in Barcelona's social centres

The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals. Exceptions have explored collective identity, ‘free spaces’ and prefigurative politics, but such processes are framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence. This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and politicizing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres. Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The variety of political forms – adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non‐activists. An approach which focuses on practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive.     

Extractivismo unearthed: a genealogy of a radical discourse

This article provides a genealogy of extractivismo discourse. In South America, the critical discourse of extractivismo has shifted political horizons and fomented a protracted intraleft dispute. Decades of neoliberalism unified popular movements to resist austerity and recuperate national sovereignty, but the ascendency of leftist administrations across the continent fragmented the field of radical politics. Ecuador exemplifies this internecine conflict: environmental and indigenous activists and allied intellectuals crafted the discourse of extractivismo to resist President Rafael Correa’s ‘21st century socialism’. State actors assert that oil and mining revenues will trigger economic development. But anti-extractive activists contend that ‘the extractive model’ pollutes the environment, violates collective rights, reinforces dependency on foreign capital, and undermines democracy. Drawing on 14 months of archival and ethnographic research, I recover the source discourses of extractivismo and outline the conditions of their coalescence into a novel problematic. I trace extractivismo to the neoliberal period (1981–2006). In that period, I identify the co-existence of two distinct critiques of resource extraction, which I call resource radicalisms: resource nationalism and proto-anti-extractivism. But alongside it, in their struggle for territorial sovereignty and collective rights, Amazonian indigenous groups articulated the discursive elements that would later be unified by the term extractivismo. I argue that a particular conjuncture – the election of a leftist President, the rewriting of the Constitution, and the government’s avid promotion of extractive projects – enabled the crystallization of extractivismo discourse. Anti-extractive resistance in turn triggered a tectonic political realignment: activists that once fought for the nationalization of natural resources now oppose all resource extraction, a leftist President finds himself in conflict with the social movements who initially supported his election, and the left-in-power has become synonymous with the aggressive expansion of extraction. Finally, I consider the tension between extractivismo-as-critique and its capacity to generate collective action.     

Patterns of engagement: identities and social movement organizations in Finland and Malawi

Based on interviews with climate-change activists and NGO workers in Finland and Malawi, this article reconsiders the ways in which the coordination of identity projects and action is approached in social movement scholarship. Rather than beginning with personal and collective identities, we take our cue from recent work by Laurent Thévenot and trace actors’ forms of engagement—the various ways actors produce commonality. As we show, doing so in vastly different social contexts allows us to see permutations in such forms afforded by participation in a transnational social movement and to identify patterns of collective action that we would otherwise be apt to miss. Finnish activists narrated their activities by way of engaging in the forms of the common good driving the climate movement, but coordinated various situations also through engagement in familiarity, comfort, and ease. Malawian activists and NGO employees also spoke of the common good the movements worked to achieve, but principally created common ground by engaging in shared individual choices and projects, which were jointly consecrated by fellow NGO participants. Ultimately, we argue that tracing forms of engagement enables more in-depth understanding of what is at stake when people act together in social movement organizations: moving away from collective and personal identity to patterns of engagement allows a vantage point into the processes through which commonality is created and generates new hypotheses regarding the coordination of action in social movement organizations.     

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 Movement Rhetoric and the Social Psychology of Collective Action: A Case Study of Anti-Abortion Mobilization

This paper seeks to contribute toward anintegrated approach to social movement mobilization. Itdoes so through considering how a social psychologicalaccount of the determination of collective behavior (selfcategorization theory) may be applied tothe mobilization rhetoric of social movements. Morespecifically it argues that as people may definethemselves and act in terms of social categories, we may usefully conceive of social movement rhetoricas being organized so as to construct social categorydefinitions which allow the activists preferred courseof action to be taken on by others as their own. Our theoretical argument is illustrated throughthe detailed analysis of category construction incontemporary U.K. anti-abortion argumentation.     

