Quiet Activism Research Articles

Unveiling quiet activism: Urban community gardens as agents of food sovereignty

AbstractUrban community gardening is emerging as a form of quiet activism challenging the corporate food system. In urban community gardening, quiet activism subtly challenges the dominant corporate food system. However, research tends to overlook its presence and impact in global South cities, where issues of food insecurity and corporatisation are acute. There is a gap in research on urban community gardening activism, with a focus mainly on global North cities. Global South cities and populations face unique challenges in the corporate food system that require attention and exploration in scholarly literature. We draw on qualitative research conducted with urban community gardeners in Cape Town, South Africa. Through interviews and observations, the study investigates how these gardeners engage in quiet activism to challenge the corporate food system. We find that community gardens are subtle but potent platforms for bolstering local food movements and fostering healthier dietary practices by cultivating and sharing produce. Quiet activism through community gardening offers a nuanced approach to challenging the corporate food system. The study highlights the need to recognise and understand varying levels of activism intensity and their implications for reshaping urban food systems. We underscore the need to discern the distinct embodiments necessitated by different modes of activism. Understanding these different modes of activism is crucial for comprehending their varying impacts on challenging and reshaping the corporate food system. This nuanced approach reveals the transformative potential inherent in community gardening practices. Community gardening in Cape Town exemplifies the transformative potential of understated acts in food activism.

Tapping on Collective National Trauma

Tapping on Collective National Trauma

Jack Johnson’s quiet activism

ABSTRACT Singer-songwriter Jack Johnson is known for his laid back, inoffensive and seemingly uncontroversial music; however (perhaps paradoxically), he is also known for his environmental activism and accountability measures, measures that may seem at odds with his relaxed personality and musical output. In the 2016 short documentary film The Smog of the Sea, Johnson partakes as a citizen scientist in an expedition to the Sargasso Sea. Here he comes to the realization that the ocean is no longer this pristine wilderness; instead, the effects of human action (in the form of plastic) can be seen everywhere. In this short film, we see the coming together of Johnson’s laid-back aesthetic with a keen and urgent message to effect positive environmental change, amounting to what some commentators have referred to as a kind of ‘quiet activism.’ In this paper we critically explore the role and value of quiet activism in contradistinction to other modes typically associated with ecomedia, especially the trope of the apocalypse. We argue that the hope associated with such quiet activism may be an effective approach to environmental politics in the epoch of the anthropocene.

Stitchers of Instagram

Stitchers of Instagram

Egyptian queer women’s quiet activism within repressive contexts in the Middle East

ABSTRACT This study highlights an unconventional form of LGBTQIA activism within restrictive contexts in the Middle East. Building on the triangulation of data findings obtained from activists’ social media accounts from 2014 until 2022, this study argues that Egyptian queer women mobilized quiet activism as a safe form of individual engagement within a repressive and anti-queer context fuelled by social disdain. Tracking women’s individual life stories, this study revealed an unfamiliar strategy of action that has been overlooked by scholarship addressing the LGBTQIA advocacy as a collective action in the Middle East. While scholars have entrenched the LGBTQIA advocacy within a logic of collective activism and organized cyber/groundwork, this study underlined quiet activism as a coping mechanism with state repression in order to contest the state persecution of queer citizens and violation of individual rights and freedom. Being at the intersection of individual engagement, transformative events and personal emotions, quiet activism is an adaptive form of entanglement with repressive contexts through non-confrontational and unchallenging tools of action, such as personal encounters and emotions.

Reconceptualising coproduction as activism together

AbstractThe COVID‐19 pandemic disrupted life across the world in multiple ways and those already minoritised and disenfranchised, like care‐experienced young people, bore the brunt of losses and mental health difficulties. This article reports on the findings of ‘Feeling Well, Feeling Cared For’ an innovative knowledge exchange project on care experience and mental health in Scotland that was seriously disrupted by the pandemic. The article explores how these disruptions created new opportunities for deepening and slowing down coproductive practices, allowing relationships between collaborators to become stronger. Three finding areas are presented and discussed through the lenses of coproduction and quiet activism. These include lessons developed through the process of carrying out this project during a pandemic, the findings from our discussions with young people about mental health, and our reflections on the meanings of activism in the context of a coproductive knowledge exchange process. The discussion highlights how learning from this project might benefit coproductive practices in the future, especially as global interest in coproduction continues to grow across a range of disciplines.

