Everyday Activism Research Articles

Emergency: A Vernacular Contextual Approach

Abstract Security scholars have traditionally viewed emergency as a state of exception that triggers a struggle for survival, justifying the breaking of rules and excesses of state power. While there have been attempts to decouple security from its survivalist logic, emergency has remained an analytical blind spot in security studies. The dominance of an elite-centric, exceptionalist paradigm in the study of emergency has foreclosed the possibility of alternative conceptions of emergency and neglected the voices of structurally disempowered agents. This paper advances a vernacular contextual research agenda that is sensitive to the empirical diversity of emergency meanings and practices while foregrounding emergency claims made by non-elite actors. Challenging the idea of emergency as a form of “anti-politics,” the paper contends that emergency should be understood as an intrinsic part of politics. It then recovers an alternative, “emancipatory” conception of emergency as an extraordinary moment of spontaneous beginnings that can activate the collective agency of marginalized actors. The final section establishes conceptual foundations for actor-centered, grounded empirical research into emergency politics and suggests avenues for future research. Contextualizing emergency and attuning to the voices and experiences of everyday actors are crucial to remove the key variable that ties security to the logic of survival and exception.

Youth’s everyday environmental citizenship: An analytical framework for studying interpretive agency

When youth agency and climate change are understood in the context of Politics, they do not reflect young people’s everyday realities and their youthful engagement with climate change. Building on the performative understanding of citizenship, in this theoretical piece, I suggest a broader framing of youthful political agency and participation in the context of climate change and consumerism by referring to four basic lived political positionings: ‘victim’, ‘voter’, ‘rejecter’ and ‘interpreter’. I further argue that young people perform their interpretive agency by adopting everyday activism and green lifestyles while challenging adult-led conceptualisations of environmental ideologies.

Everyday Activism: Gender-Based Service in Stem

There has been and continues to be a substantial amount of work done to encourage, support, and retain women in mathematics. However, very little has been written about the faculty leading these gender-based initiatives, most of whom are women. This dynamic—women advocating on behalf of other women—is connected to identity-based activist movements. In the following, I describe how I have started to see gender-based work in STEM as a form of institutional activism. I then describe how this change of conceptualization led me to rethink the landscape of gender-based work in STEM. I reflect on literature from institutional activism and describe how that literature has changed my own engagement in gender-based service. My goal in this article is to provide math practitioners with some ideas for reflecting on their own actions in contesting historical forms of sexism. As we begin to understand the rules, norms, and cultures that constrain us, we will be better equipped to strategically contest them and create the sorts of institutional change that we want to see. I conclude the article with a series of questions to challenge all of us to think strategically about the future of our work supporting women in STEM.

“I Take the Pictures as I See Them”: Doris Derby as Womanist, Activist and Photographer in the Civil Rights Movement

Doris Derby's photographic archive offers a powerful perspective on the civil rights movement that has yet to be critically or academically engaged with. Derby, an activist, photographer, and educator who has appeared in such texts as Hands on the Freedom Plow (2010) and in such collections as Julian Cox's Road to Freedom (2008), is a gateway figure to a richer, more nuanced visual history of the movement. This article utilizes original interviews, archival material, and a survey of secondary literature to call for increased consideration for Doris Derby's work. Derby's womanist perspective challenges the dominant visual rhetoric of the movement and advocates for increased consideration of the everyday activism of African American women. Men, women and children – but especially African American women – are presented in Derby's lens as dynamic agents of change. Derby's work challenges the dominant canon of the movement, which frequently relies on charismatic male leadership and black victimization. Instead, considering Derby's photography broadens our understanding of what everyday resistance in the civil rights movement was like for thousands of African Americans.

