Forms Of Activism Research Articles

Material Dissonances in the Post-Conflict City: Re-Presencing Social Injustice in Belfast, Northern Ireland

The city of Belfast in Northern Ireland has been made and remade through cycles of violence during its 400-year “history.” The most recent manifestation of violent conflict associated with the city was a low-level civil war euphemistically known as “the Troubles” (ca. 1968–ca. 1998). Alongside the enduring markers of bombings, civil unrest, and attempts to police and disrupt them, presences and absences can also be assigned to forced and facilitated movements of communities, the “planned violence” (O’Neill 2018) of road-building schemes, and what were designated at the time as “slum clearances.” But there have been attempts to disrupt—and reinsert—attempted erasures of conflict when associated with enduring social injustices. This article will examine a site associated with the bombing of McGurk's Bar in 1971 to reveal how the material memory of the past has been “re-presenced” to disrupt attempts to disappear sectarian violence as a form of activism in the contemporary.

Struggle in the Bubble: The National Basketball Association’s Response to Player Activism in the 2020 Bubble

The National Basketball Association (NBA) restarted its 2020 season by playing in a “bubble.” At the same time, a new wave of the “Black Lives Matter” movement was in full swing. Many players joined the movement with their own forms of activism, which the NBA responded to in various ways. This essay explores the NBA’s responses to player activism by using Critical Race Theory’s concept of “Interest Convergence” to analyze the gestures organized by the NBA and highlight the role race, racism, and capitalism played in the NBA’s responses. Overall, this essay argues that in order to capitalize on the popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement, and in the interest of its bottom line, the NBA engaged in three types of responses: compromise, acquiescence, and co-opt/manipulation.

Are we what we eat or what we worship? Food activism and fanaticism in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood

Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy mirrors the author’s commitment in the environmental debate, articulating, through the topos of the apocalypse, future scenarios due to modern-day generational environmental amnesia. This study focuses on the God’s Gardeners, the eco-religious group of The Year of the Flood (2009), the second volume of the trilogy. More specifically, the core of the analysis is the vegetarian philosophy embraced by this activist faction, led by the charismatic figure of Adam One. Within the framework of literary food studies, the analysis begins by examining the implications of various dichotomies encompassing concepts such as cannibalism/anthropophagy versus vegetarianism, binge eating in contrast to fasting, as well as the interplay of waste and stockpiling. Subsequently, the essay aims to build upon prior scholarly investigations into the Gardeners' ethos, which have brought to light contradictions within their philosophy of life. By contextualizing the activism of God's Gardeners within the broader discourse on food justice and sustainability, this analysis seeks to reassess the group's core beliefs and internal inconsistencies. This endeavour involves a partial reconstruction of the viability and practicality inherent in the Gardeners’ form of food activism.

Collaborative songwriting as and for artistic activism

This article explores collaborative songwriting as a form of artistic activism – the creation, performance and/or distribution of art to advance social justice – and demonstrates its potential both in terms of the process of songwriting and the songs that result from it. In doing so, it compares two songwriting workshops facilitated as part of Sex Worker’s Opera (SWO), a grassroots musical theatre project by and for sex workers, drawing on participant observation, archival research and music elicitation interviews. In unpacking the contingent nature of this potential, it evaluates the practical significance of different intentions and material constraints, approaches to fostering ownership and solidarity, and the balance between structure and freedom in facilitating the workshops. Critically, the findings suggest that public engagement, alongside a commitment to community leadership, can help to harness the activist potential of the practice. Looking at how collaborative songwriting can function as and for artistic activism – through creative processes and cultural products – the article emphasizes the opportunity this practice offers for marginalized groups to reclaim cultural space and to challenge norms of silencing in both the cultural and political spheres.

