Individual engagement in social activism

2023-07-20

Contemporary social movement research often treats individuals or groups as strategic entrepreneurs who seize opportunities to advance their agendas. Yet, to understand individual engagement in social activism, we need an approach that sensitizes us to distinct social settings and the way individuals sustain or shift involvement inside and between settings. This chapter offers a processual view of individual engagement. It begins with insights from cultural interactionism on how social settings coordinate individual action. Then, recently renovated concepts of interest and morality deepen our understanding of the individual in the process. Seen through this new interactionist account, the experiences of two housing advocates in Los Angeles illustrate the interplay between social settings and activists’ self-understandings. We need ethnographic research as well as depth-interviewing to track this interplay.

13. Pragmatist Comparative-Historical Sociology

Columbia University Press eBooks · 2022-08-13 · 3 citations

Ethnography and Social Movements

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements · 2022-09-27

Ethnography is a powerful means of researching the organizational, relational, and cultural dimensions of collective action over time. Ethnographic research illuminates the “meso”‐level processes that many social movement scholars have emphasized since the end of the 1980s. More than a tool for probing small, well‐bounded subcultures, ethnography reveals patterns of meaningful action that shape the potentials of social movements and span the boundaries between social movements, government, and commerce. This promising method of research continues to be underemployed in the social movements field.

Review Symposium

Sociology of Religion · 2022-12-29

Journal Article Review Symposium Get access Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival, by GENEVIÈVE ZUBRZYCKI. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022, 288 pp.; $32.00 (paperback). Rhys H Williams, Rhys H Williams Loyola University Chicago, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Ruth Braunstein, Ruth Braunstein University of Connecticut, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Paul Lichterman, Paul Lichterman University of Southern California, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Geneviève Zubrzycki Geneviève Zubrzycki University of Michigan, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 84, Issue 2, Summer 2023, Pages 223–233, https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srac045 Published: 11 May 2023

Ethnographic Approaches to the Study of Political Participation

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022-08-18

Abstract Abstract: Ethnographic research gives access to distinct insights on political participation. Sensitized by classic and contemporary theoretical work, ethnographers follow political participation outside as well as inside the realm of institutionalized citizenship, focusing on activities that politicize or depoliticize in a wide range of institutional and everyday sites. This chapter argues that ethnographic research is especially good at illuminating three aspects of political participation: First and foremost, ethnographers uncover the meanings and practices that constitute different kinds of political participation. Second, ethnographic research clarifies relations between political ideas and political actors, in different settings. Third, ethnography illuminates the ambiguous and shifting boundaries between what is and is not political or politicized. In each of these areas, ethnographic work improves understandings based on assumptions that commonly drive non-ethnographic or non-empirical writings.

<i>Inventing the Ties That Bind: Imagined Relationships in Moral and Political Life</i>. By Francesca Polletta. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. vii+247. $95.00 (cloth); $27.50 (paper).

American Journal of Sociology · 2022-06-16

1 A New Sociology of Civic Action

Princeton University Press eBooks · 2021-03-20

2 Placing and Studying the Action

Princeton University Press eBooks · 2021-03-20

“Qualitative Research” Is a Moving Target

Qualitative Sociology · 2021-11-15 · 8 citations