Meaningful Engagement from the Bottom-Up? Taking Stock of Participation in Transitional Justice Processes

ABSTRACT This article surveys the literature on participation in transitional justice (TJ) focusing primarily on victims and bottom-up actors. We argue that often the preoccupation in TJ has been with greater rather than more meaningful participation, and that there needs to be a concerted effort to focus on everyday actors, including their voices, needs and priorities. Consideration also needs to be given as to whether meaningful participation can occur without genuine obligation and commitment to heeding participants’ input, and greater consideration is required to measure and build an evidence-base regarding participatory TJ efforts and their outcomes. We advocate for further discussion in theory and in practice about how participation in TJ can be reimagined toward actor oriented, bottom-up led processes that lead to meaningful outcomes. We suggest that TJ specific participation considerations are required and refer to existing theoretical considerations and models from other disciplines and sectors as helpful departure points.

Rural multiculturalism? Migrants, antiracism, and convivial cultures in provincial Sweden

ABSTRACT Migrant solidarity movements are significant political manifestations that stretch beyond Europe's urban centres. Yet, their wider antiracist potential requires further examination. Starting with ethnographic insights in community activist groups that aim to create “welcoming” places outside the larger cities of Sweden, this article argues that conceptualizations of convivial cultures help to bridge perspectives on multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and antiracism. Community activists across racialized categories of natives and migrants aim to redefine their small towns towards greater local solidarity. They introduce multiculturalist ideals and recalibrate notions of race through everyday activism, while they also reproduce, or fail to address, dominant racism in domains of gender equality and neoliberal integration regimes. A focus on convivial cultures, which contrast to melancholic cultures where the past of the nation is represented as always more solidaric than that of the (migrant) present, contributes to a scholarship of hope for underexplored antiracism in rural regions.

Feminist and Antifeminist Everyday Activism: Tactical Choices, Emotions, and ‘Humor’

Feminist and Antifeminist Everyday Activism: Tactical Choices, Emotions, and ‘Humor’

What was the original intent? The Tea Party movement, the Founding Fathers, and the American welfare state

ABSTRACT Many scholars have cautioned against over-emphasizing the role of culture and values in the unique structure of the American welfare state. In this article, I argue that the Tea Party movement is an exceptional example of how values attributed to the founding of the American nation are used as a cultural schema to legitimize arguments and to mobilize political actors to constrain the perception of available welfare policy options. Using the Wayback Machine, I have built a bespoke archive of rhetoric from Tea Party chapter websites in 2009 to 2011, outlining the values the Tea Party attributes to the Founding Fathers. I provide a more nuanced history of the Founding Era in order to expose the selective scope of Tea Party history, exaggerating certain ideas while neglecting others. Adapting a pragmatic historiographical method, I argue that this historical narrative illuminates the less socially desirable motivations of both the elite and everyday actors in the Tea Party: free market ideology and latent racial animus. As such, I conclude that cultural values ought to remain an important area of research, particularly identifying how modern political actors co-opt history and national identity to legitimize partisan ideological claims, particularly in the arena of welfare policy.

Review: Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia, by Pascal Menoret

Review: Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia, by Pascal Menoret

"People Show Up In Different Ways": DACA Recipients' Everyday Activism in a Time of Heightened Immigration-Related Insecurity.

Undocumented young adults have emerged as a coherent political group, forging a large-scale social movement and helping push forward 19 state-level tuition equity laws and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012. Yet DACA recipients' status became endangered when President Trump rescinded DACA in September 2017, necessitating even more innovative strategies for contesting their exclusion. Drawing from research conducted in Maryland since 2016, I chronicle DACA recipients' trajectories of political engagement. Though some have participated consistently in public forms of collective action, many never have or have declined in participation due to political apathy, the intense need to protect their identities, and very-real fears about being exposed or deported. Yet these young adults have cultivated complementary forms of everyday activism, operating outside traditional modalities and spaces of political engagement through acts of resistance carried out in everyday life. I contend that against the backdrop of the repressive state in the Trump era, the everyday activism of DACA recipients complements more normative and overt forms of collective action. Everyday activism raises interesting questions about the nature of activism itself, including the extent to which it must be collective, organized, and public, and its place in social justice movements more broadly.

