Everyday Activism Research Articles

Youth activism and (de)personalized remix on TikTok

ABSTRACT Social media has provided everyday actors with a platform to share their personal stories and ideas. This has had a profound effect on activism, as movements are increasingly built up and amplified through the circulation of participants’ individualized motivations, experiences, and sentiments. TikTok has emerged as a salient site for studying this turn: it has proven to be a highly successful tool in activist campaigns, strongly affords personalized communication, and supports a main user base of young people known for emphasizing self-expression in their online participation. Since remix is the core form of sharing on TikTok, users are encouraged to insert and articulate themselves not only in the process of content creation, but in the process of circulation as well. Here, we focus on the way remix is exploited as a mode of personalizing activist content on TikTok, particularly among young users. We do so by qualitatively coding and analyzing remixed content associated with the digital activist organization Gen-Z for Change. We find that, despite expectations based on prior research and the observed behavior of older users, young users tended to resist personalization in their remix strategies. Yet, they simultaneously managed to assert their presence in ways that are meaningful on the app. Our results elaborate on digital activist strategies and the role of platform affordances therein, and add important nuance to common conceptions of youth political participation styles.

Becoming Yoga Bodies of Instagram: Women’s Agency, Platform Negotiations and Everyday Activism

Women’s yoga bodies have been overutilised in mainstream media through their stereotypical representation aligned with the market forces. Previous studies have shown the domination of similar visuals in yoga spaces on Instagram, following the algorithmic platform structures. Avoiding the dichotomy of subject–object bodies, this article brings out women participants’ living experiences of becoming yoga bodies on Instagram and their practices countering the dominant visual culture related to yoga bodies. The article argues that women use ‘everyday activism’ on Instagram to formulate their yoga body experiences. These findings are based on in-depth interviews with 17 women yoga practitioners active on Instagram. The analysis reveals the emergence of three main themes contributing to the ‘becoming of yoga bodies on Instagram’, namely (a) reclaiming the space through increased visibility, (b) training gazes towards women’s yoga bodies and (c) breaking the yoga body stereotype.

Everyday activism and “actionable” hope as tempered radicals

Everyday activism and “actionable” hope as tempered radicals

Sociology beyond suspicion: Goldfarb as post-critical critic

ABSTRACT This paper argues that sociology has come to be dominated by an ethos of suspicion and that attending to the critical sociology of Jeffrey C. Goldfarb can help it break free from this domination and expand the range of its relation to the structures, institutions, and interactions it studies. This argument unfolds in three parts. In the first it is argued that, while critique remains essential, the ethos of suspicion has unnecessarily narrowed its scope. The space for a more capacious understanding of critique is made, secondly, through a rereading of two recent ‘critics of critique’: Zygmunt Bauman and Bruno Latour. Third and finally, this paper shows how Goldfarb’s scholarship steps into the space carved out by these criticisms, providing a model of a sociology that has moved ‘beyond suspicion’ in its attention to the liberatory power that lies in the collective, critical capacity of ordinary, everyday actors.

Toward a resilient, resistant, and reciprocal community: Everyday youth activism of Korean American and migrant students amidst COVID-19

Situated in AsianCrit, which emphasizes centrality of racism among Asians in education as well as youth activism scholarship that denotes the engagement of youth in informal, communal, and everyday political spheres, the current qualitative study aims to center and uplift the voices of Korean American and migrant students who were enthusiastically involved in a Korean Student Organization (pseudonym) since the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, this study explores Korean American and migrant students’ motivations, perspectives, and aspirations to participate in the organization at a predominantly white university in the Midwest since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. By highlighting how Korean American and migrant students foregrounded their experiences of racism and marginalization at a predominately white university during the COVID-19 pandemic by creating a variety of collective activities, events, and opportunities within and across the campus to survive, resist, and flourish amidst of heightened racist climates, this study will provide several implications for AsianCrit and youth activism scholarship. Together, the goal of this study is to bring attention to everyday youth activism and agency among Asian and Asian American students regarding racial justice and complicate and challenge the hegemonic representations of Asian and Asian Americans as model minorities, forever foreigners, or victims of anti-Asian hate crimes in contemporary U.S. society.

