Social movements possess transformative and progressive power. In this paper, I argue that how this is so, or even if this is so, depends on one's explanatory framework. I consider three such explanatory frameworks for social movements: methodological individualism, collectivism, and complexity theory. In evaluating the various appeals and weaknesses of these frameworks, I show that complexity theory is uniquely poised to capture the complex and dynamic reality of the social world.

Understanding a normative concept like oppression requires attention to not only its harms but also the causes of those harms. In other words, a complete understanding of such a concept requires a proper causal explanation. This causal explanation can also inform and constrain our moral response to such harms. Therefore, the conceptual explanatory framework that we use to inform our moral diagnosis and our moral response become significant. The first goal of this dissertation is to propose complexity theory as the (...) proper framework for not only explaining a social phenomenon like oppression but also understanding the proper sites for social change. The second goal of this dissertation is to answer three interrelated questions about how we should respond, morally, to a chronic and complex social problem like racial or gender inequality: (1) Why do the current interventions to address these problems fail? (2) Do social movements play any unique role in addressing these problems? (3) What is our individual responsibility to participate in social movements? In response, I argue that the explanatory frameworks that we choose to understand the cause(s) of social problems can be the source of the inadequacy of our intervention. I argue that a proper social and moral intervention needs to capture the complex and dynamic nature of the social world. I also show that changing the explanatory framework allows us to see the unique role social movements play in making effective and sustainable social change possible. Finally, I conclude supporting such movements is a moral imperative. (shrink)

This article approaches the paradigm shift of datafication from the perspective of civil society. Looking at how individuals and groups engage with datafication, it complements the notion of “data politics” by exploring what we call the “contentious politics of data”. By contentious politics of data we indicate the bottom-up, transformative initiatives interfering with and/or hijacking dominant processes of datafication, contesting existing power relations or re-appropriating data practices and infrastructure for purposes distinct from the intended. Said contentious politics of data is (...) articulated in an array of practices of data activism taking a critical stance towards datafication. In data activism, data as mediators take a central role, both as part of an action repertoire or as objects of struggle in their own right. Leveraging social movement studies and science and technology studies, this theoretical essay argues that data activism can be mapped along two analytical dimensions: “data as stakes” vs. “data as repertoires”, and “individual practice vs. collective action”. Mapping action repertoires and tactics along these axes allows us to chart the potential emergence of a political data subject at the intersection of these two dimensions. This furthers our understanding of people’s engagement with data in relation to other forms of activism and existing work in social movement studies. It also helps us interpreting potential trajectories of contemporary social movements, as they increasingly interface with data, devices and platforms. (shrink)

The distinctness of each person’s life and experience is an important consideration in dominant accounts of how democratic institutions should distribute basic rights and liberties. Drawing on recent social movements, philosophers like Iris Marion Young, Miranda Fricker, and Axel Honneth have nonetheless drawn attention to the distinctive claims and challenges that plurality and difference entrain in democratic societies by analysing how the dominant discourses on rights and justice tend to elide, obscure, or reify the lived experiences of individuals belonging to (...) disadvantaged and oppressed groups. In this essay, I offer an independent justification for why we should take such lived experiences seriously. I show how the lived experiences of disadvantaged and oppressed individuals can be a resource for deep and meaningful social change. I propose a distinctive kind of social change in which the disadvantaged and oppressed themselves drive the process of transformation whereby they change the oppressive frames of difference relating to their race, class, sex, or ability. I call this kind ‘organic social change’. I also show that organic social change is distinctively important in that the disadvantaged and oppressed get to enact an empowering mode of cooperation that harnesses their singularities when they are the ones driving the process of their own and one another’s transformations. (shrink)

We argue that critiques of political process theory are beginning to coalesce into new approach to social movements--a "multi-institutional politics" approach. While the political process model assumes that domination is organized by and around one source of power, the alternative perspective views domination as organized around multiple sources of power, each of which is simultaneously material and symbolic. We examine the conceptions of social movements, politics, actors, goals, and strategies supported by each model, demonstrating that the view of society and (...) power underlying the political process model is too narrow to encompass the diversity of contemporary change efforts. Through empirical examples, we demonstrate that the alternative approach provides powerful analytical tools for the analysis of a wide variety of contemporary change efforts. (shrink)

