Narratives Of Activists Research Articles

An Exploration of the Decolonization and Ecofeminist Activism of Indigenous Kenyan Women in Wangari Maathai's Memoir Unbowed: One Woman’s Story

Wangari Maathai, perhaps one of the world’s most renowned African female writers, frequently writes on the struggles faced by indigenous Kenyan women who lack the essentials for survival. Her writings are infused with the efforts of indigenous women to establish themselves as contributing members who can create new ethical, cultural, and territorial agendas. In her writings, Maathai also places a strong emphasis on indigenous female ideal transformation and decolonization narratives. Environmentalism and indigenous women’s agency have always been a key unrelenting passion in Maathai’s writings. Following this passion, this study examines the decolonization and ecofeminist activist narratives that shape the indigenous Kenyan women's national collective identity and agency. The purpose of this article is to explore Maathai's inspiring activism which is a succession of countless acts of activism toward the planting of both the seeds of land and the agency of indigenous Kenyan women.

‘Again the Same Hopeless Feeling’: Christian Queer Activism as a Personal Experience in Finland, 1960s–2000s

AbstractLGBTQ people and the Evangelical Lutheran Church have a long history of tension in Finland. Christian queer activists have fought this tension since the late 1960s. This article asks how Christian queer activism was born and personally experienced in Finland from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. Theoretically, this article builds on queer history and affect theory. My data contains autobiographical texts and oral history interviews of the activists and their contemporaries, as well as statements by the Church, newspaper articles and a TV debate that help to contextualise the personal activist narratives. Using the method of close reading, I pay attention to affective circulation and moments in which activism emerged or started to decline. I argue that a wide circulation of negative affects attached to homosexuality in Finland in this era created an atmosphere that both inspired Christian queer activists to act, but as time went on, also caught them up in political despair when nothing seemed to change, making them reorient their activist hope.

Semi-structured interviewing as a tool for understanding informal civil society

This article aims to present semi-structured interviewing as a pivotal tool used in research on the expressions of informal civil society, including the narratives of activists outside the third sector, but involved in grassroots initiatives. As quantitative research mostly focuses on formally registered organisations, it tends to legitimise and reproduce a narrow understanding of civil society. Semi-structured interviewing, on the other hand, is effective for gaining insight into hidden aspects of social life, problems that are not immediately perceptible. It enables the analysis of under-researched informal civil society and allows researchers to investigate the organisational challenges, practices and languages of unregistered initiatives. Nevertheless, research challenges include the ethical dilemmas related to power dynamics in research-participant relations, the positionality of the researcher and limited generalisability of the findings. Based on a literature review, including articles on civil society studies from five journals, I claim that interviewing opens the way to a more radical and broad understanding of civil society, which includes unregistered initiatives.

Embedded Liberalism and Health Populism in the UK in a Post-Truth Era

The National Health Service (NHS), as a symbol of public health protection in the UK, was weaponised in pro-Brexit debates. It was suggested that European integration might inherently have undermined embedded liberalism and notably contributed to what Ruggie described as the “unbundling of sovereignty” (Ruggie, 1993). The manipulation of the NHS by right-wing populists has already been the focus of a number of articles, but calls to protect public health care from global threats have also come from left-wing politicians and activists. This article is particularly interested in socialist populist appeals to protect health care. It aims to show that for socialists the compromise between capital and labour and the protection of welfare systems, which is referred to as embedded liberalism, has not been achieved. In fact, furthering trade and investment is currently seen to be compromising the last remnants of a welfare state, which is embodied by the NHS in the UK. This conceptual article will thus start by presenting the theory of embedded liberalism. It will then establish the link between the breakdown of embedded liberalism in relation to health care systems. It will finally present populist and activist narratives on health and the UK’s national health service from an international perspective. It draws on secondary literature and a corpus of popular press articles and grey literature produced by civil society organisations.

The “Fox Eye” Challenge Trend: Anti-Racism Work, Platform Affordances, and the Vernacular of Gesticular Activism on TikTok