Coalitions across divides: The interactional maintenance paradigm

AbstractOver the years, scholars have investigated how alliances begin and end, paying particular attention to factors that facilitate the emergence of movement and campaign coalitions. However, the issue of maintaining co‐resistance among distinct activist groups that lasts over time is still understudied. This contribution aims to fill this gap. Through an in‐depth empirical study of the long‐lasting cooperation of Israeli‐Palestinian activist organizations in the Palestinian region of the South Hebron Hills, this article singles out various factors that allowed this alliance to survive intense repression and change in political opportunities. Methodologically, a Protest Event Analysis was carried out after 2 months of preliminary fieldwork in Palestine (2019). It was followed by another 3 months of fieldwork in spring 2022 spent living with the community of Susiya and joining their everyday life and activism. Twenty‐three interviews with activists from both communities were conducted.

‘Courage without the certainty of a happy ending’: the emotion regulation of environmental activists

ABSTRACT Climate change and environmental degradation are the most serious and fundamental problems of our time and focal points for many activist groups and organizations. In this paper, we adopt a psychological perspective to explore the emotions and emotion regulation of environmental activists. We know from the literature that facing the reality of the climate crisis, and the risks involved, often means having to deal with powerful emotions such as fear and anxiety. In addition, activists in general typically deal with personal, cultural as well as structural challenges that often lead to dropout or burnout. Although we know quite a lot about the ways in which emotions mobilize and energize activism, we know less about the ways in which environmental activists regulate their emotions to improve their wellbeing for sustained activism. In the present study, we interviewed a broad international sample of 30 activists from Extinction Rebellion and similar organizations sharing the principles of regenerative culture encouraging emotion regulation among members. The informants experienced a wide range of negative, but also positive, emotions in relation to the experience of ‘living in climate truth’ as well as their everyday activism. Their emotion regulation strategies could be grouped into two themes: ‘Taking action to heal’ and ‘healing to sustain action’. Both themes reflected the ability to remain emotionally flexible through questioning, and not being attached to the outcomes of activism. This implied the down-regulation and transforming of negative emotions as well as the cultivating and tempering of positive emotions.

Spaces of youth politics and the Arab uprisings: environmental activism and the Algerian Hirak

ABSTRACT The two waves of uprisings in the Arab world in 2011, then 2019, have brought profound changes. In the second wave, including Iraq, Lebanon and Sudan, the Algerian hirak of 2019 constituted a massive political and social movement, bringing a new president and government, and affecting the popular consciousness that change was now possible. While participation in formal politics remains low, new spaces of participation have emerged. Environmental activism in the public space, as well as deeper challenges to extractivist development ideology, have inspired new practices of youth politics. From the disruption of the hirak to subsequent active citizenship, Algerians have proposed alternative development models. Drawing on findings from a participatory research project working with a network of Algerian youth researchers, and interviews with Algerian young people, associations and entrepreneurs, it is argued that the practices of the hirak have consolidated and amplified the everyday activism of Algerian civil society. Organizing environmental protests and action, Algerian youth have created new political spaces and inspired deeper reflections about the future of their country. These findings offer new insights into the longer term impacts of the Arab uprisings and of environmental activism, on spaces of youth political participation.

Individual legal action as minority activism: Romani Germans in 1950s West Germany

AbstractObjectivesSocial movement theory argues that activist movements emerge when the political opportunity structure is favorable. This article contributes to the literature on social movements and minority activism by showing that individual‐level activism happens even without a favorable opportunity structure.MethodsThe legal journal Rechtsprechung zum Wiedergutmachungsrecht (Case Law on Reparations Legislation), published from 1949 to 1981, reported on West German courts’ decisions about reparations claims appeals. All issues were examined for decisions on reparations claims appeals that Romani Germans submitted regarding West Germany's 1953 federal reparations law, despite the unfavorable political opportunity structure. The number of these appeals is reported, and select cases are discussed.ResultsEvery time a Romani claimant appealed a denied reparations claim, they were, according to feminist definitions of everyday activism, committing an act of activism. Such appeals appear repeatedly in the Rechtsprechung zum Wiedergutmachungsrecht, demonstrating that if scholars look for activism at an individual level, not a group level, evidence shows that members of marginalized minority groups engage in activism regardless of the political opportunity structure.ConclusionsThese findings show that, if individual‐level activism is included in scholarly analyses, it becomes apparent that minority activism occurs even when the political opportunity structure is unfavorable.

