Activism: Activist identities beyond social movements (original) (raw)
Related papers
Online Activism: Centering Marginalized Voices in Activist Work
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, 2019
This article contextualizes feminist activism within Northern Ghana, highlighting the complexities of activism in this society. I argue that although social media provides space for the articulation of marginalized voices, it is imperative to examine how cultural capital and an intimate knowledge of power dynamics within a socio-cultural context shapes successful activist work. Therefore, online activism when complemented by activist work offline, can be used to address injustices towards marginalized people. I contextualize the case within a religiously conservative society, emphasizing the role that an activist’s positionality can play in facilitating activist work. Throughout the article, I deconstruct activism, shedding light on the evolution and malleability of activism depending on whether or not activist work leads to concrete results. Therefore, I draw on critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) to contextualize activist work that I engaged in, together with non-activist identifying people and feminist allies to seek justice for a woman who was front and center in our quest to address sexism publicly directed at her. Keywords: allyship, feminism, Ghana, online activism, social media, technological determinism, digital public shaming
Questioning the Renewal of Activism
2017
The proliferation of feminist groups on the web is a worldwide social phenomenon. This working paper questions the underlying social and political factors explaining the revival of feminism, and analyses how feminists use digital media to promote their cause. It presents the results of a two‐year research project on feminist activism in France; however, many results have broader implications for the evolution of feminism in Western countries. The survey is based on an ethnographic online observation of nine feminist collectives, face‐to‐face interviews with activists, and on a qualitative survey of ordinary feminists. The paper examines the diversity of feminist collectives and how digital media have contributed to the rise of a new leadership and of new organizational practices. Young activists are experts in producing visual narratives (images, video), in using unconventional repertoires of action (humour, satire, etc.) and in networking. They make events and campaigns which are w...
The Everyday Life of Activism [Review Essay]
POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2020
Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Both the recent rise of populist leaders and the success of protest movements in the last decade have brought the study of political and social movements center stage. Questions to do with political subjectivity and agency, affect, and activism are at the heart of many recent works that have looked at mass politics, right-wing populism and movements for democracy in Europe, South Asia, and Northern Africa. Recently, for example, Walter Armbrust (2019) has provided an ethnographic account of the Egyptian revolution, focusing on activists and tricksters in the liminal phase of the revolution, and
Interface Journal, 2020
This paper investigates how participants in global justice movements create their activist identity through protest journeys to convergence spaces. Recently, scholars have shown an increasing interest in prefigurative politics, but their focus is not on the mobility process. A focus on activists' journeys to convergence spaces is relevant because social movements enable them to prefigure processes such as choosing accommodation, transportation, and destination. This study discusses the 'protest journey' that is practised by Japanese activists while focusing on activist identity, which is different from organisational and collective identity. Based on open interviews with activists, this paper discusses two key findings. First, protesters' activist identity in a particular protest journey was influenced by two types of movements. In the tourism process, they built organisational identity through social movement organisations (SMOs) and formed a collective identity that was provided by the global justice movement in advance. Second, participants distinguished between ideal and unfavourable places to visit and what behaviours constitute the right type of activism by a true activist on a protest journey. These findings demonstrate that participants in global justice movements form a collective identity, even in the individualised process of a protest journey.
While the Occupy movement has attracted popular and academic interest since 2011, there has been relatively little attention to the significance of feminist and queer practices and discourses to the movement. Drawing from feminist theory, social movement studies, and digital media studies, this paper presents empirical research conducted at Occupy Wall Street (OWS) that highlights feminist, queer, and trans contributions to OWS from its inception, with a focus on the Trans World Order Affinity Group (TOAG). Through its activities at Zuccotti Park as well at its website and on social media, TOAG has challenged gender norms, heteronormativity, and transphobia in both the physical and virtual domains of OWS, and been a key contributor to its online prominence. As such, the group offers an illuminating case study of the challenges and successes of realizing feminist and queer agency during key developments of a major social movement. More generally, this project provides an important corrective to the prominence of class in how Occupy has been discussed and conducted, pointing out how other axes of inequality have also stratified Occupy itself. In addition, it addresses central issues about new media and participation, including negotiating differences between diverse activist groups, the efficacy of digital activism, and the relationship between online and offline strategies.
