Social movement

About: Social movement is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 23103 publications have been published within this topic receiving 653076 citations. The topic is also known as: movement & syndical movement.

Intersectionality as a Social Movement Strategy: Asian Immigrant Women Advocates

Abstract: The history of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) in Oakland and San Jose, California, over nearly three decades provides a vivid illustration of social movement intersectionality in action and illuminates the relationships that link social theory to social movements. Serving the interests and aspirations of low-wage immigrant women workers with limited English-language skills, AIWA confronts diffuse and differential forms of interlocking oppression and deploys intersectionality to help activists change multiple states of subordinated voicelessness and devaluation into an empowered sense of self-representation and self-activity. For AIWA, an intersectional optic on social movement struggles creates insurgent identities that are dynamic and dialogic, more fluid and flexible than single-axis approaches. AIWA does not embrace intersectionality simply because its members have been wounded by racism, sexism, imperialism, class exploitation, and language discrimination but because each realm of thes...

Toward an Anthropology of Democracy

Abstract: ▪ Abstract Anthropologists, through their ethnographic method, relationships with people outside of formal and elite political institutions, and attention to alternative worldviews, bring to the study of democracy an examination of local meanings, circulating discourses, multiple contestations, and changing forms of power that is rare in the scholarly literature on democratic transitions, which has largely focused on political institutions and formal regime shifts. This review brings together the writings of ethnographers working in a wide variety of settings to generate lines of inquiry and analysis for developing an anthropology of democracy.

From Solidarity to Fluidarity: Social movements beyond 'collective identity'--the case of globalization conflicts

Abstract: Over the 1980s 'collective identity' became established as one of the orthodoxies of the sociology of social movements. This paper considers this development, and argues that 'collective identity' does not allow a conceptualization and exploration of critical dimensions of action and identity emerging in contemporary globalization conflicts. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken with Direct Action groups in Australia and the USA, this paper considers (i) the role of affinity groups, (ii) the question of representation, (iii) network culture and fluidarity, and (iv) the narrative structure of action. In the light of these, the paper critiques the 'collective identity' model, while also suggesting limits to the 'personalized commitment' thesis (Lichterman, The Search for Political Community , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) advanced in relation to Green activists. The paper argues in the context of network societies, the analysis of processes of action and identity within contemporary social movement...

New social movements: the role of legal opportunity

Abstract: The article seeks to introduce the idea of legal opportunity into social movement theory. It suggests that while lobbying, litigation and protest have all been studied by political scientists as strategies for policy change, they have tended to consider the three in varying degrees of isolation. The article aims to remedy this by providing an integrated analysis of all three types of strategy, in a domestic and EU context. Four social movements - the women's movement, the environmental movement, the lesbian and gay movement, and the animal welfare movement - are used as examples in this respect.