The Dynamics of Emotion and Activism: Grief, Gender, and Collective Identity in Revolutionary Nicaragua

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorraine de Volo
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relationship ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
Cultural Expectations ◽  
Identity Based

This article argues for a multidirectional and gendered understanding of the causal relationship between emotion and collective identity. Based on interviews and participant observation with core members of a Nicaraguan mothers' organization, I identify four ways in which emotion and identity are causally linked: emotion-based identity, therapy, affective bonds, and change in collective identity leading to change in grieving style. These indicate a dynamic relationship between emotion and collective identity. Furthermore, to understand emotion-based collective identity and perceptions of the emotional benefits of participation, this relationship must be understood through gendered cultural expectations about emotion.

Making Absence Visible: The Caravan of Central American Mothers in Search of Disappeared Migrants

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 108-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Central American ◽  
Political Empowerment ◽  
Derechos Humanos ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Peasant Women ◽  
In Transit ◽  
Maternal Activism

The touring model employed by the Caravan of Central American Mothers in search of disappeared migrants in transit through Mexico creates processes of political empowerment for poor, indigenous peasant women who have no previous experience as activists and human rights defenders. Interviews and participant observation with members and organizers of the ninth caravan (held in December 2013) reveal three key moments that anchor the mothers’ transformation into political subjects and human rights activists: the creation of a collective identity based on maternal activism, the forging of an alliance with transnational human rights networks, and the emergence of a budding politics of visibility based on public acts of grieving that candidly lament the vulnerability of migrants caught in the drug war and border securitization across the hemisphere. El modelo itinerante de la Caravana de Madres Centroamericanas en busca de migrantes desaparecidos en tránsito por México genera procesos de empoderamiento político de mujeres pobres, indígenas, campesinas y sin experiencia como activistas y defensoras de derechos humanos. Entrevistas y observación participante con integrantes y organizadores de la novena Caravana (diciembre 2013) identifican tres momentos claves para entender la transformación de las madres en sujetos políticos y luchadoras sociales por la defensa de los derechos migrantes: la conformación de una identidad colectiva basada en el activismo maternal, la alianza con redes transnacionales de promoción y defensa de los derechos humanos, y la emergencia de una política de la visibilidad a partir de acciones de duelo público en respuesta a la vulnerabilidad de los migrantes en el contexto de la narcoguerra y la política hemisférica de securitización de fronteras.

The Ebb and Flow of the Foreign-Born: Changing Conditions for Collective Identities

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-207
Author(s):  
Reed Ueda
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Interdisciplinary Studies ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Local Effects ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Ebb And Flow

Winders’ Nashville in the New Millennium is a study of the local effects of the new immigration in areas that had historically experienced a paucity of immigrants and international culture. By employing a methodology based on participant observation, personal interviews, and oral histories, Winders demonstrates that a surge of immigrants in a local community can produce a complex challenge to epistemologies of collective identity based on historically entrenched ethnic categories and popular memories. Her research is a fresh addition to a field of scholarship that has produced illuminating interdisciplinary studies about the effects of the changing flows of immigrants on communities, generations, and minority groups.

Becoming an Ex: Dynamics of Disengagement from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood after 2011

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-231
Author(s):  
Mustafa Menshawy ◽  
Khalil Al-Anani
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
Original Material ◽  
Affective Processes ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Political Project ◽  
The Uk

Abstract This article explores the disengagement of members from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Following both the 2011 uprising and the 2013 coup, increasing disenchantment with the group’s ideology and political project have led many members to reconsider their commitment to, and membership in, the Brotherhood. While scholarship examining the Brotherhood’s processes of recruitment and forming of collective identity is burgeoning, few works have assessed members’ disengagement from the movement and abandonment of its ideology, or how former members make sense of their “ex” identity. Based on rich, original material and extensive interviews with former Brotherhood members in Egypt, Turkey, the UK, and Qatar, this article investigates how former members seek new meanings and identities. Adopting a processual and discursive perspective on disengagement from the Brotherhood, we identify disengagement as consisting of distinct ideological, political, and affective processes. These processes shape individuals’ strategies for exiting the Brotherhood and forming their new identities as ex-members.