Everyday activism: an AI-assisted netnography of a digital consumer movement

ABSTRACT Prior studies have tended to focus on the figure of consumer movements rather than the ground from which they arise. This AI-assisted netnography interprets data from the WallStreetBets (WSB) subreddit during the GameStop short squeeze and for a period of 2.5 years afterwards. Analysis reveals an intimate relationship between the subreddit and portrayals of participants’ everyday lives, connecting financial strategies to jokes, memes, banter, and personal anecdotes. Collective identities are forged through discussions of life situations, populist counternarratives, shared cultural referents, and self-deprecation. Findings reveal digital activism ranging from the everyday and transitional to the extraordinary, bridging literatures on fluid consumer movements with everyday politics. Results affirm the value of collective identification to digital activism and suggest conceptual linkages to participatory culture and infinite gameplay.

The public as infrastructure in policy processes: The case of the abolition of the Swedish alcohol rationing system.

The Swedish political system is based on a strong tradition of commissions of inquiry, which work over the long-term to develop knowledge-based policy. This study explores knowledge processes associated with the work of such commissions, focusing on the case of the abolition of the Swedish alcohol rationing system. The point of departure is the 1944 Temperance Committee and its internal committee work, the committee's reports, and also the resulting governmental bill that led to the abolition of the rationing system in 1955. The focus is directed at how the public was used in arguments for and against the abolition of the system. The article adds to studies of knowledge production in policy by presenting a case study of the various ways in which the arguments used in political processes rely on the public as a carrying infrastructure over the course of a political process. We use the concept of the infrastructure (Star, 1999) as a metaphor to engage with the way the public is taken for granted in policy processes, and with the discursive resources needed to move arguments forward within a political process. Political processes involve many activities related to the movement of knowledge, of which we have explored the use of the public as an activity required for the movement of arguments. The public is understood as providing both conversational and legalistic resources for moving arguments from one context to another. While the internal committee documents and the final bill allowed for an everyday use of the public in relation to arguments on hassle, annoyance and freedom, the committee reports combined the use of the public with formal arguments on legal processes and the public's sense of justice. Explanations of the movement of knowledge often miss the articulation work (Star, 1991) that takes place within policy processes. The public is indirectly present, as well-behaving witnesses used to emphasize arguments, and as such, they do plenty of work. At the same time, it is the committee documents that facilitate the presence of this public, which often lie far from the publics' actual potential to make their voices heard. Although a perception of the rationing system's lack of support in popular opinion constituted a backdrop to the work of the committee, there was little knowledge of the publics' actual views on the rationing system. We show that the public constitute a spoken rather than a material resource that proves quite effective: the public is rarely questioned as long as it is a restricted singular public that behaves well. To date, little attention has been focused on understanding the role of the everyday actors in relation to alcohol policy and other forms of drug policy. We argue that research needs to engage more with the way publics are allowed to indirectly or directly participate in policy processes and what knowledge and policy consequences this participation produces.

Socio-technically just pedagogies: a framework for curriculum-making in higher education

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic sparked an unprecedented expansion of educational technologies and digitisation of the university sector, and also amplified existing inequalities and crises. In this paper, we introduce the ‘socio-technically just pedagogies framework’ to systemically explore curriculum-making, student-staff partnerships, knowledge production, and networked capabilities in higher education. This conceptual innovation seeks to (re)articulate pedagogy across four aspects: (i) a commitment to curriculum-making as a form of everyday activism; (ii) a nurturing of student-staff coalitions to expand student-staff partnerships; (iii) development of generative spaces for transdisciplinary co-creation; and (iv) the deliberation of networked capabilities. This framework emerged from a partnership with students at an Australian university that sought to experiment with pedagogical practices and possibilities. Our coalition then responded to the framework to illicit collective insights about the curriculum-making phenomenon. The framework seeks to articulate curriculum-making initiatives that collectively enact socio-technically just pedagogies.

