Activist Strategies Research Articles

Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures. Edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland

Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland’s edited collection Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures is nuanced, thoughtful, and a joy to read. Solarpunk, as a movement encompassing (but not limited to) speculative fiction, art, fashion, architecture, activism, lifestyle, and philosophy, is often defined by its diversity—of identities, of sociopolitics, of theoretical styles, of activist strategies—and the Almanac demonstrates this in its wide variety of both essays and contributors. The Almanac exemplifies the solarpunk strategy of “adapting theory to local reality” (1), moving from context of the Anthropocene and a history of the generic roots of solarpunk (“Introduction”), to the historical forces giving rise to the events of this moment that affect our day-to-day reality and how solarpunk can affect our imagination of a better future (“Part 1”), to the way that individuals can use solarpunk thought and action in their personal lives (“Part 2”), to contextualizing the individual solarpunk in their community of human and more-than-human beings in their environments (“Part 3”), to how readers can put all of this careful thought into concrete action (“Part 4”) in service of making life better in the here and now.

The anti-caste alter-network: equality labs and anti-caste activism in the US

Abstract As a pan-South Asian phenomenon that marks certain groups and bodies as untouchable, caste-based discriminatory practices have also traveled with the South Asian diaspora. This article examines the case of anti-caste activism, especially in the context of its transnational potentials which have blossomed with the ubiquitous uptake of digital technology worldwide. We examine anti-caste activism in the US through the work of Equality Labs, an anti-caste civil rights organization that works with digital and non-digital activist strategies. Analyzing a range of material including surveys and reports, online chatter, and journalistic discourse we show how the organization’s work is part of a larger, transnational network of anti-caste activism—something we term the anti-caste alter-network.

Sámi Feminism and Activism in Ann-Helén Laestadius’ Novel Stöld

ABSTRACT The article examines the thematization of (intersectional indigenous) feminist criticism and activism in the novel Stöld (2021), written by the Sámi-Tornedalian-Swedish author Ann-Helén Laestadius. The novel depicts life in a small town in Sápmi, where reindeer herders are strongly affected by the brutal killings of their animals and the lack of legal security they experience. A central motif in the novel is the resistance to this discrimination through the characters Elsa’s and Minna’s Sámi and feminist activism. The first part of the analysis examines their common Sámi causes and activist strategies; and the second focuses on the critique of gender norms within the minoritized reindeer herding society, and investigates the gendered attitudes towards their activism. Finally, I discuss the ways in which the novel functions as literary activism. In sum, the book shows that it requires the effort of several women acting across generations through various institutions such as the police, the media, and the judicial system to create change.

The Poet and the Pragmatist: Cross-Sectoral Insights Against the Grain and for Activist Politics

Claims of structural injustice are difficult to hear for those in positions of social advantage, where listening and response are needed most. Most activist strategies focus primarily on “disruptive” politics, which exerts pressure on decision-makers via a pragmatics of directness, expediency, and force. This paper argues that the particular “structures of feeling” that make listening difficult for advantaged groups call for a different kind of activism. It draws on interdisciplinary expertise from four sectors effective in fostering listening in the face of challenge – conflict mediation, therapy, education, and performance – to articulate three common features that enable transformation in these sites. Each of these more “poetic” qualities runs counter to the logic of most activist politics, and holds significant potential for civic interventions that seek to open closures and soften resistances to claims of structural injustice among socially advantaged groups.

‘The Spatial Void Could be a Chance to Recreate’: Queer Visual Activism in the Fallout of the Beirut Blast

On August 4<sup>th</sup>, 2020, Beirut was torn apart by a chemical explosion at its port. The blast was a consequence of dire government negligence – killing over 200 people, injuring a further 6,500, and causing massive destruction. Although the catastrophic effects of the blast were felt across the whole of Beirut, those areas most significantly affected – particularly the neighbourhoods of Mar Mikhael, Gemmayze and Geitawi – were among the most queer-friendly areas in Beirut, in which ‘queer bodies [could be] safely visible’ in the otherwise ‘hyper-(hetero)sexualized city’ (Aouad and Abed, 2021: 3). Intersecting with the realities of an economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, the devastation of queer safe spaces as a result of the blast precipitated deep material and indeed existential losses across the diverse queer communities of Beirut.<br /> This article engages with the process of visual activism in the fallout of the Beirut blast, exploring specifically the affective and temporal dimensions of creation against the backdrop of spatial destruction. Analysing the work of three Lebanese visual practitioners from Beirut, I explore how they navigate the terrains of material loss, traumatic grief, reclamation, and resistance through their art and activism. I examine the evolution from immediate adaptation to humanitarian activism post-blast – quickly organised through the mobilisation of existing networks of artists and activists – to the grappling with grief and trauma through artistic outputs, and finally the ongoing work of reclamation and recreation within a particular spatial context. Analysing both loss and rebuilding, this article serves to foreground the voices, work, and strategies of queer and feminist visual activists as they reclaim space and reassert their presence amidst the trauma and material wreckage of the Beirut blast.