Everyday activism and transitions towards post‐capitalist worlds
Transactions of the institute of British …, 2010
This article aims to broaden and deepen debates on the everyday practices of autonomous activists. To do this we present three main research findings from a recent research project that looked in detail at what we called 'autonomous geographies'. First, in terms of political identity, we highlight how participants in political projects problematise and go beyond the simple idea of the militant subject, set apart from the everyday who opposes the present condition. Second, we highlight how everyday practices are used to build hoped-for futures in the present, but that this process is experimental, messy and contingent, and necessarily so. Finally, we illuminate the contested spatialities embedded within political activism that are neither locally bounded nor easily transferable to the transnational. This exploration of everyday activism has illuminated that the participants we engaged with express identities, practices and spatial forms that are simultaneously anti-, despite-and post-capitalist. We argue that it is through its everyday rhythms that meaning is given to post-capitalism and it is this reconceptualisation that makes post-capitalist practice mundane, but at the same time also accessible, exciting, feasible and powerful. This paper draws upon material collected during a 30-month empirical research project into the everyday lives of grassroots, non-party political activists in the UK between 2005 and 2008. Three case studies were explored in detail -autonomous social centres, Low Impact Developments, and tenants' networks resisting gentrification.
Cultural Dynamics 22 (2), 2010
Ethnography is like much else in the social sciences … It is a multi-dimensional exercise, a coproduction of social fact and sociological imagining, a delicate engagement of the inductive with the deductive, of the real with the virtual, of the already-known with the surprising, of verbs with nouns, processes with products, of the phenomenological with the political. (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2003: 172) Forgotten places … have experienced the abandonment characteristic of contemporary capitalist and neoliberal state reorganization … [H]ow can people who inhabit forgotten places scale up their activism from intensely localized struggles to something less atomized and therefore possessed of a significant capacity for self-determination? How do they set and fulfill agendas for life-affirming social change-whether by seizing control of the social wage or by other means? (Gilmore, 2008: 31) In what ways might the work of ethnography, conceived of in this inclusive and multidimensional way by Jean and John Comaroff, prove useful for reimagining the multi-scalar work of building activist solidarity, pace Ruth Wilson Gilmore? Our comments emerge from a sequence of workshops on 'Ethnographies of Activism' organized by us at the London School of Economics in 2007 and 2008, the second of which was focused on revising papers for this double special issue of Cultural Dynamics. The two of us-Donner, an anthropologist of South Asia, and Chari, a geographer of India and South Africa-came together through the question of whether it might be possible to think through the problems of ethnographic research on activism with a specifically left or 'progressive' focus. In the process of engaging this problem, we recognized disciplinary constraints and possibilities in our attempts to harness ethnography as a transdisciplinary and transformative practice. We found that thinking across ethnography and progressive activism involves transgressing disciplinary boundaries to address complexity and universality .
Social Movement Intersectionality and Re-Centring Intersectional Activism
2017
In this paper, I argue that intersectional activism needs to be re-centered in intersectional studies and that research about social movement intersectionality offers one means of doing so. To demonstrate this argument, I review several examples that complicate our understanding of how social movement intersectionality is done in practice. I discuss how these examples reiterate the point that intersectional movements can be realized; illustrate how coalitions are varied but do work; and remind us that there are, nevertheless, unique constraints that those striving to do social movement intersectionality face—for example, the challenge of constructing critical collective consciousness. I close by discussing analytic strategies characterizing the emerging research on social movement intersectionality and lessons offered herein and I call for deeper inquiry to engage activist work and re-center activist knowledges in intersectionality studies. Resume Dans cet article, je soutiens que ...