In this article, we explain the mechanisms that allow social enterprises to balance their missions, and the risk of mission drift as organizations grow. We empirically explore Incubator-BUS (I-BUS), a student organization within a private Brazilian university, which sought to incubate cooperatives for vulnerable groups. Although initially successful in balancing its missions, I-BUS then failed. We show how scaling-up can complicate the balancing of different missions within the same organization. We propose that, to balance their missions, social enterprises—especially recently formed (...) and democratically managed enterprises—need not only “spaces of negotiation,” as suggested in the literature, but also “herding spaces” that connect an organization to its institutional context. We indicate why herding spaces are critical, but then show how scaling-up can result in organizational “compartmentalization” that undermines them. (shrink)

When we participate in political debate or protests, we are judged by how we look, which clothes we wear, by our skin colour, gender and body language. This results in exclusions and limits our freedom of expression. The Politics of Becoming explores radical democratic acts of disidentification to counter this problem. Anonymity in masked protest, graffiti, and online de-bate interrupts our everyday identities. This allows us to live our multiple selves. In the digital age, anonymity becomes an inherent part of (...) everyday communication. Through our smart devices we express our selves differently. As cyborgs, our identities are disrupted and reassembled. We curate self-representations on social media, create avatars, share selfies and choose the skin colour of our emojis. The Politics of Becoming encourages us to engage in a revolution of the self. Democratic pluralism is not only a matter of institutional design but also about how we express our identities. Inner revolutions change our personal realities and plant a seed for democratic futures. (shrink)

While offering valuable comparative insights into models of the self and ethical formation across religious traditions, studies of virtue ethics have been critiqued for putting forward accounts which are elite-focused. Some comparative ethicists have pointed to work in religious ethics and political theology on faith-based community organizing as offering compelling case studies of non-elite ethical formation. I seek to add to this literature by performing an analysis of the theories and practices of ethical formation in the South African Muslim anti-apartheid (...) grassroots organization known as the “Call of Islam.” The “Call of Islam” emphasized a liberation-oriented praxis and active solidarity with non-Muslim organizations for the purposes of protesting apartheid and employed a range of social practices including study circles (halaqat) and political funeral processions to prepare and equip its members for such work. As such, it not only sheds light on non-elite ethical formation, but in its cultivation of the habits and dispositions of democratic solidarity, it also serves as an Islamic example of broad-based community organizing. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to propose a precise characterization of the collective practice behind at least an important part of the phenomena named “decision by consensus”. First, I provide descriptions of the use of this rule, and give a definition of the non-opposition rule, both as a specific sequence of acts and as a stopping rule. Second, I challenge the usual way of understanding the non-opposition rule by contrast with voting, stating that the contrast between logic of approval (...) and logic of consent also has to be taken into account. Third, I examine the conditions of its use. The non-opposition rule satisfies groups whose concern is to decide without dividing. Finally, from the analytic benefit of opening up decision by consensus as the use of the non-opposition rule, I will examine, in a fourth part, whether consensus in decision-making is as democratic a procedure as is sometimes thought. (shrink)

This article argues that emotions can be a medium of social power. Using qualitative interview material from American Jews discussing anti-Semitism and its relationship to contemporary politics, it engages recent scholarship on emotions and political contention and shows how emotions make effective the various forms of symbolic exclusion by which group members exercise what Bourdieu calls symbolic power. It also explores the emotional connections to group membership by which some “excluded” members can engage in symbolic struggle over “the principles of (...) vision and division” Bourdieu (Sociological Theory 7(1), 14–25, 1989) that define the group. Finally, it shows how emotions work to incite discipline in some group members, inspiring them to conform to dominant definitions of group membership so as to avoid both symbolic struggle and exclusion. (shrink)

What is African American Politics? What form should it take? How does it conceptualize white supremacy? In In the Shadow of Du Bois, Robert Gooding-Williams uses the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Fredrick Douglass to provide answers to these questions. While the choices of Douglass and Du Bois make a great deal of sense, they reproduce the tendency of confining political theory to literature – a move that bounds the genre in problematic ways. In this article, I (...) in effect attempt to “unbound” the genre by considering Ella Baker, a civil rights era political organizer. (shrink)

