Marginalizing Disorder: Paradoxical Tensions and the Failure of Local Collective Organizing

Abstract

Using an in-depth qualitative field study of homelessness in the city of Eugene, Oregon in the United States over a 10-year period, I investigate the dynamics leading to the failure of long-term local collective action in resolving social issues. Despite waves of mobilizing, organizing, coordinating, and sometimes organizational and policy outcomes, many local societal issues such as homelessness, crumbled urban transits, and urban police violence, persist. I synthesize insights from social movements research, organizations, and crisis management to unpack how different forms of collective organizing emerge, evolve, sediment, and decay over decades. I analyze these localized long-term dynamics using a tensions-based lens to identify the conflict affecting collective organizing on three levels, socio-historical local discourse, tensions around the social issue, and tensions from collective organizing. These nested multi-level tensions shape and are shaped through the contentions between local communities and how power shifts between settled and disrupted times. I reveal these dynamics and the mechanisms sustaining them to induce a process for the long-term attenuation of local collective organizing.