THE NARROW CONFINES OF INSTITUTIONAL ACTIVISM: THE U.S. SUPREME COURT, ABORTION, AND AMICUS CURIAE BRIEFS

Abortion disputes routinely occur in the judicial realm. Before the Supreme Court, from Roe to Dobbs, both reproductive rights and antiabortion movement groups and their allies engaged in institutional activism, filing amicus curiae (or friend-of-the-court) briefs to influence case outcomes. The number of such briefs has increased substantially over time. Yet few movement researchers investigate this form of institutional activism. We examine amicus briefs in over forty abortion cases from 1971 to 2022, discerning which amicus filers and frames influence justice voting, including for the pivotal moderate justices. We situate our work in resource mobilization, professional status, and framing theorizing, concluding that amicus briefs significantly shape judicial outcomes in abortion cases. However, our results show effective amicus strategies confront a narrow set of opportunities for judicial influence. Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court battle over reproductive rights is heavily shaped by justice ideology, with filer and framing approaches—when they are influential—impacting mainly moderate justices.

Studying gender and sexuality in school health education: an exploration of the intersection between the official curriculum and student-led activism

ABSTRACT In response to their experiences of heteronormative and cisnormative cultures in school contexts, some young people undertake various forms of action within their schools with the intention of changing practices, school environments, or school policies. This student-led action can be understood as a form of activism but it may also be seen as the enactment of sexual citizenship. Both activism and sexual citizenship usually sit outside of the formal curriculum in schools. So, what happens when activism and sexual citizenship are recognised in official curriculum policy and are formally studied as part of school programmes in senior high school? In this article, we draw on findings from two ethnographic projects conducted in two different school sites in Aotearoa New Zealand to explore the intersection between official curriculum practices in relationships and sexuality education (RSE) and student-led activism. We wonder what emerges at the intersection of activist approaches and sexual citizenship when these are domesticated by official technologies for curriculum design and assessment.

Eco-sabotage as Defensive Activism

AbstractI argue for the conditions that eco-sabotage (sabotage involving the protection of animals or the environment) must meet to be a morally permissible form of activism in a liberal democracy. I illustrate my case with Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya’s oil pipeline destruction, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s whale hunt sabotage, and the Valve Turners’ pipeline shut-off, climate necessity-defense. My primary contention is that just as it is permissible to destroy an attacker’s weapon in self- or other-defense, it is permissible to engage in some forms of eco-sabotage. Taking inspiration from just war theory, I use the conditions of just cause, reasonable chance of success, proportionality, necessity, and discrimination to both conceptualize eco-sabotage as defense and illustrate the justificatory burden the eco-saboteur must meet. Often eco-sabotage is doubly pro-tanto wrong because it is illegal and involves property destruction. Overcoming these hurdles is particularly difficult because in seemingly bypassing democratic means of dispute resolution, the eco-saboteur seemingly coerces the other members of society by forcing idiosyncratic views upon them. Non-anthropocentric eco-sabotage grounded in defense of animal rights has mixed results regarding the democratic objection just described. I argue that anthropocentric eco-sabotage, grounded in defense of human rights, has the best chance of overcoming this objection, provided a persuasive case can be made for its reasonable chance of success. Passing a reasonable chance of success also causes problems for non-anthropocentric eco-sabotage grounded in species defense, while non-anthropocentric eco-sabotage grounded in defense against animal suffering has a lighter justificatory burden.

Can retail investor activism inhibit corporate greenwashing behavior: Evidence from investor interactive platforms in China

Different from developed markets, China capital market is dominated by retail investors. In the digital age, retail investors are increasingly making their voice heard through online channels, which is a new form of shareholder activism in China. This paper examines the association between retail investor activism (RIA) and corporate greenwashing behavior (CGB) using the data of question raised by investors on official investor interactive platforms (IIPs) in China. We discover that the RIA on IIPs is negatively associated with CGB. The mechanism analysis shows that the RIA helps to curb CGB through promoting information transparency and improving internal corporate governance level. We also find that the association between RIA and CGB is strengthened in regions with weaker green finance and environmental regulation, and in industries with weaker product market competition. This indicates that the RIA, a type of private governance, can serve as a substitute to the governance effect of the government and the product market. Further studies show that RIA on unofficial channels such as stock forums or search engines can promote CGB, contrary to the conclusion about IIPs. Our research suggests that strengthening the rights of retail investors through official channels helps to reduce CGB and demonstrates the importance of official channels in the governance role of RIA in emerging markets.

