Patterns of Protest: Trajectories of Participation in Social Movements - Hardcover

Corrigall-Brown, Catherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804774102 ISBN 13: 9780804774109

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Asked to name an activist, many people think of someone like Cesar Chavez or Rosa Parks—someone uniquely and passionately devoted to a cause. Yet, two-thirds of Americans report having belonged to a social movement, attended a protest, or engaged in some form of contentious political activity. Activism, in other words, is something that the vast majority of people engage in. This book examines these more common experiences to ask how and when people choose to engage with political causes.

Corrigall-Brown reveals how individual characteristics and life experiences impact the pathway of participation, illustrating that the context and period in which a person engages are critical. This is the real picture of activism, one in which many people engage, in a multitude of ways and with varying degrees of continuity. This book challenges the current conceptualization of activism and pushes us to more systematically examine the varying ways that individuals participate in contentious politics over their lifetimes.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Catherine Corrigall-Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario.

Catherine Corrigall-Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario.

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Patterns of Protest

Trajectories of Participation in Social MovementsBy Catherine Corrigall-Brown

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7410-9

Contents

List of Illustrations........................................................................ixAcknowledgments..............................................................................xi1 A Model of Participation...................................................................12 Getting In: Initial and Shifting Engagement................................................163 Trajectories of Participation..............................................................394 Social, Political, and Organizational Context of Participation.............................595 The Ties That Bind? The Effect of Social Ties and Interaction..............................826 We Are Not All Activists: The Development and Consequences of Identity.....................1057 Beyond the "Activist"......................................................................123Appendix: Methodology........................................................................139Notes........................................................................................149References...................................................................................159Index........................................................................................171

Chapter One

A Model of Participation

IF IT IS TRUE, AS AMOS OZ SAID, that "activism is a way of life," how do people come to embrace this lifestyle? Dorothy typifies one pathway to participation. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, and at the age of ten, she moved with her family to a tenement flat on Chicago's South Side when her father lost his job. After graduating from high school, she received a scholarship to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she became politically radicalized. After two turbulent years on campus, Dorothy dropped out and moved back to New York. She settled on the Lower East Side and took a job as a journalist for a socialist newspaper. During this period, she spent many weekends protesting against war and campaigning for women's rights. While attending one such rally outside the White House, she was arrested and went on a hunger strike with her fellow activists in prison until they were released. When her daughter was born ten years later, Dorothy began an intense period of spiritual awakening, which ultimately led her to embrace Catholicism. Her new involvement with the Catholic Church inspired her to write for Catholic publications and to work for social justice through her congregation. Her support for the peace movement remained strong and she also became actively involved in programs to feed and house the homeless. Throughout her life, Dorothy stayed fully committed to these causes—she was last arrested only five years before her death at the age of 75 for taking part in a picket line in support of striking workers.

Dolores also came to embrace activism as a way of life. She was born in New Mexico and raised in California by a single mother. Inspired by her politically active family, especially her grandfather, Dolores became engaged in a variety of causes at an early age: gathering food donations for the poor, protesting for women's rights, and organizing Mexican Independence Day celebrations and other cultural events. After earning a degree in education at a local community college, she embarked on a short-lived teaching career. Years later, Dolores reminisced that she "couldn't stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes. I thought I could do more by organizing ... workers than by trying to teach their hungry children." Over the course of her adult life, she was married twice and had 11 children. Despite the intense demands made on her by her large family, she maintained a passionate commitment to social and political change throughout her life. To date, she has been arrested 22 times and has on many occasions been the victim of police violence.

For many, Dorothy and Dolores are the quintessential activists, showing the exceptional dedication and perseverance often associated with contentious political engagement. Their biographies illustrate what some might call the nobility, and others might call the insanity, of activists. Indeed, they seem to be different from "regular people," who might care deeply about social and political issues but fail to dedicate their entire lives to a cause.

Popular accounts of activism as well as scholarly studies often focus on the actions of a few inspirational individuals like Dorothy and Dolores, who are in fact Dorothy Day (1897–1980), the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and Dolores Huerta (born in 1930), the cofounder of the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez. In fact, examining the number of books written about these inspiring individuals shows that interest in charismatic leaders far outstrips attention to their movements as a whole. The focus on the lives and work of this type of inspiring activist is clearly far greater than the attention given to the movements as a whole in which they engaged.

The problem with this focus on long-term, committed activists such as Dorothy and Dolores is that it misses the true story of social movement participation, substituting a charismatic leader for the movement and minimizing the significance of the vast majority of social movement participants. This clouds our larger understanding of contentious political activity and the mechanisms of social change because it implies that change results primarily from the actions of a small, homogeneous cadre instead of from a large, diverse group of individuals.

In this book I show that social movement participants are not just the dedicated few. Approximately two-thirds of the respondents from the nationally representative longitudinal study of Americans used in the analyses presented in this book have belonged to a social movement organization, attended a protest, or engaged in other forms of contentious political activity at some point in their lives. Activism, in other words, is the realm of the many. In addition, and contrary to what is sometimes assumed, social movements are not populated solely by lifelong activists. Many participants engage for only a short time and then leave altogether. Others move from group to group or reengage after a lull in participation. This is the real picture of activism, one in which many people engage, in a multitude of ways, and with varying degrees of continuity.

Karen exemplifies this type of contentious political participation. In 1974, Karen joined a student group at her high school that helped organize a march for disarmament. While working on this project, she met volunteers in the United Farm Workers, a group she would later formally join after high school in 1978. In 1982, Karen moved to Florida to help establish a National Farm Worker Ministry. However, starting in 1986, she took a long break from activism. In fact, she did not participate in social movements or contentious politics at all for 14 years. During this period, she moved to Europe, started a family, and began raising three children. Upon her return to the United States in 2000, Karen again took up the cause of social justice: she founded a Farm Worker Ministry in her church, which she still leads today.

Amy's experience is similar. In 1981, she joined a homeowners association in Santa...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804774102
• ISBN 13: 9780804774109
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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