Yarn over Police Brutality: Race and the Occupation of Rochester City Hall’s Steps during the Daniel Prude Protest

This reflection describes what happened when 40 women, predominantly white and from suburban and rural areas of residence, gathered on the Rochester City Hall steps in September 2020, in New York State, following the Rochester Police Department killing of Daniel Prude, a Black man having a mental-health episode in March 2020. The white yarn activists engaged in quiet craft activism, allied with the local Black Lives Matter activists, to hold space on City Hall steps so the BLM activists could engage in self-care during the day in advance of nightly protests that also encountered police brutality. The concept of “textile togethereness” posits that all forms of activism can work together to heighten the fight for social justice, even complicated by racial and geographic demographics.

Plant-based food politics: veganism, quiet activism and small businesses in Sydney’s foodscapes

ABSTRACT Veganism is becoming more popular as the social, environmental, and ethical impacts of animal agriculture become better known. This is creating new opportunities and challenges as an array of economic actors seek to profit from and contribute to the movement. In this paper, we analyse how small plant-based food businesses are engaging with and influencing vegan politics through a case study of Sydney, Australia. Through interviews and an online audit, we analyse the motivations, goals and practices of small businesses; their geographies, inclusions and exclusions; and the benefits and tensions that arise from the merging of business with politics. We find evidence that small businesses are actively and creatively engaged in quiet, collaborative, affirmative and visceral forms of activism that prefigure the skills, ingredients, tastes and knowledge required to transition away from animal agriculture. However, we also find that plant-based businesses avoid the term vegan, are becoming whiter, and are producing more masculine and expensive foods, such as meat analogues, in response to market pressures. We conclude that small businesses are important but overlooked actors within vegan politics that are contributing to race, gender and class biases, and should be engaged with in the pursuit of less exploitative food systems.

Reimagining African womanhood in an unjust world order: exploring the writings of Ghanaian women’s rights advocates, 1970s–1980s

AbstractThis article provides the first systematic exploration of the ideas on inequality of the two Ghanaian women’s rights advocates Annie Jiagge and Florence Dolphyne, who were both part of the Ghanaian National Council on Women and Development during the 1970s and 1980s. Zooming in on their work and writings during this time, I challenge the view offered by some scholars that these decades were ‘apolitical’ and shaped by ‘quiet activism’ with regard to the Ghanaian women’s front. I show how Jiagge and Dolphyne actively rearticulated womanhood in postcolonial Ghanaian and African societies, placing women’s ‘issues’ and rights within the framework of an unequal world order. In doing so, I argue that they vernacularized the contemporary global discourse on women’s rights, shaped by the UN Decade for Women (1976–85), in a Ghanaian context, evoking what postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha has called an in-between ‘third space’ through which the many intersecting and ambivalent aspects affecting the lives of women in postcolonial Africa, and the so-called Third World at large, could be articulated.

Podcasting as a feminist space for the disclosure of trauma and intimate embodied experience: The Heart as a case study of quiet activism

The ‘#MeToo’ movement established the disclosure of sexual violence via social media as mainstream and offered participants space to share experiences, receive support and create a sense of community. As a response, we explore the use of podcasting as a conduit to describe embodied experiences and how non-visual media can provide a safe environment to reveal deeply personal experiences. We use the podcast The Heart (mini-series No) as a case study to highlight patriarchal power and sexual violence myths. The result is profoundly discomforting but also emancipatory – talking about sexual violence can constitute a revolutionary act given the stigma and victim blaming prevalent in western society. The Heart makes private, intimate experiences public and centres female perspectives, highlighting disparate, gendered perceptions. As ‘#MeToo’ underscored the universality of women’s experiences of male harassment, we argue that The Heart is an example of ‘quiet activism’ and public scholarship that challenges patriarchal assumptions.

Black Ecological Vibrations

Black Ecological Vibrations

Introduction

Introduction

Urban Space and Everyday Adaptations

This paper addresses Jem Bendell’s concept of “deep adaptation” in the Anthropocene through the lens of everyday urban practices in contemporary Northern Europe. It proposes that this “deep adaptation” should be defined less in relation to a socio-ecological “collapse” and more through everyday occurrences in presentday urban environments.
 Entering into a critical conversation with Bendell’s conceptual “4 Rs” framework, the paper draws on primary data from several cities in Sweden and Germany to show how, in practice, resilience can be found in the “quiet activism” of leisure gardeners; how ingrained notions of restricted land use may be relinquished through “commoning” urban space; how novel constellations of co-living restores old ideas of intragenerational urban cohabitation; and, finally, how a path to reconciliation may be articulated through an ontological shift away from an anthropocentric urban planning, towards one that recognises other-thanhuman beings as legitimate dwellers in the urban landscape.
 Accounting for urbanities of enmeshed societal, ecological, and spatial trajectories, the paper reveals an inhibiting anthropocentrism in Bendell’s framework and ultimately points to how his “creatively constructed hope” for the future may be found, not in an impending global collapse, but in everyday adaptations and embodied acts that stretch far beyond the human.