Livin’ in the future: Conceptualising the future of UK disability activism through utopian, retrotopian and heterotopian configurations

The article explores how the future is imagined through disability activism. It highlights how UK Disabled People’s Movement members, established and newcomers, envisage inclusive and accessible societies and what role disability activism has in realising such visions. To achieve this, conceptualisations of the future are mapped within a framework of three topias (places/worlds): utopia, retrotopia and heterotopia. These topian configurations provide a way to make sense of activist visions for progressing disabled people’s emancipation. The article argues that the UK Disabled People’s Movement currently produces two dominant conceptualisations of the future: a deterministic, radical overhaul of political and economic arrangements (utopia); and a return to ‘purer’ forms of disability activism produced by historical activists and their networks (retrotopia). Young disabled activists who do not align with such conceptualisations are denied opportunities to influence broad activist strategies and are, instead, relegated to opportunities that necessitate a youth perspective. Young disabled activist’s conceptualisations of the future can be best understood as the production of counter sites, which generate activities, politics and discourses around notions of inclusion, social justice and accessibility (heterotopia). These produce possible and preferable alternatives to the current ordering of the social world – with disability activism becoming spaces that encourage creativity of new ideas, new practices and new options against existing norms and inaccessible worlds.

Using Strategies Elites Understand: Divestment as an Approach to Social Change

ABSTRACT Over the past 50 years, student activists and community organizers on college campuses have advocated for divestment as a strategy to enact necessary change. These activists and organizers are often tasked to confront the higher education elite, such as trustees, with these demands. Higher education institutions will only continue to face immense pressures to be humane organizations with the public interest at its core. This article reviews the literature on divestment as a social activist strategy and its use in higher education. In addition to the political importance of divestment, reinvestment is emerging as a significant complement to activists’ demands. We advance an argument for how divestment and reinvestment can inform a new paradigm for higher education finance to stimulate future activism.

Ecological Wunderkind and heroic trollhunter: the celebrity saga of Greta Thunberg

ABSTRACT In December 2019, a Swedish climate activist was appointed Person of the Year by Time Magazine. Greta Thunberg was only 15 when she inspired a wave of school strikes and protest marches. She stole the media attention at a series of global summits, until public gatherings and international travels were interrupted by the pandemic. The aim of this article is to highlight a short but intense celebritisation process with culture-bound responses. First, I will establish Thunberg’s deep roots in a Nordic children’s culture, which defends bio-diversity with ‘superhoney’ and science. Then, I will compare the strong impact of an ecological Wunderkind in the EU with the polarised reactions in the US. In the conclusion, I will relate Thunberg’s activist strategy and persona to other types of eco-celebrities and discuss the significance of diverging time horizons.

From “Social Evils” to “Human Beings”: Vietnam's LGBT Movement and the Politics of Recognition

Since 2008, non-governmental organisations and other civil society organisations have helped to transform the image of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Vietnam. Their efforts reached a peak in 2014 when Vietnam became the first country in Asia to debate the issue of same-sex marriage in the national parliament. Yet, the outcome of the debate remained was ambiguous, with same-sex marriage being neither illegal nor recognised by the state. This paper explores the tactics and strategies of LGBT activists as they campaigned for recognition of same-sex marriage. It argues that a key factor in the “in-between” outcome was their lack of attention to the redistributive implications of recognition. Together with attention to the fractured nature of the Vietnamese state, engaging directly with issues of redistribution may allow LGBT activists to further advance the politics of recognition at the same time as they redefine the contours of civil society and activism in contemporary Vietnam.

When Theatre Can Wait

On October 17, 2019, riots broke out in Lebanon in response to heightened economic pressure and corruption scandals surrounding the political elite. Within days, Lebanon witnessed one of its largest protests with people flooding the streets across the country and repurposing public spaces. As a resident at the time and activist in solidarity, I searched for theatre arts initiatives within the protest movement. A colleague ended my hunt with one, clear statement: “Theatre can wait.” She argued that this was a time to regroup, to stand en masse with people in the streets. Only a few months later, the pandemic-induced lockdown that swept over Lebanon and abroad enforced another form of silence on theatre artists and activists. The streets went quiet, theatres stood empty, doors were shut. In both of these instances, with or without deliberation, theatre stood still. My colleague's words during the protests - and the context of pandemic lockdown that followed - led me to question when, if at all, theatre should be silent, specifically within the activist initiatives. In the midst of protest movements, what is the significance of socially engaged theatre practice that is still: is it a reflective pause, an opportunity to (re)consider activist strategies, to collectively listen and gather strength? If so, how is the significance of silence transformed when it is imposed by physical restrictions? The following provocation argues that engaging with the idea of silence is an essential skill within the context of socio-political urgency and protest-led calls to action that resound globally today.