Ideas, thinkers, and social networks: The process of grievance construction in the anti-genetic engineering movement

Popular commentaries suggest that the movement against genetic engineering in agriculture (anti-GE movement) was born in Europe, rooted in European cultural approaches to food, and sparked by recent food-safety scares such as “mad cow” disease. Yet few realize that the anti-GE movement's origins date back thirty years, that opposition to agricultural biotechnology emerged with the technology itself, and that the movement originated in the United States rather than Europe. We argue here that neither the explosion of the GE food issue in the late 1990s nor the concomitant expansion of the movement can be understood without recognizing the importance of the intellectual work carried out by a “critical community” of activists during the two-decade-long period prior to the 1990s. We show how these early critics forged an oppositional ideology and concrete set of grievances upon which a movement could later be built. Our analysis advances social movement theory by establishing the importance of the intellectual work that activists engage in during the “proto-mobilizational” phase of collective action, and by identifying the cognitive and social processes by which activists develop a critical, analytical framework. Our elaboration of four specific dimensions of idea/ideology formation pushes the literature toward a more complete understanding of the role of ideas and idea-makers in social movements, and suggests a process of grievance construction that is more “organic” than strategic (pace the framing literature). Rachel Schurman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests lie in the areas of international political economy of food and agriculture, environmental sociology, and social movements. She is co-editor of Engineering Trouble: Biotechnology and Its Discontents (University of California Press, 2003) and several articles and book chapters on the anti-genetic engineering movement. Her current book project, with William Munro, explores how organized social resistance to GMOs has shaped the trajectory of agricultural biotechnology. William Munro is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director, International Studies Program, at Illinois Wesleyan University. His research and writing focuses on the politics of agrarian change and state formation in Africa, as well as post-conflict development. He is the author of The Moral Economy of the State: Conservation, Community Development and State-Making in Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press,1998). He is currently collaborating with Rachel Schurman on a book about social resistance to agricultural biotechnology.     

Genocide as Contentious Politics

Despite a recent turn towards the study of political violence within the field of contentious politics, scholars have yet to focus their lens on genocide. This is puzzling, as the field of collective action and social movements was originally developed in reaction to fascism (Nazism in particular), while research on collective action and research on genocide has long shown parallel findings and shared insights. This paper reviews the history of this scholarly convergence and divergence, and suggests that recent findings of research on genocide can be improved by the consideration of concepts from social movements and collective action. It then details three theories of the micro‐mechanisms that mobilize individuals for contention – framing, diffusion, and networks – and specifies how they refine existing explanations of civilian participation in genocide. In the conclusion, I suggest that a contentious politics approach to genocide would consider it one form of collective action among others, analyzable within the existing framework of collective action and social movement theory.     

The political is the personal: women’s participation in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

This article examines women’s lived experiences as new activists in social movements. Taiwanese women – many of them housewives – joined the Sunflower Movement, a large-scale protest against a trade pact with China, and a related anti-nuclear movement in 2014. This study demonstrates how new women activists’ everyday political practices mutually construct the public and private spheres in the Taiwanese context. By ‘making private public’, these new activists use discourses of citizenship and maternalism to connect politics to social issues and daily life. Public participation makes these women feel empowered, and their daily actions transform politics from a set of formal, institutionalized practices to a practical fact of everyday life. This research also challenges the reproduction of a rigid private/public division in previous feminist scholarship that regards family and childcare as a separate realm that hinders women’s public participation. In a marked break from past accounts, these women don’t separate their caring responsibilities from their political actions. By focusing on new activists’ political action in and through their family and childcare, this research calls into question scholarly discussions that view maternalism primarily as a public discourse for mobilizing women or a visual strategy for collective protest. By considering the disruptive potential of all acts of mothering, this study paints a more complex and nuanced picture of women and mothers as protesters and reveals how activist women’s actions in the family and private social networks can be a central part of maternalist strategies’ radical potential.     

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.     

