Overcoming Uncertainty: Agency,Stance, and the Rise of Collective Action in Times of Crisis

This article examines how grassroots actors initiate and engage in collective action to transcend dramatic situations of large-scale societal crisis. Merging strands of sociolinguistic scholarship with social movement theory, the concepts of stance and stance-taking are presented to reveal how individuals collectively exert their agency during episodes of macrostructural instability and uncertainty. Stance is defined as the agentive and solidaristic position taken up by a group of actors to navigate and overcome moments of social rupture. Stance-taking is the situational ensemble of discursive, organizational, and dramaturgical practice through which stances are developed and deployed. Analysis of the social construction of stance promotes multidimensional understandings of how social movements intensify and expand under conditions of crisis. To illustrate the analytical purchase of these concepts, the study describes the stance-taking practices that fueled the rise of mass public protests in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the height of a national crisis in 2001.