Recently, radical democratic initiatives have been undertaken by freelancers and founders who come together in a range of alternative forms such as ethical entrepreneurial coalitions, urban coworking spaces, and open cooperative networks. In this paper, we argue that these initiatives to invent alternative, more equal forms of organizing engage strongly with relational activities to replace hierarchical interaction with distributed peer collaboration. While the literature has emphasized the sense of experimentation and reflexivity of these alternative forms of organizing, this paper especially (...) draws attention to the affective dynamics of everyday peer-to-peer collaboration. Drawing on an 18-month ethnography of a cooperative network of social entrepreneurs, we use a practice-based approach to study peer collaboration as a relational practice formed through a nexus of ‘weaving,’ ‘sharing,’ and ‘caring’ activities. Focusing on the affective orders enveloping relational practice, we document how the practice of peer collaboration is imbued by what we call an ‘affective oscillation’ forming contrasting amplitudes between confidence and frustration, exuberance and anxiety, and trust and exhaustion. As our core contribution, we problematize how the affirmative intent of radical democratic organizing is potentially jeopardized by this ‘cloudy affectivity,’ and we conclude that the collective pursuit of embodied ethical encounters is formed by slowing down and feeling into affective oscillation. (shrink)

This paper asks how anti-nuclear activists form collectives that are able to act collectively. It argues that shared interests and collective identities only insufficiently explain the emergence of collective action. Alternatively, the paper investigates meeting talk of German anti-nuclear groups where activists discuss proposals for collective action. Based on audio recordings, a sequential analysis of activists’ deliberations traces the transformation of vague ideas into concrete and collectively agreed to proposals. It is shown how the process by which activists reach a (...) common understanding about a particular protest activity—as something that is being talked about here and now—and the process of becoming an acting collectivity—a group that is ready to carry out this protest activity in the future—are interdependent. Activists make use of “indexicality” to introduce specifically vague proposals, enabling others to respond and contribute to the emerging proposal while group agency is suspended. At first, the authorship of proposals is minimized. Step by step, vague proposals are specified by meeting participants until a “change in footing” marks group consensus. While the group emerges as the author and principal of proposals through this process, the paper shows that implementation relies on individual principals again who take responsibility during and after the meeting. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 38-58, Spring 2022.

Since Durkheim, the importance of collective rituals in creating meaningful religious experience has been recognized. This article argues that to understand the outcomes of collective rituals, researchers should first understand the structure and dynamics of the rituals themselves. This article details the interactional practices of ‘call and response’ using conversation analysis to analyze video data gathered from Bible study meetings. Four fundamental responsive practices are identified: ‘continuing’, ‘agreeing’, ‘assessing’, and ‘confirming’. It is argued that these practices are resources through which (...) religious doctrine is made relevant in the interpretation of personal experience, in a process that is both public and collective. Simultaneously, these practices are a mechanism through which religious faith is publicly proclaimed and validated. These practices thus form a fundamental link between religious culture and personal experience within a context of shared religious understandings. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed a concern among theological bioethicists that secular debate has grown increasingly "thin," and that "thick" religious traditions and their spokespersons have been correspondingly excluded. This essay disputes that analysis. First, religious and theological voices compete for public attention and effectiveness with the equally "thick" cultural traditions of modern science and market capitalism. The distinctive contribution of religion should be to emphasize social justice in access to the benefits of health care, challenging the for-profit global marketing of (...) research and biotechnology to wealthy consumers. Second, religion and theology have been and are still socially effective in sponsoring activism for practical change, both locally and globally. This claim will be supported with specific examples; with familiar concepts like subsidiarity and "mid- dle axioms"; and with recent analyses of "participatory democracy" and of emerging, decentralized forms of global governance. (shrink)

