Call for Papers

With this sub-theme, we call for empirical studies of activist organizations and organizing. Activist organizing and organization refers to a wide range of organized phenomena conceptually similar by virtue of their efforts to achieve change, but less similar with regards to their structures, concrete goals, division of labour, decision making structures, organizational imaginaries, or applied means. We invite empirically-based papers that explore activist organizations and organizing, thus foregrounding the specific and situated particularities of activist organizing and enriching our collective understanding and theorisation of activism as well as the various methodological possibilities of studying activism.
 
We easily recognize activism in the form of protests (cf. Burø et al., 2023); sabotage (cf. Malm, 2021); blockade (cf. Temper, 2019); occupation (cf. Graeber & Hui, 2014); and open confrontation with political enemies (e.g., Testa, 2015); government (e.g., Ang et al., 2014); or capital (e.g., Bédoyan et al., 2004). Such forms primarily articulate what people and movements are against. Activism for something is less conspicuous, but still observable, such as intentional communities (Christian, 2003), prefigurative organizations (Schiller-Merkens, 2022), community organizing (Shragge, 2013), and diversity work in organizations (Plotnikof et al., 2022). Activism is ubiquitous. It is also fragmented, tied to particular struggles, and precarious.
 
Considering the variety in forms of activist organizing may lead to a taxonomic question: what kinds of organizing count as activist? One way to understand activist organization and organizing is through the lens of the anarchist principles of direct action and the integrity of means and ends. Direct action is the practice of organizing to meet needs in the here and now (Graeber, 2009), practised, for instance, in the Sioux people’s resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline (Malm, 2021: 15).
 
The integrity of means and ends is the idea that the chosen means should be in accordance with the ends, i.e., using pacifist means to achieve pacifist ends (Baker, 2023). Thus perceived, activist organization is notably different from the rational organization of state and market: in terms of hierarchy, structure, and means and ends relationships. But all activist organizations may not be conditioned by such anarchist ideals (Parker et al., 2014). At heart, activist organization may be understood as any organized effort to change something; labour unions and corporate lobby organizations can be appreciated as activist – even if it resonates less with the common usage of the word. Queer employee networks (Githens & Aragon, 2009) and affinity groups (Pour-Korshid, 2018) are thus further examples of activist organization.
 
Reframing the question, we may thus investigate how activists construct organizations and how they lean into the challenges of organizational complexities (Chari and Donner, 2010). To mention but a few examples: boundary work in feminist activist organization (Deschner & Dorion, 2020), the enablement and maintenance of democratic culture in organization (Featherstone, 2010), internal racialising and gender dynamics in anti-racist activist organizations (Dueck-Read, 2018), and activist burnout (Chen & Gorski, 2015). Finally, activists operate with imaginaries (Roux-Rosier et al., 2018) of how things could be different, making imagination and the symbolic dimensions of activism interesting objects of study: how do they imagine things differently? And in the case of utopian activist organizations: how do they socially dream of a radically different society (cf. Sargent, 1994)?
 
With this sub-theme we call for contributions that present empirical studies of activist organization and organizing in and of both the Global North and the Global South and for contributions of activism(s) across the political spectrum. Relevant contributions may be but are not limited to:

• Empirical studies of new and old activist organizations

• (Auto)ethnographies of activist experience

• Empirical studies of emergent fields of conflict

• Empirical studies of feminist, queer, and anti-racist activism and feminist, queer, and anti-racist perspectives on activism

• Longitudinal studies of activist organization

• Historiographies of activist organization

• Historiographies of activist organizational ethnography

• ‘Quick and dirty’ studies from the field(s) of activism

• Presentation of raw data from empirical fieldwork

• The use of video, photography, and sound recording in empirical studies of activism

• Methodological and ethical reflections, and critiques on doing activist ethnography, incl. challenges of and to ethnographic writing and dissemination

• Studies of the powers, problems, and politics of (activist) ethnography

References

• Baker, Z. (2023): Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States. AK Press.

• Bédoyan, I., Aelst, P., & Walgrave, S. (2004): Limitations and possibilities of transnational mobilization: the case of EU Summit protesters in Brussels, 2001. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 9(1), 39-54.
• Burø, T., Christensen, J. F., & Guschke, B. L. (2023): ‘No hate. No bigotry. Fight white supremacy!’: A case study of Nørrebro Pride and collective organizing in the face of ongoing apocalypse. Ephemera. Theory and Politics in Organization. (Forthcoming).
• Chari, S., & Donner, H. (2010): Ethnographies of activism: A critical introduction. Cultural Dynamics, 22(2), 75-85.
• Chen, C. W., & Gorski, P. C. (2015): Burnout in social justice and human rights activists: Symptoms, causes and implications. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 7(3), 366-390.
• Christian, D. L. (2003): Creating a life together: Practical tools to grow ecovillages and intentional communities. New Society Publishers.
• Deschner, C. J., & Dorion, L. (2020): A feminist and decolonial perspective on passing the test in activist ethnography: Dealing with embeddedness through prefigurative methodology. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 9(2), 205-222.
• Dueck-Read, J. (2018): Racialized and gendered peacebuilding in the US–Mexico border justice movement. Conflict Transformation, Peacebuilding, and Storytelling: Research from the Mauro Centre, 127.
• Featherstone, D. (2010): Contested relationalities of political activism: the democratic spatial practices of the London Corresponding Society. Cultural Dynamics, 22(2), 87-104.
• Githens, R. P., & Aragon, S. R. (2009): LGBT employee groups: Goals and organizational structures. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 11(1), 121-135.
• Graeber, D. (2009): Direct action: An ethnography. AK press.
• Graeber, D., & Hui, Y. (2014): From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Central: The Case of Hong Kong. Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved October, 22, 2014.
• Malm, A. (2021): How to blow up a pipeline. London: Verso.
• M Parker, G Cheney, V Fournier, C Land (2014): The question of organization: A manifesto for alternatives. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 2014, 14(4): 623-638
• Plotnikof, M., Muhr, S. L., Holck, L., & Just, S. N. (2022): Repoliticizing diversity work? Exploring the performative potentials of norm‐critical activism. Gender, Work & Organization, 29(2), 466-485.
• Pour-Khorshid, F. (2018): Cultivating sacred spaces: A racial affinity group approach to support critical educators of color. Teaching Education, 29(4), 318-329.
• Roux-Rosier, A., Azambuja, R., & Islam, G. (2018): Alternative visions: Permaculture as imaginaries of the Anthropocene. Organization, 25(4), 550-572.
• Sargent, L. T. (1994): The three faces of utopianism revisited. Utopian studies, 5(1), 1-37.
• Schiller-Merkens, S. (2022): Prefiguring an alternative economy: Understanding prefigurative organizing and its struggles. Organization, 13505084221124189.
• Shragge, E. (2013): Activism and social change: Lessons for community organizing. University of Toronto Press.
• Temper, L. (2019): Blocking pipelines, unsettling environmental justice: from rights of nature to responsibility to territory. Local Environment, 24(2), 94-112.
• Testa, M. (2015): Militant anti-fascism: A hundred years of resistance. AK Press.
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