‘Small steps and small wins’ in young people’s everyday climate crisis activism

ABSTRACT This Viewpoint is primarily a personal account of 16-year-old Daniel’s experiences of his everyday climate crisis activisms. The article demonstrates Daniel’s disquiet with how things stand, and how this translates into everyday climate crisis activism and relational dilemmas that need to be carefully navigated. Guided by his ‘inner climate compass’, Daniel finds small and controllable ways to influence family, friends and his broader community, and it’s through small steps and small wins he exerts influence and develops the capacity to cope with relational dilemmas that may arise from diverging views and responses, and recognition of the boundaries of his agency.

What difference does it make? Exploring the transformative potential of everyday climate crisis activism by children and youth

ABSTRACT Given the enormity of the climate crisis, the transformative potential of ‘everyday’ activism is often questioned. In this theoretical discussion, I explore the real-world significance of everyday activism by children and youth. First, I emphasize the need for top-down policy change as well as bottom-up cultural shifts. Next, I describe the significance of young people’s everyday activism through the lens of countercultures, while highlighting agency-limiting practices common in present-day formal educational settings. Lastly, I call for participatory and arts-based approaches in facilitating youths’ everyday climate crisis activism, noting its potential micro-level benefits and its relationship to macro-level social change.

Acts of Volunteering for Refugees: Local Responses to Global Challenges

This article explores volunteering in grassroots networks that formed to support refugees arriving to Europe, in the context of a socio-political landscape marked by disunity in 2015. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Berlin and Copenhagen in 2017, the article analyses grassroots volunteering as local responses to global challenges. The analysis draws theoretical inspiration from a performative approach and concentrates on everyday activities in the networks, with a focus on the motivations and rationales of the volunteers. Building on dynamic understandings of citizenship and borders as proposed by Engin Isin and Chris Rumford, this article discusses the volunteer activities as acts of volunteering that negotiate who belongs in a given society and thus rearrange the notion of citizenship. In this context, this article argues that grassroots networks function as platforms for testing out forms of everyday activism in the specific socio-political context.

Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde

Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde

The Role of Bedouin Youth and Women in Resistance to the Israeli Prawer Plans in the Naqab

Naqab Bedouin resistance and political activism against the Israeli Prawer plans attracted attention in many local and international contexts and became a symbol of sumud [steadfastness] among Palestinians in Israel. In fact, the Bedouin, led at this time by motivated youth and women activists, showed greater creative, tactical and strategic agency and skills than politicians and scholars acknowledged in the past, and they actively contributed to shaping aspects of their own destiny within the state structure. We argue that creative, nonviolent, everyday and political resistance and activism, led by the young Bedouin [al-hirak al-shababi], succeeded in modifying and mitigating the Israeli Prawer Plan policies and strategies to relocate and expel the Bedouin from their historical villages. This study draws on a number of in-depth interviews in the Naqab with male and female youth, activists, and politicians. Specifically, it shows how Bedouin women and youth were key actors in resisting the Prawer Plan using social media tactics, which later led to Israeli withdrawal and freezing of the plan in 2013. The evolution of Bedouin resistance and the prevailing misrepresentation of the Bedouin is identified and tested through the case study of the anti-Prawer campaign and the Naqab Bedouin villagers’ on-going resistance to being forcibly relocated from their historical land in the Naqab.

Reflections on social work 2020 under Covid-19 online magazine

ABSTRACT Social Work 2020 under Covid-19 was a free online magazine conceived just before the UK’s Covid-19 full lockdown began, in late March 2020. It ran for five editions until 14 July 2020. In this time it published close to 100 articles from academics, people with lived experience, practitioners and students. It contained a far higher proportion of submissions from the last three groups of contributors than traditional journals. This article draws on the six-person editorial collective’s reflections on the magazine: it considers its founding purposes; its role in fostering social work community, utilizing an adaptation of social capital classifications; and its potential as a learning tool. It concludes by arguing that the magazine illustrates the potential for free online publications to be an important emergent vehicle for ‘everyday activism’ within the field of social work.

