Social Movements and Activism in the USA

ISBN-13: 9780415461597 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 194 str.

Stephen Valocchi

Opis

'Social Movements and Activism in the USA' considers the stories, rhetoric, and emotions of progressive activists from Hartford Connecticut, a post-industrial city in a neo-liberal nation.

What can we learn when we listen closely to, and engage in dialogue with social movement activists?

Social Movements and Activism addresses this question for a group of progressive activists in Hartford, Connecticut who do community, labor, feminist, gay and lesbian, peace, and anti-racist organizing. Situated within the twenty-first century landscape of post-industrialism and neo-liberalism and drawing on oral histories, the book argues for a dialogic and integrative approach to social movement activism. The dialogue between scholar and activist captures the interpretive nature of activists' identity, the variable ways activists decide on strategies and goals, the external constraints on activism, and the creative ways activists manoeuvre around these constraints. This dialogic approach makes the book accessible and useful to students, scholars and activists alike. The integrative nature of the text refers to its theoretical approach. Rather than advancing a new theory of social movements, it uses existing approaches as a tool kit to examine the what, how, who, and why of social movement activism.

Spis treści

1. Scholars and Activists in Dialogue  2. Theory and Activism  3. The Context of Hartford Progressive Activism  4. What Activists Do: Developing Strategies, Conceptualizing Goals, Exploiting Opportunities  5. What Activists Do: Gathering Resources, Forming Organizations  6. What Makes Them Do It: Recruitment and Commitment to Social Movements  7. What Makes Them Tired: Activist Burnout And Managing an Activist Life  8. Who They Are: Collective Identity And Oppositional Consciousness  9. Rethinking Activists’ Questions And Scholars’ Answers

O autorze

Stephen Valocchi is Professor of Sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (with Robert C. Corber), and has also written numerous essays on progressive social movements in the United States, which have appeared in Mobilization, Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, and Social Problems.