“Earth Girl Won’t Stand For It!”: Representations of Environmental (In)Justice in 'Mayah’s Lot' (2012)

As the global climate crisis escalates, environmental disaster and extreme weather will play a defining role in the lives of many of today’s children, particularly those from impoverished communities and communities of color. However, environmental children’s literature has overwhelmingly failed to educate readers about environmental injustice or equip them with the tools to combat these pressing issues. Rebecca Bratspies and Charlie La Greca’s comic Mayah’s Lot (2012) counters this troubling silence by empowering children to pursue environmental justice. The comic centers on Mayah, a young Black girl who discovers that a corporation plans to transform a vacant lot in her urban neighborhood into a toxic waste storage facility. Mayah joins forces with her neighbors to halt the development, participating in protests, community meetings, and legal action. The comic concludes with the community defeating the corporation and collaborating to turn the lot into public green space. By highlighting the intersections between environmental and racial inequalities, along with showcasing a range of viable community activist strategies, I argue that Mayah’s Lot demonstrates how environmentally-justice oriented comics can empower young readers to participate in environmental advocacy and develop resilience in the face of environmental disruption.

Gendering Jewish inter/nationalism: introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT This essay introduces and sets out the stakes of the special issue, “Gendering Jewish Inter/Nationalism,” especially for Jewish historians. It summarises each of the pieces contained within and defines the terms and subject area. It also highlights common themes that emerge from several articles, discussing activist trajectories, causes, strategies, and kinship relations; the concepts of double shifts and women as vectors for internationalism; and geographies including Zionist internationalism.

Re-membering: Tracing epistemic implications of feminist and gendered politics under military occupation

In this article, I trace ‘re-membering’ as a feminist practice in the context of gendered activism under military occupation in Kashmir. Drawing on its anticolonial feminist roots, I conceptualise re-membering as practices that do not simply put together what has been severed or dismembered by coloniality but they also, in doing so, propose different frames of looking. I think through re-membering by focusing on two intertwining sites of gendered and feminist activism in Kashmir: protests that re-member the disappeared and activist representation under military occupation. A feminist analysis of these activist strategies grounded in anticolonial thinking suggests that re-membering in the specificity of its emergence under conditions of heightened control does multivalent work: it contests dominant claims and the coloniality of the Indian state, thereby exposing the continuum of violence including its carceral, psychic, discursive forms that co-constitute and perpetuate the occupation of Kashmir. As such, it insists on accounting for historical and contextual specificities as necessary conditions for imagining an expressly anticolonial feminist politics that can open possibilities of epistemic and political transformation towards knowing Kashmir and people’s struggles differently. It is here that the epistemic potential of re-membering lies: in overturning the terms of conversation as decolonial feminist scholarship has long insisted.

Activism Among Bureaucrats: Creative Social Housing Work in a Conservative Institutional Setting

How can activist bureaucrats unexpectedly influence policy outcomes? What strategies do these actors adopt in order to defend and implement public policies in institutional settings unfavorable to their ideas? How do the individual trajectories of activist bureaucrats influence their strategies and repertoires of action? Drawing from the literature on institutional activism, this article shows how bureaucrats worked as activists to create and institutionalize participatory arenas in slum upgrading projects, within an institutional setting adverse to popular participation. Our research was carried out through interviews with bureaucrats and local community actors, as well as participant observation. The main results of our study were: the identification of four distinct profiles of bureaucrats and four main activist strategies used by them, as well as the identification of bureaucrats’ profiles more associated with the adoption of certain practices - so that specific profiles of bureaucrats have influenced the policy-making process in different ways, according to their relational skills, previous trajectories, and worldviews. These findings suggest that the individual characteristics of bureaucrats are important to understanding the variations in bureaucrats’ activist strategies within the state, as well as how bureaucrats can influence policymaking in heterogeneous ways.

Episodes of contention, bonds of trust: the UGTT and ‘new’ trade union activism in post-Ben Ali Tunisia

ABSTRACT While labour unions in many places have been weakened by neoliberal policies and declining memberships, the continued importance of the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) after the 2010–11 uprising is striking. Applying a strategic interactionist approach, this paper examines the UGTT's evolving role within this expanded political space, exploring how it has leveraged political openings and social crises to broaden its influence, and how Tunisia's new political landscape, marked by a surge in collective mobilization, has changed the goals and strategies of union leadership and activists. The executive branch has made the UGTT central to national governance, pressuring governments unresponsive to its demands, and positioning itself as an ever-present political actor fundamentally different from any the political parties. Meanwhile, militant unionists have enhanced horizontal cooperation, strengthened strategic interactions and engaged in joint collective action with other movements, adopting a more militant identity in support of their specific objectives.