This article examines the political crisis of social-democratic parties in Western Europe in light of its impact on the social-democratic emancipatory project, and asks whether the first calls the second into question. It begins by defining social democracy as an emancipatory project, and identifies three major historical phases that correspond to three distinct conceptions of the project. “Social-democratic dilemmas” section examines recent literature in comparative welfare state economics, political sociology, and studies of populism and authoritarianism, to show how the socio-economic (...) transformations of the last five decades have enlarged and fragmented the constituency of social-democratic parties, and contends that this situation has generated powerful tensions between the normative and the mundane dimensions of the social-democratic project. Three major dilemmas—economic, cultural, and political—leading to three deep conflicts internal to the social-democratic constituency are identified and discussed. Combining these empirical findings with the three rival interpretations of the social-democratic project introduced in “Social democracy as an ideational and a mundane project” section, “Three scenarios” section develops three possible scenarios for the evolution of this project in the near future: decline, drift, and renewal. “Implications for policy and politics” section assesses the likelihood and political meaning of each scenario for the pursuit of the social-democratic project, taking into consideration the recent upsurge of left-wing populism. (shrink)

Scholars have recognized that contentious political action typically draws on relatively stable scripts for the enactment of claims making. But if such repertoires of political practice are generally reproduced over time, why and how do new modes of practice emerge? Employing a pragmatist perspective on social action, this article argues that change in political repertoires can be usefully understood as a result of situated political innovation—i.e., of the creative recombination of existing practices, through experimentation over time, by interacting political agents (...) for whom old repertoires were proving inadequate to the changing context of action. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by applying it to explain the historical emergence of a new set of populist mobilizing practices in early twentieth-century Peru. The results have implications for the study of political action and historical change. (shrink)

The literature focussing on digital platforms as intraorganisational intermediaries underlines a key shortcoming of this model that has not been addressed by the literatures on digital social movements, advocacy, and activism. This limitation is related to the fact that platform-based organisations usually exploit widespread representations of digital technologies as tools for democratisation, but then offer low-quality internal democracy. This has implications for these organisations’ internal and external legitimacy, which are vital for mobilising and engaging supporters and the general public. This (...) article proposes an historical and processual study of the hybrid organisation Momentum, with the aim of exploring the organisational implications of the cyber-democratising discourse and its impact on the internal legitimacy of platform-based organisations. (shrink)

The Islamist movement in Turkey bases its mobilization strategy on transforming everyday practices. Public challenges against the state do not form a central part of its repertoire. New Social Movement theory provides some tools for analyzing such an unconventional strategic choice. However, as Islamist mobilization also seeks to reshape the state in the long run, New Social Movement theory (with its focus on culture and society and its relative neglect of the state) needs to be complemented by more institutional analyses. (...) A hegemonic account of mobilization, which incorporates tools from theories of everyday life and identity-formation, as well as from state-centered approaches, is offered as a way to grasp the complexity of Islamism. (shrink)

Sociological studies of culture have made significant progress on conceptual clarification of the concept, while remaining comparatively quiescent on questions of measurement. This study empirically examines internal conflicts (or “infighting”), a ubiquitous phenomenon in political organizing, to propose a “resinous culture framework” that holds promise for redirection. The data comprise 674 newspaper articles and more than 100 archival documents that compare internal dissent across two previously unstudied lesbian and gay Marches on Washington. Analyses reveal that activists use infighting as a (...) vehicle to engage in otherwise abstract definitional debates that provide concrete answers to questions such as who are we and what do we want. The mechanism that enables infighting to concretize these cultural concerns is its coupling with fairly mundane and routine organizational tasks. This mechanism affords one way to release the culture concept, understood here as collective self-definitions, from being “an amorphous, indescribable mist which swirls around society members,” as it was once provocatively described. (shrink)

This article discusses how the issue of precarity has developed into a new catalyst for activism in Italy and demonstrates how this activism is linked to changes in the employment and capitalist manufacturing environment of the 1980s and 1990s. It links events in Italy to the activism of the global anti-neoliberal movement and discusses how various activist movements (the independent Marxist tradition, creative activism, social activism, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT), radical feminist activism) are mobilizing around the issue of (...) precarity. This article focuses specifically on the activist network ‘Precari su Marte’ (Precarious on Mars) which has been active in Turin since 2005. It demonstrates how the theoretical and practical evolution of this network has led to various outcomes, including experimenting with creative forms of political practice at MayDay demonstrations and questioning the boundaries of gender. (shrink)