Armed Citizens on the Border: How Guns Fuel Anti-Immigration Politics in America

Abstract To make a nation on stolen land using enslaved labor, the early American state relied on gun and immigration policy to create a well-armed white settler population. This legacy continues to animate modern conservativism, which is staked on supporting gun-friendly and anti-immigrant policies. Despite this history and ongoing political reality, however, the sociology of migration has largely ignored the relationship between firearms and immigration politics. To explore this relationship, the current study draws on 20 months of ethnographic data from the U.S.-Mexico border. I show how contemporary American gun culture bolsters anti-immigrant organizations through two mechanisms. First, gun shows and shooting ranges are important sites of recruitment among anti-immigrant groups. Second, the thrill of handling firearms mitigates the monotony of everyday anti-immigrant activism, while also easing the disenchantment that participants may otherwise feel about the effectiveness of their actions in bringing about long-term change. The article concludes by urging scholars of American politics to be mindful of the legacies of settler-colonialism and to take seriously the reinforcing effects of guns on nativist politics.

Review of “Liberty Road: Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism”

Liberty Road: Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism is an extraordinarily well researched and highly readable historical and ethnographic book that situates the suburbs as central sites for development of racial and political identities in the United States. Drawing on ethnographic observations, 50 interviews and archival research, Gregory Smithsimon argues that the landscape of Black suburbanization was produced by dualling forces of everyday activism for greater housing opportunities and everyday neoliberalism seeking to tear down the advances of the Civil Rights movement. In doing so, he centers Black agency in the process of expanding housing choices for African Americans and acknowledges how structural racism continues to shape those choices as well, even for more economically advantaged African Americans. In the first chapter, Beyond Blockbusting, Smithsimon uses archival research to show how the image of the blockbuster was created in the popular press and reproduced in academic literature with little basis in actual events. The blockbuster narrative that profit hungry real estate agents scared white residents in transitioning neighborhoods into selling their homes at a loss, which they then sold to unwitting Black families at a huge markup took the blame off of white residents who left and ignored the agency of Black homeseekers and Black integration activists. Instead, Smithsimon develops a fuller account of how racial transition actually happens, particularly in the suburbs, through a conscious effort on the part of multi racial constellation activists who included real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and political actors who sought integration for varied reasons and ultimately did manage to secure increased and improved housing options for Black households.

Dominant Development Indexes’ Construction of Gender and Challenges for Recognizing Everyday Activism for Peace and Security

Developed organizations have increasingly garnered numerous indicators to measure gender and development outcomes. Yet, measurements themselves reflect a logic of the arenas where development occurs and can be captured, and therefore reflect where women are imagined to predominantly exist. Based on the analysis of 1,298 indicators across 15 major development databases covering African countries, this article argues that mainstream development organizations predominantly understand gender in terms of institutional sites. Sometimes these were sites for intervention, or a place for institutional ‘betterment’ (a hospital, a work place, and a school). Other times, these sites were conceptualized as natural places where women would be (the family and the nation state). We identify the spatial logics underpinning these development indicators, and link them to larger historical gendered and racialized colonial logics organizing diverse social, economic, and cultural lives, where economic and institutional sites are promoted, a more nuanced and relational one is displaced. Ultimately, these spatial imaginings extend to the larger context of where debates about peace and security are situated—namely in largely individual, state-driven, and institutional-centric ways.

"Hope for a better tomorrow": Using photovoice to understand how Arab adolescents enact critical consciousness.

We explore how Arab adolescents enact critical consciousness to improve their lives and better their community. Eleven first- and second-generation Arab adolescents participated in a Photovoice study and were asked to reflect on and take photos that represented their well-being, daily life, and sense of belonging and community. The participants discussed their photos over multiple group reflection sessions. Thematic analysis highlights how Arab adolescents make positive change in their community, aided by their connections to community, their awareness of structural challenges they and their communities face, and their sense of agency to make positive change. We contribute to the literature by offering a window into the lived experiences of critical consciousness among Arab adolescents, an underrepresented group in the critical consciousness literature. We also add to the growing body of evidence that highlights the importance of "everyday activism" when considering social change actions.