This article takes the “Fox Eye” challenge that trended on social media in 2020 as a case study in anti-racism activism by (East) Asian users on TikTok. The “Fox Eye” challenge was a trend in which both celebrities and ordinary users—often predominantly White women—posted photos and short videos on how to wear specific styles of make-up to achieve almond-shaped eyes or “fox eyes.” This was often accompanied with a “migraine pose” where a user pushes their index and middle fingers up against the temples on both sides of their head to “lift” the corners of their upper eyelids, and was colloquially referred to as a “Chinese” or “oriental” look. In response, (East) Asian users on TikTok called out the historically racist undertones of this seemingly superficial trend, using the features and affordances of the platform to produce everyday, nonheroic forms of digital activism, as an act of civic engagement and activist campaigning. Building on the scholarship on digital activism, we consider how TikTok has emerged as an alternative activist space for young people, specifically as it services users as a video production and sharing app. We specifically focus on the audiovisual aesthetics of the TikTok narratives in the counter-Fox Eye trend campaign, wherein the strategic and templatable deployments of vernacular TikTok aesthetics—curated image selections, creative uses of sound and audio memes, specific renders of visual filters and effects—play a central role in giving meaning to the online activist narratives created. This has given rise to platformed activism in the TikTok vernacular that we term “gesticular activism,” which focuses on the generation of visibility and virality as awareness-building and consciousness-raising tactics.

Coloniality of power and social control strategies in mining: an analysis of MAM activists’ narratives

Brazil has experienced the expansion of mining in recent years, guided mainly by the neoextractive model. This exploitation model has been imposed by a hegemonic discourse that considers mining as a need for the development of periphery countries. But cases such as the failure of the dams in Mariana and Brumadinho confirm that this model has brought more negative impacts than benefits and development for the local communities. In this context, many resistance movements have emerged to confront mineral exploitation. At the same time, mining companies have adopted strategies to protect their interests. The study objective is to analyse the strategies of social control adopted by corporations to guarantee their domination in mining territories, based on the narratives of activists from the Movement for Popular Sovereignty in Mining (MAM), interpreted from the perspective of coloniality of power. Results reveal that mining companies are central agents in neoextractivism, reproducing the coloniality of power through social control strategies, reinforcing subalternisation of vulnerable populations and making it more difficult for communities to resist mining.

Thailand’s Sex Entertainment: Alienated Labor and the Construction of Intimacy

Promising research from Thailand already highlights women in the sexual entertainment industry as being active participants in both intimate relationships and commercial transactions simultaneously. Notably, they are neither victims nor alienated laborers, as some activist narratives assert. Women working in Thailand’s sex entertainment industry consistently adapt working cultures to modernity’s demand to reduce sex to a commercial transaction while often seeking emotional engagement. One result is that new forms of intimacy emerged, taking on new cultural meanings. The profoundly felt need to care for and take care of someone else [dulae (Thai: ดูแล)], seen as a form of “intimacy”, is, in fact, deeply rooted in the Thai social context. We reframe the literature about sex work in Thailand by assuming that intimacy is key to understanding how “sex work” arose and is sustained there. Focusing on intimacy distances research about sex work away from western assumptions about the commodification and alienation of labor. This gives a more holistic understanding of the complexity of overlapping and intersecting dimensions of the work women perform in sex entertainment. “Intimacy” ties together the issues of money, labor, and a need to care for someone and be taken care of. This thread links women with their customers, families, and themselves.

The finch in the coal mine: Interrogating the environmental politics of extinction narratives

AbstractThe black‐throated finch is an endangered species whose highest quality remaining habitat directly overlaps with the site of the controversial Adani Carmichael coal mine in Central Queensland, Australia. The image of this finch has been widely used by anti‐Adani protest groups as a powerful symbol for the destructive nature of greenfield coal mining. Drawing on extinction studies literature, we problematise the use of the black‐throated finch as a symbol of imminent extinction, highlighting how activists have constructed a fixed finch on‐the‐brink ontology that narrows possible futures for the species. We identify how the finch has been strategically deployed as an affective tool for engaging publics while the anti‐Adani campaign has been primarily driven by concerns around climate change futures. We use primary sources of anti‐Adani ephemera as well as interviews with key scientists, activists, and image‐makers involved in the debate about the Carmichael coal mine. We argue that critical evaluation of the effects and potential consequences of simplified environmental activist narratives and the instrumentalisation of nonhumans is needed to support and enable activism that centres care and responsibility within multispecies entanglements. Engagement with the complexities of environmental intervention in relation to the finch, and not exclusively the mine, is also necessary to locate openings through which more‐than‐human futures can be creatively imagined and enacted.

Biographies of Labor Activists: Trajectories, Daringness, and Challenges

AbstractThis comment discusses three topics. First, John French's biography of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is located in the broader trajectory of the production of biographical narratives of activists under the auspices of the historiography of the labour movement. Second, French's daring gesture of comparing the trajectories of Lula and August Bebel, who lived in such different contexts, and the impact of this in terms of a more sophisticated understanding of labour history in Brazil is discussed. Finally, we look at some of the challenges faced by writers of biographies of working-class leaders, notably in relation to the intersectionality between class, race, and gender.

