Layers of Activism

Author(s):  
Corrine M. McConnaughy

The women’s movement of the nineteenth century emerged within a context of proliferating civic organizations making demands on the American state. This chapter considers how this era of activism shaped the development of social movements for women’s rights and policy demands, arguing that social identities were influential determinants of the paths that women’s activism took through a web of organizational possibilities. The chapter first discusses how membership, organizational structure, and repertoires of activism were produced by the layers of identities and organizations from which they were built. It then turns to how coalitional strategies emerged, including the importance of bridge actors across layers of interest organizations. Finally, it highlights how the varied policy outcomes of women’s activism across both time and states within the layered era have enabled conditional explanations of activism’s effectiveness, including new understandings of when gender worked as a constraint and when it facilitated success.

Author(s):  
Holly J. McCammon ◽  
Verta Taylor ◽  
Jo Reger ◽  
Rachel L. Einwohner

The introduction to The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women’s Social Movement Activism, begins with an “aerial” view of the history of scholarship on U.S. women’s collective action, tracing the roots of this body of research to the early nineteenth century and following its trajectory to the present. In recent decades, the scholarly study of U.S. women’s activism has increased dramatically, with a wide range of investigations that reveal both the broad diversity of women’s politicized collective action and the theoretical sophistication in our understanding of the causes, processes, and consequences of women’s collective struggles. The introduction concludes with an overview of the Handbook’s five sections, which explore the history of women’s activism, the issues mobilizing women, the strategies and tactics women have employed, the targets and forums of women’s activism, and women’s participation in a variety of social movements, in addition to those concerned with women’s issues.


Author(s):  
Deva R. Woodly

Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements is an analysis of the emergence of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), its organizational structure and culture, and its strategies and tactics, while also laying out and contextualizing the social movement’s unique political philosophy, radical Black feminist pragmatism (RBFM), along with documenting measurable political effects in terms of changing public meanings, public opinion, and policy. Throughout the text, the author interweaves theoretical and empirical observations, rendering both an illustration of this movement and an analysis of the work social movements do in democracy.


2018 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
George Shuffelton

In the early nineteenth century, as alumni associations quickly became commonplace, Oxford and Cambridge colleges established their own alumni magazines and societies. This raises questions such as: what kinds of friendships were created at medieval universities? How commonly did university men retain lasting connections with those they had met years ago as scolares? The answers to these questions tell us something about the medieval universities as institutions capable of forging new social identities for their members. This chapter reviews the available evidence for friendships among old members of medieval Oxford and Cambridge. Nearly all of the evidence discussed comes from previously published sources, including institutional records and official correspondence, letters from formularies and at least one real-life example of how such formulas might be employed, the theories of friendship taught in the classroom and those theories as embodied in popular handbooks for students, and the evidence of wills.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 829-839
Author(s):  
Irvin J Hunt

Abstract This article reconsiders the recent turn in political theory to love as a countercapital affect, helping us endure when hope has lost its salience. The article offers the concept of “necromance” to attend to the ways the popular configuration of love as life-giving often overlooks how in the history of slavery and liberal empire love operates as life-taking. Distinct from necromancy, necromance is not a process of reviving the dead but of bringing subjects in ever closer proximity to the dead. Grounded in a reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’s romantic novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), particularly its vision of a cooperative economy and its response to the evolving meaning of love in American culture at the end of the nineteenth century, necromance is both a structure of feeling and a form of writing. As a resource for activism indebted to the creative powers of melancholic attachments, necromance contests the common conception that in order for grievances to become social movements or collective insurgencies they must be framed to create feelings of outrage, not of grief. By working inside existing conditions of irrevocable loss, necromantic love registers the feeling that the revolution is already here.


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