Locked in Liminality. Angst und Methode in der Krisenerfahrung der Gegenwart

Against the backdrop of proclamations of a society of fear, risk and panic from the late 1970s to the present, the article takes a lead from fears as productive agents within the ethnographic process. Through the focal lens of pandemic everyday experience, and deploying essayistic ways of thinking and writing, it draws attention to the intersubjective and intercorporeal practice of meaning-making as conceptualised in phenomenology, psychoanalysis and pragmatist semiotics, and outlines its relevance for emergent interpretation and reflexivity. On an interactive micro-level, the essay explores the moment of ‘in-between’ that is sparked by surprise or crisis, and opens a transient ‘third milieu’ where experience can be shared, whilst cultural meaning is in ongoing renegotiation. The idea of this ambivalent space, as marked by indeterminate creative possibilities merging with fear and uncertainty, is followed further through Corona communication and narration, and investigated in its ambiguous effects of consolidating agency, and perpetuating anxiety and ideological exclusion by way of paranoid ‘infection’. The article inquires into the dynamic conceptual potentials of liminality theory, which it transgresses towards a late-capitalist state of permanent exception: What happens when everyday actors find themselves overpowered by paradoxical emotional requirements that cannot be resolved into new sociality? How can ethnographers, with view to their own involvement into the meshes of everyday fears, retain an empathic, yet empirically grounded understanding of pandemic experience and beyond?

Youth in conflict: space and subculture

ABSTRACT The steady decline of youth participation in society has been a concern for social scientists since the 1970s. Recent research has sought to move beyond concluding this signifies a ‘crisis of democracy’ or explaining the phenomenon by distinguishing between formal and extra-institutional types of participation by redirecting attention towards everyday life. Through a similar focus on the ‘everyday’, we seek to enrich our understanding of how youth participation manifests today, by drawing on the rich vein of (post)subcultural theory and the study of everyday youth practices. Specifically, we consider the meaning and role of space in the everyday lives and activism of youth in conflict with social institutions. The article draws on cross-national ethnographic data, from research with stigmatised groups of youth in Croatia, Finland, Spain and Slovakia, collected within the framework of the project. The findings affirm that space is a socially, politically and economically determined category that reflects existing social inequalities and power relations between social groups. At the same time, space is used by the young research participants, often through subcultural practices, for: self-integration; empowerment through the appropriation of public and private space; broadening the spectrum of their capabilities; and active participation aimed at achieving social change.

Female Nationalist Activism in Japan: Truth-Telling Through Everyday Micro-Practices

There is an emerging debate about the role and importance of women in right-wing nationalist movements. Drawing on research that highlights the need to study such women as active and complex political agents, this article examines a phenomenon that has previously received little attention—the activism of female Japanese nationalists. We approach the question of how such activism is practiced by analyzing a group interview with female nationalists, a nationalist manga centering on women’s experiences, and autobiographic books on such activism by and for Japanese women. The article contributes by arguing that female nationalist agency in Japan is a complex phenomenon, which is enacted through everyday micro-practices. It outlines how female nationalist activism draws upon and enhances, as well as challenges and transcends, a traditional Japanese “housewife identity.” As such, the female Japanese nationalist is imagined as having access to certain truths. She takes on the role of “truth-teller,” who is playing a strategic role in “waking people up” to the nationalist cause by voicing anger but also making space for a more “joyful,” “cute,” and inconspicuous everyday activism.

Zombie resistance: Reanimated labour struggles and the legal geographies of authoritarian neoliberalism in Cambodia

AbstractAs neoliberalism lurches through its zombie phase – intellectually dead but dominant – critical scholars chart the global ascendancy of authoritarian variants of neoliberalism. Distinguished, in particular, by the rise of constitutional and legal strategies to contain dissent and entrench exclusion, authors call for attention to the role of law in reproducing and regulating neoliberal policy. Previous research on the intersections of law and neoliberalism tends to emphasise law's role in maintaining rather than subverting hegemony. In this paper, I move away from domination‐oriented accounts to consider the potential for resistance. I argue that renewed dialogue with legal geography and its erstwhile emphasis on contingency can recentre the agonistic dimensions of authoritarian rollout. I draw on evidence collected through a three‐year institutional ethnography of the labour movement in Cambodia, examining the impacts of the 2016 Law on Trade Unions on labour and labour organising in the garment and footwear industry. I show how the law frustrates and criminalises union organisation in an attempt to insulate the state from the growing discontent provoked by Cambodia's uneven neoliberal development. In doing so, however, the law has inadvertently centred the state as the direct target of popular labour struggles no longer contained within disciplining trade union channels. By drawing attention to the complex entanglements of everyday activism and state efforts to contain dissent, the paper highlights the contradictions that manifest in the consolidation of authoritarian neoliberalism. I argue that legal geography helps elucidate how these contradictions are productive of new forms of crisis, where the rollout of zombie neoliberalism spawns recurrent reanimations of zombie resistance.