“Change Agents” on Two Wheels: Claiming Community and Contesting Spatial Inequalities through Cycling in Los Angeles

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 965-982
Author(s):  
Jennifer Candipan
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Spatial Inequalities ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
Urban Cycling

This study uses participant observation to examine how an all–female collective in Los Angeles uses urban cycling culture as a way to contest inequalities and advocate for social change in communities of color. Bridging the literatures on gentrification and social movements, I examine how the collective uses the bicycle as a unifying tool to draw disparate individuals together and, through the group's practices and rituals, generates a shared sense of collective identity and politicized consciousness embedded within the uneven spatial development of Los Angeles. I demonstrate how this politicized consciousness drives a collective spirit of resistance that challenges gentrification by reimagining and re–embodying space through organized actions and everyday practices. I find that organized anti–gentrification resistance is not merely reactionary, but rather entails pre–figurative action and visioning for space and community. Overall, findings speak more broadly to how communities of color facing exclusion and marginalization make claims to space and community.

Defenders of Nature and the Comarca: Collective Identity and Frames in Panama

2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Horton
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Land Claims ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Indigenous Identity ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Multiple Frames ◽  
Indigenous Land

This article examines collective identities as both a resource and constraint in framing processes of social mobilization through a case study of Panama's Kuna Indians, one of Latin America's most effectively organized indigenous peoples. It highlights tensions between movement nurturance of distinct indigenous identity as intrinsically valuable and to a degree counterhegemonic and instrumental use of an environmental frame to advance indigenous land claims. This article also explores shifts in dominant discourse and institutional practices that provide both opportunities for identity-based movements as well as risks. One way identity groups address tensions between appropriation of externally generated frames for instrumental goals and the nurturing of distinct collective identities is to manage multiple frames aimed at distinct audiences with distinct content. errors are the sole responsibility of the author.

Not in our name: collective identity of the Serbian Women in Black

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (04) ◽  
pp. 607-623 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bojan Bilić
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Activist Group ◽  
Documentary Analysis ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Strategic Options ◽  
Life Story Interviews ◽  
Cross Fertilization

The Belgrade-based activist groupWomen in Blackhas been for twenty years now articulating a feminist anti-war stance in an inimical socio-political climate. The operation of this anti-patriarchal and anti-militarist organization, which has resisted numerous instances of repression, has not been until now systematically approached from a social movement perspective. This paper draws upon a range of empirical methods, comprising life-story interviews, documentary analysis and participant observation, to address the question as to how it was possible for this small circle of activists to remain on the Serbian/post-Yugoslav civic scene for the last two decades. My central argument is that a consistent collective identity, which informs the group's resource mobilization and strategic options, holds the key to the surprising survival of this activist organization. I apply recent theoretical advances on collective identity to the case of the BelgradeWomen in Blackwith the view of promoting a potentially fruitful cross-fertilization between non-Western activism and the Western conceptual apparatus for studying civic engagement.

scholarly journals Terms of Engagement: Re-Defining Identity and Infertility On-line

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 431-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elzbieta Korolczuk
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Specific Element ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sick People ◽  
Digital Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
On Line ◽  
Identity Based