Shapeshifting and Boundary Crossings of Socially Engaged Art

Socially engaged art practices are understood to borrow from and overlap with several disciplinary territories, crossing over into contexts that, in the process of engaging in civic work and everyday actions, obscure their identity as art and aesthetic practices. The article examines the complications that result from co-existing in various ontological sets of properties, through the presentation of a socially engaged project rooted simultaneously in art, social work, education, and ethnography, and where the author acts and performs as an artist, scholar, and facilitator. Participants in the project embody multiple identities which are dependent on changing perspectives and conditions. Arguing for a relevant ethical orientation to research adapted to the transdisciplinary positions of such community-based projects, the inquiry further interrogates the wrangle between the expectations that symbolic capital is typically accrued to artists engaged in these practices and the inconspicuous agency of quiet activism that offers potent alternative forms of resistance.

Anti-racist mobilization in France: between quiet activism and awareness raising

ABSTRACT Drawing on observation and interviews conducted in community centres in three deprived neighbourhoods in France, this article examines the conditions required for making a commitment to anti-discrimination activism. In theory, the experience of racial discrimination provides reasons for action. However, mobilization against racism is by no means the norm. This qualitative study shows that forms of resistance that value horizontal, inclusive relationships and quiet activism, encourage people to make a commitment despite their reluctance to do so. These collectives are also meeting places that allow people to politicize their personal experiences and raise awareness on racial stigmatization and discrimination.

Activism to make and do: The (quiet) politics of textile community groups

Based on qualitative interviews conducted with local guilds, charities and community groups in England, this article highlights the public service older women provide for their communities by volunteering their labour to local textile craft groups. Driven by an ethics of care, they make up for a lack of services formerly provided by the welfare state, such as public transport and mental health support. We mobilise existing literature on ‘quiet activism’ to argue that their community work constitutes a form of political activism, albeit one that stops short of overtly challenging the political system. While highlighting the ways in which older women quietly go about helping their communities, we argue that by being ‘louder’ about the public service they provide, they could help disrupt the narrative of a system that has failed their communities and exploits their free labour.

Schoolgirl Embroideries and Black Girlhood in Antebellum Philadelphia

Embroideries stitched by girls at schools for Black children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are rare finds. The few embroideries likely stitched by Black schoolgirls that do survive often offer historical evidence in the stitched names of their makers and the schools they attended. Yet there is little scholarship on these embroideries or the education these schoolgirls were pursuing while creating their samplers. Examined with methodologies that use material culture as primary evidence, these embroideries can provide valuable clues about the lives of Black girls in northern cities during the antebellum period. This paper examines the materiality, textual content, and design aesthetics of these needlework pieces, as well as the context in which they were stitched. Previous scholars have automatically attributed the girls’ needlework skills to their European schools or influences. My work considers the needlework skills likely taught to the girls by their family and kinfolk. Moving outside of the home, I examine school and organizational records to understand the motivation and methodology for teaching children of color in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania after the Revolutionary War. These embroideries reveal young girls who were learning and being taught how to be young Black girls, and all that entails in terms of the performance of domesticity and republicanism. The quiet activism revealed in their embroideries continued with the formation of their families and the support they gave their communities. “Reading” needlework offers invaluable insight into the early history of Black children’s formal education before Emancipation and illuminates the formation of Black American girlhood identities in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States. On a larger scale, these embroideries represent another form of Black American cultural production to add to the long list of contributions people of the African diaspora have made to the Americas.