Rooting, shifting and mobilizing: Women's peacebuilding across differences in Georgia and Myanmar

This article explores how female peace activist's experiences of armed conflict drive their activism. By analyzing women's peace activism as a manifestation of transversal politics, I capture how women's experiences and social positioning in relation to the armed conflict influence how they shape their identities and create alliances across conflict divides. Building on the narratives of activists and members of women's organizations in Georgia and Myanmar, I argue that when experiences such as displacement and loss are articulated with the awareness of the gendered dynamics of the conflict, women expand the categories in which their identities are defined, and challenge political stances which were hitherto only guided by the ethno-political context. This process allows women to approach other parties (which were previously either neglected or considered as opponents) and to build common ground for peace activism despite the existence of multiple differences within and across groups.

Embodiment in activist images: addressing the role of the body in digital activism

When studying digital protest, researchers generally focus on the linguistic content produced by activists and supporters. The images associated with this content, however, are not given equal attention. This study will attempt to assess the role that images play in the narratives of activists who are not addressing issues explicitly tied to the physical body. I analyze the digital content of two social movements: ‘The Occupy Wall Street Movement’ and ‘The Swan Queen Movement’. Discourse analysis, both linguistic and visual, of the social media content (Tumblr specifically) from the movements reveals that these images serve the purposes of embodiment. This contradicts much of the literature on the Internet and embodiment, which posits that the Internet better serves the purposes of disembodiment and disconnection from consistent identity practices. I argue that this work sheds light on how activists are re-defining what it means to be embodied.

Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in the Arctic North

Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in the Arctic North

Psychotherapy in the Shadow of Shame

ABSTRACT The author reviews current examples of institutionalized homo-, bi-, and transphobia expressed by right-wing politicians and the Catholic Church in Poland. He uses the Gestalt theory of shame to understand the psychological consequences of this systemic oppression and analyzes internalized homo-, bi-, and transphobia; “the love focus” in activist narratives on homosexuality; and the lack of psychotherapeutic depth when working through gender and/or sexuality issues with clients. A psychotherapist’s role as a psychosocial activist (the Gestalt realm) or shadow practitioner (the Jungian realm) is suggested as a crucial support for an LGBT+ client.

Environmental activists’ hysteresis as a driving force for establishing environmental actions against urban forest privatization in Bandung, Indonesia

Despite the huge and growing environmental movement to protect urban forests in Indonesia, the tensions between environmental activists’ past engagements with nature and the emerging environmental problems are under-studied. The inner contradiction between the intensive nature of the connections and experiences that the actor maintains and the recent external threat to the environment is the key energizer of an environmental movement. Through Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal concept of hysteresis, this article explores how activists’ previous experiences with nature suffer disjuncture caused by the threat of urban forest privatization occurring in their neighborhood. Drawn from in-depth interviews with the co-founders of an environmental movement organization, the activist narratives in this article reveal that the development of their current struggles was driven by feelings of disappointment, anxiety, anger and a fear of losing the urban forest. The urban forest, for them, not only constitutes a physical space, but serves social and spiritual purposes, represents local identity and is the basis for everyday life.

“My Baby Went Straight to Heaven”: Morality Work in Abortion Online Storytelling

Abstract Two competing activist narratives dominate public conversation around the morality of abortion, yet little empirical research examines how women talk about the morality of their own abortion experiences. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 156 accounts from an abortion storytelling website, I find that traditional pro-choice moral arguments invoking privacy and bodily autonomy were apparent but not dominant in women’s accounts. Three other frames emerged as ways to confront the problem of abortion as a morally controversial action: “abortion as morally unremarkable,” “abortion as morally problematic, but justified,” and “abortion as morally desirable.” These frameworks varied in the degrees to which they aligned with politically acceptable abortion narratives. Throughout these frameworks were a number of overlapping themes, including motherhood, responsibility, and religion. Drawing on theories of morality work and moral accounts, I posit that subjects are able to hold a “tension of opposites” while still maintaining cohesive narratives and presenting positive moral identities. For example, many women assigned their fetus a moral status as a life or potential life, yet ultimately felt other factors outweighed the obligation to sustain that life. I argue that this tension is a significant feature of morality work that warrants more attention.