Dangerous Arms and Everyday Activism: A Dialogue Between Two Researchers with Lived Experience of Self-Harm

Using the format of dialogue, this paper is a collaborative exploration of navigating academia in self-harm scarred bodies. Prompted by the proposal of social media regulators to blur and ban self-harm scars, thus communicating such bodies as “dangerous,” our dialogue considers personal notions of activism, researcher identity, emotional labor, future potential, and the importance of finding and building communities for embodied solidarity. Structured as a single flowing discussion, the dialogue itself is (re)constituted from conversation, follow-up emails, and reviewer feedback. Explorations rely predominantly on personal experience and are supported in places by literature which has informed and shaped our ideas. In itself, this paper will be an “everyday act of defiance” in being seen, as well as advocating for spaces such as ECQI where meaningful connections can be instigated and maintained, and dialogues continued.

Everyday Activism and Resistance By Minority Women in Denmark

Abstract STEREOTYPES OF MINORITY WOMEN, AND IN PARTICULAR MUSLIM WOMEN, ARE BEING USED TO PUSH CERTAIN GROUPS TO THE MARGINS OF DANISH SOCIETY, BOTH DISCURSIVELY AND GEOGRAPHICALLY. FOCUSING ON TWO CASE STUDIES WORKING IN THE SOCIAL PERIPHERY, ANDROMEDA, 8220 AND KVINDER I DIALOG, THIS ARTICLE ILLUMINATES HOW THE SAME STEREOTYPES ARE USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF COUNTERNARRATIVES THAT RESIST STIGMA AND DIVISIVE POLICIES. DESPITE THE MEDIA ATTENTION THAT THE NEW LAWS IN DENMARK SUCH AS “GHETTO” REFORMS AND MASKING BAN HAVE RECEIVED, LESS ATTENTION HAS BEEN PAID TO EXAMPLES OF RESISTANCE AND THE FIGHT FOR POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY. BY FURTHER DEVELOPING AND EMPLOYING POSTCOLONIAL AND FEMINIST THEORY IN A DANISH CONTEXT, THIS ARTICLE ADDRESSES THIS GAP AND EMBARKS ON AN ANALYSIS OF MINORITY WOMEN’S CULTURAL ACTIVISM AGAINST HOMOGENIZATION.

Things Are the Way They Are: A Typology of Reification

This project clarifies the notoriously ambiguous concept of reification through analytical descriptions of reificatory modes of experience in social context. The experience of social constructions as fixed and unchangeable (“subjective reification”) is manifest in four interrelated experiential modes: (1) doxa, taking the social world for granted; (2) identification, experiencing abstractions as realer than particular objects; (3) enframing, the experience of means (technology and economic production) as ends and ends (humanity and life) as means; and (4) detachment, experience after suspending genuine emotional engagement. Each experiential mode is rooted in historically contingent yet objective social conditions (“objective reification”) and, thus, has a degree of validity – hence the power of reification, in comparison to legitimation, in social reproduction. Methodologically, the difficult path remains theorizing society as a totality without losing sight of its human formation with due attention to the everyday actors who reproduce and, every so often, challenge this totality.

Escola Polivalente de Osório-RS: Políticas Educacionais e Trabalho a partir da História Oral

Este estudo refere-se à Escola Maria Teresa Vilanova Castilhos - Escola Polivalente, de Osório, Rio Grande do Sul, cuja fundação ocorreu em 1974, no bojo dos acordos MEC-USAID. Quanto à metodologia, o presente estudo desenvolve-se a partir da História Oral, tendo-se realizado quatro entrevistas, com docentes que atuaram na referida instituição. O objetivo do presente estudo é analisar como as políticas públicas em educação influenciavam nas práticas que se desenvolviam no âmbito escolar, bem como da forma como compreendiam a formação técnica em nível de 1.º grau e sua relação com as disciplinas da base comum. Este estudo viabiliza perceber como os atores cotidianos refletem e ressignificam na esfera escolar as concepções de ensino integrado e de formação humana integral.