This article aims to confront the principal arguments of the concept of critique in sociology and to demonstrate the emergence in recent years of a re-dimensioned conception of critique, on the one hand, of a pragmatic, pluralistic and contingent nature, and, on the other, show how the need for a strong and transcendental concept of critique that does not renounce the possibility of individual and collective emancipation is still present. This article argues that the analytic and empirical space in which (...) we can better observe the meeting between the contingent and normative aspects of critique is that of the social movements, that unsurprisingly have been important reference points for many of the different sociological traditions of critique. (shrink)

Prior generations’ electoral crises (e.g., gerrymandering) have dealt mainly with political maneuverings around geographical shifts. We analyze four recent (1998–2003) American electoral crises: the Clinton impeachment controversy, the 2000 Florida presidential election, the Texas legislators’ flight to Oklahoma and New Mexico, and the California gubernatorial recall. We show that in each case temporal manipulation was at least as important as geographical. We highlight emergent electoral practices surrounding the manipulation of time, which we dub “temporal gerrymandering.” We suggest a theory of (...) postmodern electoral crises, in which the rules of time and space are simultaneously in flux. These crises expose concerns with early American democratic theory, which was based on an understanding of “the people” as geographically and temporally unidimensional. Representative systems, therefore, were designed largely without reference to geographic and temporal complexity. (shrink)

Reflecting on the Occupy movement, particularly Occupy Wall Street, this article begins by addressing two major questions: how are social movements understood by legal academics; and how do social movements engage with law? Our aim is to present an alternative frame to understanding law and social movements. We draw on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy to explore law as both present and constituted in the coming together of persons in common which occurs in social movements. While the Occupy movement does (...) engage with a form of law that is legislated and enacted through the government and legal system of a nation-state, the movement also forms and enacts law as part of its own processes. In this article we shift perspectives and attempt to think law within social movements. This involves a critical reading of some dominant approaches that explore social movements and law. Rather than situate our discussion within boundaries that seek to identify what is inside or outside a law and legal system that is determined and enforced by a nation-state, our discussion of law involves a re-thinking of law. This law is part of a constant negotiation and it is involved in the dynamic processes of movements. Law involves establishing a limit and tracing this limit, but this limit is un-working itself as soon as it is constituted. The Occupy movements live law by existing not outside the law, but by rethinking the role and function of law in the movement and processes of community. (shrink)

In this article, I address the ways in which debates in liberal, Marxist and postmodernist social theory have remoulded readings of emancipation – and how these reformulations have affected the organisation of emancipatory struggles by and in political parties and social movements. I focus on three conceptual ambiguities that have spurred theoretical disputes and restructured organisational imaginations of emancipation: who might struggle for liberation, to what end and in which ways. In all three respects, understandings of emancipation have become increasingly (...) individualised, contingent and process-oriented – both in theory and in its political-organisational correspondents. As a consequence, effective collective struggles for autonomy may become ever more difficult to organise. While occurring in the name of further liberation, the ongoing reinterpretation of emancipation and its impact on the political organisation of emancipatory struggles might in the end hamper or even undermine the very liberation and autonomy they had aimed to promote. (shrink)

This study examines the first two years of a tactical innovation that emerged in 2012 in Egypt, which involved activist groups organizing patrol-type "intervention teams" to combat sexual violence against women in public spaces. Findings reveal that the new tactic took different forms in the two places in which it was deployed, even though the same actors employed it. I argue that the place in which a new tactic emerges shapes the form it takes. When coming up with a new (...) collective action tactic, activists elaborate visions about how to carry out their actions based on their collective identities and taste in tactics. But as they start experimenting with the new tactic on the ground, they learn about the places' material affordances, symbolic valence, and power relations, as well as the constraints and opportunities that they represent. The material properties of places shape activists' possibilities of movement, patterns of communication, field of vision, and capacity to escape repression or reach safe spaces. The configuration of actors in a place shapes the nature of their interactions with others on the ground, possible alliances, and sources of conflict. The symbolic meanings of places shape the resonance of a group’s actions and the degree of resistance that actors face. Place in part determines the ability of activists to develop a tactic in the form that best fits their preferences. (shrink)