Negotiating agency: disability activism in Uganda between local contexts and global influences

This article explores how disability activists in Uganda mediate their agency between influences of the Global North and local realities. Narratives of activists illuminate limits to their agency on individual, community and national levels and depict challenges to apply global frameworks to local contexts. I argue that the Ugandan disability movement needs to determine a common strategy with an increased focus on social change, but activists do not have the agency to determine priorities as funding organisations impose their agendas. Activists seem to lack awareness of current debates in critical disability studies that would support engagement with unequal power relations and reflections on the assumed universality of concepts. I conclude with the call for a dialogue between critical disability studies and development studies that supports activists in Uganda can develop a context specific disability discourse. Points of interest This article explores the work of disabled people and their organisations who aim to improve the situation of disabled people in Uganda While this Ugandan disability movement has had exemplary achievements in the past, currently it seems disorganised and not unified. The priorities of the Ugandan disability movement are heavily influenced by funding organisations, which has resulted in a focus on creating laws and policies, while work to improve the attitudes of society towards disabled people has been limited. The funding organisations are mainly development organisations that work globally and rarely take specific local contexts into account. Critical disability studies debates stress the importance of local context, but the debates do not reach Ugandan disability activists. Disability studies and development studies scholars and practitioners need to work together to find ways forward that meet the needs of disabled people in contexts like Uganda.

Disrupting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology: Social-Environmental and Trauma-Informed Approaches to Disciplinary Transformation

This article is the second in a two-part series that analyzes current research on harassment in archaeology. Both qualitative and quantitative studies, along with activist narratives and survivor testimonials, have established that harassment is occurring in archaeology at epidemic rates. These studies have also identified key patterns in harassment in archaeology that point to potential interventions that may prevent harassment, support survivors, and hold perpetrators accountable. This article reviews five key obstacles to change in the disciplinary culture of archaeology: normalization, exclusionary practices, fraternization, gatekeeping, and obstacles to reporting. Two public health paradigms—the social-environmental model and trauma-informed approaches—are used to identify interventions that can be taken at all levels of archaeological practice: individual, relational, organizational, community, and societal.

The politics of Black and Brown solidarities: race, space, and hip-hop cultural production in Los Angeles

ABSTRACT Conceptualizations of Latinidad range from those emphasizing ethnicity and whiteness to those questioning the category's utility for capturing the diversity of diasporas from dozens of countries. This article approaches Latinidad from relational formations of race framework, revealing the importance of the sociohistorical context in which Latinxs are racialized in relation to one another and other racialized groups. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with artists and activists in Los Angeles and analysis of hip-hop cultural productions, this research finds that Latinxs raised in “minority-majority” neighbourhoods have developed understandings of race and political solidarities that highlight brownness, which is often articulated as part of a “Black and Brown multiracial formation”. Such understandings of race and racialization challenge the dominant black/white racial binary, whitewashed notions of Latinidad, and ethnonationalisms. The counterscripts articulated through cultural production and activist narratives provide grassroots theorizations on race, belonging, and citizenship and shed light on multilevel processes of racialization.

Activist memory narration on social media: Armenian genocide on Instagram

This article explores diasporic activist memory narration on social media. We analyze the multimodal content and comments on the Instagram account “Armenians in Lebanon” (AiL), Instagram’s affordances, and interview data with their social media manager to understand how memory is narrated, how specific audiences respond to it, and how Instagram as a platform shapes it. We found three temporally non-linear memory activist narratives—“Survival,” “Suffering,” and “Never Forget.” These narratives leverage Instagram’s affordances of visuality, scalability, and interactivity and combine social media branding practices with framing to recount the past so as to serve the diaspora Armenians’ present and future needs of genocide recognition and reparations. In the narrative, Armenians are positioned as both continually suffering because of, and thriving despite of Turkey, as well as committed to extending their quest for genocide recognition into the future.

91 Addressing urgency in grassroots organizations - If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door of leadership

Abstract Grassroots (GR) organizations that develop pipelines of pivotal leadership are better able to respond to the multiple challenges of the day. As public organizations, social media and biased-literature intensify advocacy for the reduction and constraint of animal agriculture (AA), it is clear AA is under concerted attack. Producers must not only learn to cope with changes in weather pattern intensification and droughts, depletion of resources, dramatic policy shifts and more, they must defend the activist narratives. The need for well-informed, competent GR leader communicators to advocate for the beef community has never been more urgent to the future of the beef industry. The Young Cattlemen Leadership Program (YCLP), a partnership between AU Animal Sciences and the Alabama Cattlemen’s Association, is an outreach effort focused on the delivery of an integrated, customized blueprint of content workshops, legislative sessions, industry tours, conferences and mentoring for catalyzed leadership development to meet the current and future needs of a highly diverse state constituency. Based on survey feedback and case analysis, YCLP, now in its seventh cohort, is proving the effectiveness of the collaborative learning design model contextualized around issue topics surrounding AA as alumni have assumed multiple roles of leadership in the organization.