Culture and Its Discontents: Recent Theorizing on the Cultural Dimensions of Protest (original) (raw)

Protest and Culture: Concepts and Approaches in Social Movement Research – An Introduction

First Chapter of the Book "Conceptualizing Culture in Social Movement Research". Downloaded from the site of the book at Palgrave: http://www.palgrave.com/resources/sample-chapters/9781137385789\_sample.pdf Culture has become a very prominent concept in social movement research. Despite its omnipresence, however, the concept of culture is often employed in an unsystematic and unnecessarily limited fashion. This is crucially due to the fact that culture is frequently used as a simple addition to existing models rather than as an approach in its own right. Recent approaches have started to address some of these shortcomings but remain marginal. This volume aims to systematize the different concepts of culture in social movement research by comparing approaches, assessing (theoretical) shortcomings, and presenting new ways of cultural analysis in the study of social movements and protest.

The resource, structural, and cultural bases of protest

2005

www.democ.uci.edu Political protest has a long, albeit uncertain, history in the repertoire of political action and the course of political development. 1 From DeToqueville's description of the French Revolution to Gurr's Why Men Rebel (1970), some analysts have described protest as a tool used by the disenfranchised and the politically frustrated to pressure the government. In contrast, other scholars claim that contemporary protest has become an extension of conventional politics by other means (Inglehart 1990; Norris 2002), used by those who are generally active in politics. There is also debate about whether levels of protest are changing. Protest is apparently increasing in advanced industrial democracies, and there are claims that protest has spread on a global scale. In her recent study of political participation, Pippa Norris describes protest as a nearly ubiquitous part of contemporary politics: Public demonstrations are used today by a multiplicity groups ranging from Norwegian anti-fuel tax car-owners to Florida retirees protesting the ballot design of Miami-Dade county, Philippino 'people power' intent on ousting President Estrada, local farmers critical of the McDonaldization of French culture, street theatre like the gay Mardi Gras in Sydney, and consumer boycotts such as those used against British supermarkets stocking genetically-modified foods. Events at Genoa combined a mélange of mainstream charities like Oxfam and Christian Aid, as well as radicals like British 'Drop the Debt' protestors, the German Freie ArbeiterInnen Union, and Italian anarchists like Tute Bianchi and Ya Basta! Collective action through peaceful channels has become a generally accepted way to express political grievances, voice opposition, and challenge authorities. (Norris 2002: ch. 10). Because of the centrality of protest to the processes of political change, theorizing on protest is rich and varied-but these theories are often untested. Scholarly interest in protest is long-standing, but the factors that shape levels of protest in a nation are still uncertain. Because it is an unconventional activity, actual counts of protest activity are not as readily available as participation in conventional politics, such as election turnout or political party membership. Evidence of protest activity for developing nations is typically limited to descriptive examples or estimations based on events data from media reports. And without firm estimates of the level of protest across nations, it is difficult to explain what generates protest, and thus what are the political implications of contentious action. This paper presents a large-scale cross-national study of protest activity based on reports from the publics themselves. We first describe the aggregate level of protest across more than 70 nations based on data from the 1999-2002 and 1995-98 waves of the World Values Survey. This provides the most accurate assessment of protest around the globe that has ever been possible.

Protests Revisited: Political Configurations, Political Culture and Protest Impact

2018

This chapter summarizes and discusses the key results of this volume. The key objectives of this book have been to analyze forms, sites, and actors of migration-related contestations in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, specifically solidarity protests against deportations, refugee protests for inclusion, and restrictionist protests against the reception of new refugees. In all three countries and in most cases, the emphasis lies on implementing specific deportations and only to a lesser degree on deportation (policies) in general, with similar actors engaging in local struggles against deportations using similar repertoires of protest forms and demands. Along with the similarities, protests nevertheless vary according to particular national and local political opportunity structures, institutional contexts, political cultures, and the degree to which deportees participate in the protests. This chapter identifies four particularly significant effects of the protests: case-specific ...

Culture, Power, and Institutions: A Multi-Institutional Politics Approach to Social Movements*

Sociological Theory, 2008

We argue that critiques of political process theory are beginning to coalesce into a new approach to social movements-a "multi-institutional politics" approach. While the political process model assumes that domination is organized by and around one source of power, the alternative perspective views domination as organized around multiple sources of power, each of which is simultaneously material and symbolic. We examine the conceptions of social movements, politics, actors, goals, and strategies supported by each model, demonstrating that the view of society and power underlying the political process model is too narrow to encompass the diversity of contemporary change efforts. Through empirical examples, we demonstrate that the alternative approach provides powerful analytical tools for the analysis of a wide variety of contemporary change efforts. anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. A special thanks to Kristine Olsen for research assistance.

Emerging Trends in the Study of Protest and Social Movements

Pp. 213-244 in Research in Political Sociology. Political Sociology for the 21st Century, vol. 12, edited by B. A. Dobratz, T. Buzzell, and L. K. Waldner. Greenwich: Elsevier Science., 2003

of social psychological and cultural theories of social construction with structuralist accounts of movements. Taken together, they promise theory that is both broader in scope and better able to address the diversity of social movements.

Meanings and Mobilizations : A Cultural Politics Approach to Social Movements and States

Through examination of the Zapotec movement in Juchitán, Mexico, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Pan-Mayan movements in Guatemala, and the Afro-Reggae Cultural Group in Rio de Janeiro, this article will show that social movements are best analyzed through a combined focus on the circuitous historical pathways of their origins and emergence and on the diverse pieces of representation and meaning out of which they are made. This dual focus, in turn, enables us to understand how political actors form, the places where politics occurs, and the resignifications that lie at the heart of political conflict. Social movements offer a unique view of politics because they create new forms of organization and representation at the intersections of daily life and formal institutions. Social movements establish these new forms amidst and out of multiple cultures, economies, and political practices, often in ambiguous and contradictory ways, and the processes of their creation are deeply historical and cultural. It would thus be mistaken to

Introduction: Performance, Power, Exclusion, and Expansion in Anthropological Accounts of Protests

Conflict and Society: Advances in Research, 2020

This introductory article offers a theoretical frame for the current special section, discussing protests’ value for analyzing performance, power, expansion, and exclusion, and contributes its own case study from the ongoing anti-logging protests in Estonia. While arising from power imbalances, protests hold powerful tools for achieving their aims. Th e introduction considers protests’ ability to expand in space, through time, and beyond topics, and to capture wider support, creating communities in the process. At the same time, considering the contexts of protests, it also demonstrates how such movements get caught up in the normative features of human sociality, reproducing the existing power relations, including those the protests aim to challenge. Th e Estonian case study enables further insight into this by analyzing dispossessions that protests both aggravate and suffer from.