Rendering the ‘orphaned’ dead palpable

Following the end of the Vietnam–American War in 1975, the commemoration of the fallen soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) remains a difficult issue. The post-war Vietnamese state has marginalised ARVN dead from its national commemorative practices, while it has destroyed or neglected former South Vietnam memorial sites. This article provides an examination of recent efforts by local ARVN former combatants, living relatives of fallen soldiers and young Vietnamese to attend to the upkeep of the former ARVN cemetery in southern Vietnam. Based on participant observation and interviews, I explore how people care for the dead through regular acts of grave maintenance and religious rituals. I show that, through these persistent practices of care, southern Vietnamese engage in a form of memory activism to ensure the continual existence of the cemetery and lay claims to the right to mourn for the marginalised dead.

No Overactivism: Robert Lewandowski’s Use of Gentle Protest to Avoid National Political Backlash

The last few years have seen the return of athlete activism into major international sports events held worldwide as a mindset based on social responsibility and political freedom of speech has spread into the selfperception of many current top athletes. However, while these athletes may have experienced a recent personal transformation, the national political backlash accompanying activism remains set in a long tradition condemning political interference in sports. This article provides a background on the tradition of castigating political athlete activists, a theory on why and how national political backlash occurs, and evidence on the successful use of gentle activism to avoid such scenarios. The research examines a case study of Polish international footballer Robert Lewandowski’s ‘pointing the finger’ during a World Cup qualifier in 2022 to illustrate how alternative moderate forms of activism can be adopted. This study aims to introduce the term ‘overactivism’ into the politics of sport as a concept where the athlete prioritises retaining long-term political relevancy over maximising the political impact of a single event.

Prepping as implicit activism: risk, danger, and post-capitalist imaginaries in prepper literature

ABSTRACT This paper explores the increasingly widespread practice of prepping, and examines how it differs from conventional forms of activism, which generally involve explicit and purposeful efforts to instigate collective social change. Drawing on Luhmann’s sociological theory of risk and the narrative concept of foreshadowing, the paper explores how preppers understand the future and their own responsibility in shaping it, as well as the ways in which their visions of the future show up in the present. The paper argues that while the practice of prepping may appear apolitical and perhaps even asocial at a first glance, its political potential lies in the implicit and largely unintended performative consequences that arise from popularizing and proliferating the idea of a potential alternative to capitalism. Consequently, the paper demonstrates how ‘taking the future seriously’, much like conventional activist movements, albeit within the context of viewing the future as dangerous as opposed to risky, can have performative effects that may ultimately function as a form of ‘implicit activism’. This implicit activism could potentially prove as, if not more, effective in terms of challenging the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism. Considering this, we argue that social movement scholars and activists could benefit from a more profound engagement with the practice of prepping. Empirically, the paper draws on a selection of popular self-help books on prepping.

Travel for women rights: social movements and the construction of travel as activism in social media

ABSTRACT Globalized social movements often require travel, but travel as a symbolic form of transnational activism has only been examined in certain instances. This paper employs the notion of political travel and, through a qualitative content analysis of social media posts during the 2018 pro-choice Irish referendum campaign, it shows how travel can be approached as a form of activism and resistance from a critical feminist angle in the context of a global campaign mediated by social media. Inspired by assemblage theory [De Landa, M. (2016). Assemblage theory. Edinburgh University Press.], our findings show how different elements; people, spaces, objects are assembled to construct the framing and narrative of a social movement that fights for women rights. The individual accounts of travel experiences in social media contributed to the overall ‘aestheticization’ of the social movement. Also, the study offered insights into the meanings that, predominantly female, travellers, assign to their political travel, which are in turn shaped by personal and historical concerns.