A Small Door Set in Concrete: One Woman's Story of Challenging Borders in Israel/Palestine by Ilana Hammerman

Reviewed by: A Small Door Set in Concrete: One Woman's Story of Challenging Borders in Israel/Palestine by Ilana Hammerman Lina Tuschling Hammerman, Ilana. A Small Door Set in Concrete: One Woman's Story of Challenging Borders in Israel/Palestine. Translated by Tal Haran. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. A Small Door Set in Concrete is an intense reminder that although borders may separate people, they need not define them. In her newest book, Israeli writer, translator, and activist Ilana Hammerman gives us a glimpse into her [End Page 433] decades-long activism in the Palestinian Territories. After two losses in her personal life and a period of deep reflection, Hammerman starts traveling to the Palestinian Territories to learn about "the other side," where she generously invests time, effort, and money to aid those living under Israeli military rule. Voices of ordinary people affected by conflicts are often missing from academic scholarship and public discourse; this book tries to change that by giving voice to some ordinary Palestinians trying to make a living, get an education, or raise a family. A forceful counter-narrative to one-dimensional portrayals of both parties to the conflict, Hammerman's book effectively draws on her own experiences while putting the struggles of the Palestinians she encounters at the center of her stories. The book's division into two parts—"The West Bank" and "The Gaza Strip—makes intuitive sense. Throughout the book, we learn how Hammerman meets many Palestinians and how their life stories are intertwined, sometimes for years, at other times just for an hour or two. The book is a series of literary portraits stretching across almost three decades of the author's trips to the Palestinian Territories showcasing her quiet but persistent activism. Her actions are characterized by helping others accomplish seemingly normal things: seeing the sea for the first time; replacing a pair of glasses that broke; finding work for a few days; exploring a nearby city. Yet to accomplish these and other goals, Hammerman has to be resourceful and in some instances break the law, as when she smuggled the father of a family in her trunk to Jerusalem to give him employment for a few days. Or when she takes four Palestinian children into Israel so that they can visit the zoo for the first time in their lives. While her actions are marked by solidarity and compassion, they are acts of civil disobedience and show a fierce commitment to defying stereotypes and enemy narratives. Hammerman's accounts excel at showcasing a mosaic of individual fates that are individually and collectively representative of a whole yet fractured people living under military occupation. She also shows the "other" as regular individuals with hopes, dreams, and everyday struggles, and in doing so she attempts to combat the narrative of "enemy" on both sides of the conflict. Most of all, this book gently forces the reader to realize and evaluate the vastly different realities of everyday live on each side of the border. Most of the book is written in the third person, referring to Hammerman frequently as "the woman." This perspective appears to be utilized in order to emphasize her participation in the narrative while also providing a sense of [End Page 434] distance between the writer and the story, putting the focus on the Palestinian protagonists. Although this stylistic choice may fulfill its purpose for most readers, this reviewer found the frequent use of the third person a bit disconcerting. The nature of the book—a collection of personal experiences that are different yet share a common thread—makes for an easy read that stimulates compassion and even sympathy for the Palestinians we meet through Ham-merman. However, the recounting of personal stories is also the book's greatest weakness. Readers not familiar with the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be left puzzled by or unable to grasp the severity of certain accounts and even underestimate Hammerman's courage. For students and scholars of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and those interested in nonviolent activism, this book amplifies voices rarely covered in typical textbooks on politics in the Middle East or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in...

Action for change

In the current climate of pressing concerns, the early years sector continues to strive for a stronger voice. While lobbying often shouts the loudest, ‘quiet activism’ can be equally powerful.

Decolonising the ‘safe space’ as an African innovation: the Nhanga as quiet activism to improve women’s health and wellbeing

ABSTRACT Contemporary power and decolonisation discourses reflect how Eurocentric and Western analysis has shaped our understandings of the world. Decolonisation efforts within Global Health and feminist studies (including what counts as valid forms of women’s organising) also require a reclaiming of praxis developed within historically oppressed countries lost through erasures of knowledge-production. Our work contributes to these efforts through an analysis of a form of collective activism for women’s health and development in Zimbabwe: the Nhanga. This traditional cultural practice is anchored to intergenerational women only ‘safe spaces’, a praxis pre-dating second-wave feminist theorising on such ideas. Currently, Nhangas are used by the Rozaria Memorial Trust across community, national and global advocacy spaces to promote women’s health. Using collaborative autoethnography, each author’s personal accounts of engagement in the Nhanga interrogate the processes that promote change in women’s lives. Our analysis suggests that the Nhanga fractures systemic, institutional and relational power through leveraging culture, emotions and narrative, in spaces where such dynamics are often overlooked. We conclude that the method offers a valuable form of collective organising: fully engaging with the complex relational, political, social, and cultural environments that impact on health, through a quiet activism anchored to emotion, connection, and re-imagining of culture to promote change at individual, community, and global levels.