This article focuses on the identity work that takes place on the biggest Polish Internet forum for infertile people (www.nasz-bocian.pl). It is an example of a wider trend of “digital groupings created by and for those who struggle with the physical and emotional burden of a disease or disability, and through blogs, chats and forums contact others who have similar experiences, while staying anonymous. Participating in on-line discussions often leads to various forms of social engagement, both on-line and off-line. The sick, their family members, partners and friends cooperate in order to change the public discourse, as well as the regulation and financing of research and the treatment of certain diseases. Emergence and proliferation of such digital groupings raise questions such as: what ails these communities? How the collective identity is constructed on-line? This article examines “boundary work, which is a specific element of collective identity construction processes. The analysis concerns how the borders are established between the different sub-groups within the digital community, and how this process involves producing novel forms of identity based on a fragmented “socially legitimized childlessness. It focuses on a sub-forum” Conscious Childlessness and is based on qualitative analysis of the posts placed there. This sub-forum was established by users who do not necessarily share the dominant collective identity around which the social mobilization on infertility in Poland coalesces. They refuse to see themselves as sick people, or as patients, attempting to construct a new collective identity based on the idea of choice and the pursuit of happiness.

scholarly journals “A Moment of Science, Please”: Activism, Community, and Humor at the March for Science

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 46-57
Author(s):  
Hauke Riesch ◽  
Photini Vrikki ◽  
Neil Stephens ◽  
Jamie Lewis ◽  
Olwenn Martin
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Social ◽  
Alternative Facts

In April 2017, scientists and science sympathizers held marches in the United Kingdom as part of a coordinated international March for Science movement that was held in over 600 cities worldwide. This article reports from participant-observation studies of the marches that took place in London and Cardiff. Supplemented with data from 37 interviews from marchers at the London event, the article reports on an analysis of the placards, focusing on marchers’ concerns and the language and images through which they expressed those concerns. How did the protesters articulate their concerns and objectives, and how were these articulations used to build a community? The placards did not represent a clear, focused, and unifying message; they instead illustrated disparate concerns ranging from human-induced climate change, Trump and “alternative facts,” and local UK specific political issues concerning the country’s exit from the European Union. Our analysis shows that placards gave a playful and whimsical character to the march, with slogans displaying significant amounts (and moments) of humor, often formulated through insider jokes, scientific puns, or self-deprecating appropriation of negative stereotypes about scientists. We analyze the march through the social movement literature and as a collective identity-building exercise for an (emergent) community of scientists and sympathizers with long-term aims of establishing a louder voice for scientists, and experts, in public discourse.

scholarly journals Contentious precarious generation in anti-austerity movements in Spain and Italy

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimiliano Andretta ◽  
Donatella Della Porta
Keyword(s):  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Organizational Network ◽  
Network Embeddedness ◽  
Political Opportunities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Formal Network

This article focuses on the precarious generation protesting in Spain and Italy in times of crisis and austerity (2010-2012). Their many similarities notwithstanding, the two countries have experienced different types of mobilization against austerity measures. In Spain, a relatively autonomous mobilization –characterized by new collective actors and new forms of action– has made possible the building of a political actor, Podemos, able to seriously challenge the established political parties. In Italy, instead, the mobilization was dominated by established political actors, especially trade unions, did not produce innovative forms of action and has not been able to overcome (so far) the fragmentation of the social movement sector. In both countries, however, the anti-austerity protests have been characterized by a strong presence of what we call hear the “precarious generation”, particularly exposed to the economic crisis and the austerity measures. By relying on data from several surveys conducted in demonstrations on social, economic and labor issues in the two countries from 2010 to 2011, in this article we single out differences and the similarities in terms of presence, social composition, grievances and emotion, collective identity and network embeddedness of the precarious generation. Our findings show that the precarious generation was almost equally present in the selected demonstrations in the two countries, share similar socio-graphic features and similar types of grievance and emotions. Nonetheless, in Spain it seems to have built a more cohesive and radical collective identity based upon a more informal and internet based network integration while in Italy it seems embedded in a more traditional and formal network, which prevented the formation of a strong collective identity. Moreover, while in Spain the differences between the older and the precarious generation reveal that, both have a strong identity based on different networks; more formal the older and more related to informal and online instruments the latter; in Italy, the older generation has a much stronger collective identity based on a organizational network, while the precarious one is less but still integrated in organizational network. We conclude that the more autonomous civil society tradition in Spain, together with the particular political opportunities, under the pressure of a harsher economic crisis, may account for the differences we found.

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