Self-Change as Global Change: Spiritual Activism and Its Place in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Legacy

This article looks at Gloria Anzaldúa’s under-explored and posthumously published work Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, which marks important developments for Anzaldúa’s legacy and philosophy, and is a culmination of her thoughts concerning identity, spirituality, aesthetics, ethics, ontology, and metaphysics. This work’s cornerstone concept, “spiritual activism,” provides activists with a radical new means of resistance that attempts to dismantle systemic oppressions that enable separatisms such as racism, sexism, classism, speciesism, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, and even environmental degradation. In envisioning these social and ecological injustices as interconnected and intersectional phenomena, spiritual activism amalgamates spiritual technologies with political forms of activism. Spiritual activism views self-change as a means of global change in and of itself, making this connection more robust, visible, and explicit for Anzaldúa’s readership. It formulates a new metaphysics of interconnectedness with others, animals, and the earth itself in new ontological matrices that disrupt the cultural hegemony of Eurocentric, Anglocentric, and western cultures. Anzaldúa’s last work develops new forms of resistance via the critical and constant (re)shaping of our identity formations and ontological categories to make positive social change and global justice its highest priority.

Family members at the epicentre of policy discourses

The articles in this thematic issue of Sociolinguistic Studies, ‘Family as a language policy regime: Agency, negotiation and local practices’, are concerned with the impact of family (language policy) among the minority population, whether indigenous or otherwise, on the sociolinguistic makeup of the contemporary policy regimes worldwide. Although family language policy is already a well-established domain of inquiry, this issue points to the wide range of cases from around the world, including Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, Iran, Lithuania, Northern Ireland, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe, to understand how (individual) pathways are formed and choices made in favour of language and cultural maintenance. While covering a wide range of factors and perspectives that contribute to our understanding of families’ linguistic behaviour and the broader social implications of the discipline, these papers emphasise the complex relationships between language, culture, politics, and socioeconomic factors in today’s global multilingual and multicultural mosaic. This edition further underlines a number of present-day requirements in the field, such as being able to examine children’s or extended family members’ agency, use of digital technologies for language maintenance, different forms of parental language planning and activism to mention a few. The collection has emerged in the wake of a symposium ‘Family as a language policy regime: Agency, practices and negotiation’ at the 20th AILA World Congress (19–20 July, 2023, Lyon, France) and a closed call for papers.

Troublemakers: Young people as unruly activists in an anti-trans US school context

This piece of comics-based research (CBR) tells the story of young people’s activism and adult lassitude in progressive US communities where the transgender and nonbinary youth had seemed well supported, but were in fact targeted by school staff at two middle-grade schools. While there ensued various forms of protest and activism, adults encouraged children to engage in adult-curated, docile forms, such as making chalk art on the sidewalk in front of the middle school, or writing letters to administration. Many young people refused these forms and instead used “unruly” forms of activism. These included defacing school spaces and other means of disrupting institutional functioning. They saw adult-curated docile activism as a frustratingly inert treatment. Even in such a clear situation, many adults seemed still more uncomfortable with unruly activism, cast as “troublemaking” than with adult transgressions, and refused to see the children as anything other than improper. This comic describes children’s unruly activism in the context of adult violence and adult-curated docile activism as a form of control—and reflects on adult discomfort as a fulcrum of complex power. Reflections on reframing all child “misbehavior” as radical action conclude the comic narrative.

(Im)possibility of ethical encounters in places of separation: aesthetics as a quiet applied linguistics praxis

Abstract What is the possibility of ethical encounters in places that are historically, spatially, and morally configured to avoid them? And what can applied linguistics do to create such a possibility? This study is located in a rural community in eastern Slovakia with a history of separation between Slovak and Roma ethnic groups and the systemic spatial, economic and linguistic marginalisation of the latter. This paper draws on relational ethics to foreground the perceiving subject’s ethical responsibility. I take up the scholarship on semiotic repertoires and exploit their performative power to affect the perceiving subject. Advocating for aesthetics as an applied linguistics research praxis, this article both documents and invites a sensory entanglement with others through a series of aesthetic invitations. I see such an embodied engagement as a way for applied linguistics to stage the ground for ethical encounters, even if never guarantee an outcome. I discuss what this research pathway might mean for doing applied linguistics research in social and educational settings with entrenched narratives about the other and how quiet applied linguistics – one which privileges sensory attending and epistemological indeterminacy – might be a form of activism that disturbs the realm of the impossible.

