week 6: collective identity and strategies and tactics

collective identity

a sense of shared experiences and values connecting individuals to movements and making them feel capable of effective change through collective action

• individual identity markers are shared with others, the feeling of being part of a broader collective

• defined as an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connections with a broader community, category, practice, or institution

• functions as the glue that holds a movement together

formation of collective identities

formed through three interconnected processes (ongoing, not chronological)

• boundary formation

• consciousness building

• negotiation

boundary formation

• social, psychological, and physical structures that establish differences between a challenging group and dominant groups

• acknowledgement of shared experience that delineates group from broader public, creation of us versus them

• can emerge from affinity (shared concern or objectives) or discrimination (external forces like exclusion that can create a boundary)

consciousness building

• consciousness as interpretive frameworks that can emerge out of a challenging group’s struggle to define and realize its interests

• recognition of shared nature of experiences of similarly situated people - material conditions and relationship to means of production (Marxian)

• requires change in political awareness or interpretive understanding of reasons for oppression and inequality - adoption of diagnostic frame

• ex: mobilization of second wave feminism in recognizing women’s issues as systemic not personal, women became a salient political identity

• can include processes of reclaiming previously marginalized identities

negotiation

• group collective identity is constructed through interactions, both within certain group and between groups outside of it

• interactions with allies, bystanders, opponents, and the media

• “The symbols and every day actions that subordinate groups use to resist and restructure existing systems of domination”

• ex: HIV/AIDS activists in 80s, had to negotiate identity in context of stigma and put forward a positive identity

  • relied on support of allies and those outside affected group

  • ACT UP - AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (1987)

challenges with defining collective identity: homogenization

potential for homogenous collective identity that obscures diversity of needs and interests in a movement or group

• desire to present identity as cohesive, and offer claims and objectives that serve this cohesive identity

ex: first and second wave feminism emphasized the experience of white upper-middle class women to the exclusion of racialized and poor women

• Sojourner Truth’s “Aint I A Woman” - the only black woman in attendance at a women’s rally

• bell hooks (1981) - borrowed the name of the speech for her book

• continues to be a tension today

challenges with defining collective identity - essentialism

essentialism treats collective identity as natural and inherent

• reductive to a singular attribute, ignores constructed nature of identity

• collective identity is a process that typically involves intentional formation

scholars have come to see collective identity as constructed in order to avoid this essentialism

• shared experiences and shared positions but work must go in to maintain these identities

ex: process of racialization

• racial categories emerge as result of classification based on visible physical attitudes (debra thompson)

• categories of race are imposed, often by the state

• race as a political and social construction as it flows out of state categorization, should be understood as a signifier of complex power relations, context specific

collective action repertoires

tactics as contentious performances, a menu of options available to a social movement in a given time period

• generally standardized, tactics are borrowed from other movements

• higher and lower levels of risk

• digital repertoire

repertoires are historically bounded

• historical movements were local, parochial

• massive social transformation introduces new tactics that supplant previously used ones - urbanization, state expansion, nationalization of markets

tactics are modular - tactics from one area can be used in another area

continuum of tactics

education and persuasion → legal mobilization → demonstration → confrontation and civil disobedience → direct action and property damage

movements need to take into account who they want to include and target, what their goals are, how disruptive they want to be, who they are potentially alienating when choosing their strategy

• ex: BLM Toronto at Toronto Pride 2016

principled non-violence

idea that violence is unethical or unmoral, and thats why movements don’t use it as a tactic

strategic non-violence

idea that violence is ineffective as a movement strategy and thats why movement's don’t use it

tactical innovation

the idea that the dynamics between activists and their opponents is an interaction, and through these interactions opponents find ways to respond to activists and activists must therefore devise new methods