The rhythms of social movement memories: the mobilization of Silvio Meier’s activist remembrance across platforms

ABSTRACT

This article presents a temporal analysis of the activist remembrance of Silvio Meier, a prominent member of Berlin’s radical left scene, who was stabbed to death in 1992. It asks: when has Meier’s activist remembrance occurred and been remediated, with what rhythms, and how has it been influenced by different platforms? To answer these questions, the article draws on the literature dedicated to the interface between social movements and collective and connective memory, and applies Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis approach. Within this approach a diverse set of material is used to visualise the timing of the digital and non-digital remediation and mobilisation of Meier’s remembrance across different platforms of memory including commemorative events, newspapers, websites and social media. Thereafter the various temporalities of use associated with these platforms and how they can influence the mobilisation of remembrance by social movements is discussed using Lefebvre’s concepts of polyrhythmia, arrhythmia, isorhythmia, eurhythmia and with respect to, firstly, a fifteen-year period between 2002 and 2017 and secondly, a fifteen-day period between 15 November and 30 November 2012 around the twentieth anniversary of Meier’s death. The article concludes by introducing another Lefebvrian concept – dressage – in order to consider which rhythms of activist remembrance might most benefit social movements and their goals. Overall, by demonstrating the importance of attending to the when and not only the what, who, where and how of social movement memories and by highlighting the need to consider the temporal influence of the different digital and non-digital platforms that activists use, as well as, by indicating the broader potential of applying rhythmanalysis approaches to instances of activism, the article has broader relevance for the further study of social movements, their use of different media and their mobilization of memory.     

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 Movements and Ethnographic Methodologies: An Analysis Using Case Study Examples

This paper defines and discusses the viability and applicability of specific ethnographic methods for the study and theorising of social movements and related social mobilisation. Ethnographic methods are shown to be one tool in a box of available methods, but are perhaps especially suited for the in‐depth study of social movements and social networks. Pros and cons of such methods are identified, using examples drawn from an ethnographic narrative comprising over a decade of research; ethnography of UK environmental direct activists, and more recent ethnography of UK publics engaging with human genetic technologies. Ethnography enables developments in latent social interactions to be identified in the field, providing data sources that inform social analysis and the development of theoretical stakes. This ethnographic narrative has contributed to the theorising of complexity in movement collective identity and complex social mobilisation patterns; namely the theorising of social movement. Findings can be disseminated to a range of stakeholders, including the research participants. Thus, ethnography can be both a method for studying social movements and a means of ‘upstream’ public engagement, understanding what is happening at the grassroots, with the aim of enabling capacity building between all actors in the research process. This methodological rationale is defined as ‘action research’.     

Social Movement Strategy,Tactics, and Collective Identity1

Tactical choices and their execution are closely related to the construction of collective identities in social movements. Studying collective identity has helped scholars understand why people participate in collective action, but the array of tactics that constitute action has not been fully explored. An emerging interest in culture and strategy that situates social movement actors in a field of contention with opponents, allies, and bystanding publics raises questions about the tactics that are used and the construction of collective identity, which is formed in interaction with others. Strategies and tactics reflect collective identities but also provide opportunities for reaffirming or challenging them. Innovative methods can create tension as activists work to resolve what they do with who they feel they are. Conflict studies, nonviolent action studies, and sociological research using concepts such as framing, discourse, protest events, and tactical repertoires offer tools with which to bridge tactics and collective identity.     

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.     

Creating the collective: social media,the Occupy Movement and its constitution as a collective actor

This paper examines the process through which Occupy activists came to constitute themselves as a collective actor and the role of social media in this process. The theoretical framework combines Melucci's (1996 Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) theory of collective identity with insights from the field of organizational communication and particularly from the ‘CCO’ strand – short for ‘Communication is Constitutive of Organizing’. This allows us to conceptualize collective identity as an open-ended and dynamic process that is constructed in conversations and codified in texts. Based on interviews with Occupy activists in New York, London and other cities, I then discuss the communication processes through which the movement was drawing the boundaries with its environment, creating codes and foundational documents, as well as speaking in a collective voice. The findings show that social media tended to blur the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the movement in a way that suited its values of inclusiveness and direct participation. Social media users could also follow remotely the meetings of the general assembly where the foundational documents were ratified, but their voices were not included in the process. The presence of the movement on social media also led to conflicts and negotiations around Occupy's collective voice as constructed on these platforms. Thus, viewing the movement as a phenomenon emerging in communication allows us an insight into the efforts of Occupy activists to create a collective that was both inclusive of the 99% and a distinctive actor with its own identity.