Texas, monuments, toward a politics of self-reckoning

In this article, I examine the efforts of a group of anti-Confederate monument activists in Williamson County, Texas. The article begins with the history of the monument itself, 100 years before the activists initiated their efforts. The intransigence to removing the Confederate monument is symbolic of white resistance to struggles for racial equality more broadly. Second, I discuss how the local legal impasse has contributed to distinct anti-monument activist strategies that deploy counternarratives and memories, from performances, to challenging narrative claims regarding who is more patriotic. Finally, I explore the politics of self-reckoning—the process by which white people find that they have to answer for racism deep within themselves as well as in relation to violent white supremacy and the legal and institutional fortress that protects whiteness generally. Battling both racists and racist institutions is hard and lengthy, and monument activism persistently exposes what is at stake.

The Implementation Activist: How One Determined Person with a Camera Has Achieved Enforcement of Smoke-Free Laws throughout Thailand.

Smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke are leading causes of disease and premature death in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where over 80% of smokers live. Over 152 LMICs, including Thailand, have passed laws designating that indoor and outdoor public spaces should be smoke-free. Throughout LMICs, implementation of laws has been a persistent problem. We identified one activist in Thailand who developed his own highly effective strategy for ensuring implementation of smoke-free laws, and whose approach has potential for being a model for implementation activists in other LMICs. We set out to describe the implementation activist's strategy and impact, and to explore his perspective and motivations. We conducted in-depth interviews with the activist, reviewed video recordings and transcripts, and used narrative analysis to identify key themes and illuminating statements. In the implementation activist's assessment, administrators and officials were not being held accountable for their responsibilities to enforce laws, resulting in low public compliance. The activist developed his strategy to first identify public places where no-smoking signs were not posted and/or where people were smoking; take photographs of violations and make notes; and file citizen's complaints at police stations, submitting his photographs as evidence. The implementation activist documented over 5,100 violations of smoke-free laws throughout Thailand and reported violations to police. Often, police officers were unsure how to deal with his complaints, but when he educated them about the law, most undertook enforcement actions. The activist's work has contributed substantially to creating smoke-free schools, sports facilities and parks. This implementation activist's approach can be a model for preventing youth from using tobacco/nicotine, and preventing exposures to secondhand smoke and e-cigarette emissions. Based on his successes, we provide a list of elements that implementation activists can use to be effective, along with recommendations for policy and practice.

Decolonizing Open Science: Southern Interventions

AbstractHegemonic Open Science, emergent from the circuits of knowledge production in the Global North and serving the economic interests of platform capitalism, systematically erase the voices of the subaltern margins from the Global South and the Southern margins inhabiting the North. Framed within an overarching emancipatory narrative of creating access for and empowering the margins through data exchanged on the global free market, hegemonic Open Science processes co-opt and erase Southern epistemologies, working to create and reproduce new enclosures of extraction that serve data colonialism-capitalism. In this essay, drawing on our ongoing negotiations of community-led culture-centered advocacy and activist strategies that resist the racist, gendered, and classed structures of neocolonial knowledge production in the metropole in the North, we attend to Southern practices of Openness that radically disrupt the whiteness of hegemonic Open Science. These decolonizing practices foreground data sovereignty, community ownership, and public ownership of knowledge resources as the bases of resistance to the colonial-capitalist interests of hegemonic Open Science.

Between real and virtual: strategies of mobilisation of the radical right in Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT In this article, we explore radical right mobilisation beyond the electoral arena, looking at its characteristics and forms, as well as intensity and related factors (such as the preferred targets and issues). Within a comparative study of four country cases in Central and Eastern Europe the analysis is carried out by drawing on two novel datasets: i. a protest event analysis of RR street mobilisation (from 2008 to 2016; for a total of 1040 events collected) and, ii. formalised web content analysis of more than 200 radical right websites. We provide a comprehensive overview of the recent developments in the action strategies of (Eastern European) RR movements, activists and party actors-- comparing them with offline and online RR mobilisation in Western Europe. Common trends but also specificities of the Eastern European arena of RR contention are unveiled.

Where the Personal is (Geo)Political: Performing Queer Visibility in Georgia in the Context of EU Association

ABSTRACT This article examines the interplay between the European Union’s (EU) interventions fostering LGBT+ rights in Georgia, and the visibility-raising strategies of local queer activists. The growing antagonism between the EU and Russia over their “shared neighborhood” crystallizes the idea of a value-based divide between the West/EUrope and the East/Russia on LGBT+ issues—with Georgia occupying a liminal position therein. The paper puts forward the concept of geopoliticization to unpack how the discursive construction of LGBT+ equality as a geopolitical issue shapes Georgian queer activists’ visibility strategies, and to interrogate the outcomes these processes produce.