Remembering through #LetUsTalk: an affective archive narrating Iranian women´s everyday trauma and resistance habits

ABSTRACT This article explores the intersection of hashtag activism, remembering practices, and the diaspora by focusing on the #LetUsTalk hashtag. Employing feminist memory studies, it examines the evocation of objects, occasions, and experiences associated with the hashtag, particularly focusing on diasporic Iranian women´s memories of compulsory hijab and how these memories are embodied and remembered. This article argues that #LetUsTalk is a form of hashtag memory activism enabling diasporic Iranian women to shape an archive of affect. Within this archive, a diverse range of affective responses, bodily reactions, and resistance habits emerge as participants recall forgotten, mundane, and unwanted memories. Through conducting memory work, it sheds light on the capacity of hashtag memory activism to create a space for collective remembrance. In this type of collective remembering, non-participants add their voices to hashtag contributors to unveil hidden struggles of everyday life in connection with mundane memory objects, leading to the generation of new political and transformative actions even if they perform in a minor key.

Political participation among deaf youth in Great Britain.

Variations in political participation are linked to demographic factors, socioeconomic disparities, and cultural-ethnic diversity. Existing research has primarily explored reduced political involvement among individuals with disabilities, particularly in electoral politics. However, little research has attended the involvement of deaf people specifically. This is of interest because deaf youth are at an intersection of disability, language and cultural identity with their language affiliations and rejection or acceptance of disability evolving through childhood. This study draws from original data collected via an online survey, comprising 163 deaf young respondents aged 16-19 in Great Britain. We compare their levels of political participation with those of general population peers to explore how sociodemographic factors, alongside variations in self-identification as deaf, and meaningful interactions with other deaf people contribute to explain their political engagement. The results challenge conventional wisdom by demonstrating that deaf youth participate more actively in politics than their hearing peers in various forms of political involvement, including collective, contact, and institutional activism. We also recognize differences among deaf youth and propose that social aspects of identity formation, particularly embracing a deaf identity and having deaf friends, can boost certain forms of political engagement. In summary, this study underscores the importance of acknowledging the diversity of deaf youth in terms of affiliation with various forms of deaf identity, rendering their experience different from both disabled and hearing youth. By identifying the factors driving heightened political participation, policymakers and advocates can develop strategies to enhance political engagement among all young people, regardless of their hearing status.

Collaborative investor engagement with policymakers: changing the rules of the game?

Purpose Applying universal ownership theory and drawing on a multiplecase study design, this study aims to analyze what drives institutional investors to engage with government entities and what challenges they find in the process. Design/methodology/approach The authors relied on document analysis and conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with representatives from asset owners, asset managers, investor associations and academia. Findings The authors identify a trend where investors conduct policy engagement to fulfill their fiduciary duty, improve investment risk management and create an enabling environment for sustainable investments. As for engagement challenges, investors report the longer-term horizon, a perceived limited influence toward governments, the need for capacity building for investors and governments, as well as the difficulty in accessing government representatives. Originality/value This research contributes to filling a gap in the literature on this new form of investor activism, as a growing number of investors engage with sovereign entities on environmental, social and governance issues.

A brief stop on the design research journey

This editorial introduces Issue 10.1 which includes contributions on our understanding of designed artefacts and interactions, the possibilities of designed artefacts as forms of activism, the challenges of new recruits assimilating into design firms and an exploration of intersectional feminist thinking in design. Acknowledging the collective efforts of editorial teams, reviewers and authors from previous issues, the Editorial introduces the new editorial team and lays out ideas towards future issues.