What Counts as Activism?: The Role of Individuals in Creating Change

Abstract

GENDER, PLACE, AND EVERYDAY LIFE Fifteen years ago, Naomi Abrahams (1992, 342) urged scholars of action to pay greater attention to individuals in their daily lives by acknowledging a range of activities as political: those that do not directly target change in economy and are part of arena of social life. Abrahams's argument connects with other feminist scholarship that has broadened concepts of action and activism by extending public sphere to encompass household and social relations and by highlighting role of work (often, but not always, waged labor) in stimulating people's awareness of social problems and motivation to address them (e.g., Mansbridge 1990; Naples 1992; Ryan 1992; Staeheli and Cope 1994; Staeheli and Clarke 2003). In this essay, we further explore notions of women's activism by focusing on crucial role played by individuals embedded in communities in shaping social networks and relations necessary for social change; these networks and relations that foster change begin in informal and localized interactions and may evolve into more formalized, institutional social movements. We highlight and seek to better understand potential links between geographical embeddedness and small acts of social networking or social change, actions that may not in themselves create direct action but that foster social relationships that may enable future action or organizations (as in civil rights movement [Morris 1984]). As geographers, we see activism as an issue of geographic scale (as do, for example, Staeheli 1994; Miller 2000; and Martin and Holloway 2005): Some person or group recognizes a problem (at what scale?) and takes some action(s) to address it (at what scale?) in order to create change (at what scale?). Fundamentally, this notion of activism conceptualizes individuals in terms of their social relationships, with varying geographies (e.g., near, far, electronic). Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt (1995) have demonstrated how place-based social networks cut across, link together, and help to construct diverse realms of everyday life, including those within home, workplace, neighborhood, and community. How activism shapes those relationships affects whether and how it is perceived as a movement (with formalized goals, articulated grievances, and like). We open category activism to consider actions and activities that, because of their limited geographic reach, normally are considered too insignificant to count as activism and yet do create progressive change in lives of women, their families, and their communities. Lynn Staeheli and Meghan Cope (1994, 447) argue that activity involves the 'private' negotiations of household, 'personal' coalitions of neighborhood, and 'informal' networks within while Abrahams (1992, 329-30) suggests that political action is defined as a form of human behavior that involves negotiation, alteration, or entrenchment of social values and resources. We draw on these observations to suggest a definition of activism as everyday actions by individuals that foster new social networks or power dynamics. In this sense, we see activism as a precursor to action that transforms a community, develops a formal organization, or extends in scale to reach social networks beyond initial embeddedness of instigating activist. Our intention is not to identify every daily act as activist, but to theorize how small acts transform social relations in ways that have potential to foster social change. This essay originates in unanticipated insights that emerged from a study that one of us has been doing on gender and entrepreneurship. The research involved in-depth personal interviews with about two hundred business owners in each of two U.S. metro areas: Worcester, Massachusetts, and Colorado Springs, Colorado (Hanson 2003). …

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