Suchergebnisse

Introduction: activist class cultures as a key to movement building -- Why look through a class lens? : five stories through three lenses -- Applying class concepts to US activists -- Four class categories of activists and their typical group troubles -- Movement traditions and their class cultural troubles -- Where is everybody? : approaches to recruitment and group cohesion -- Class speech differences I : humor and laughter -- Activating the inactive : leadership and group process solutions that backfire -- Class speech differences II : abstract and concrete vocabulary -- Class speech differences III : racial terms -- Diversity ironies : clashing anti-racism frames and practices -- Class speech differences IV : talking long, talking often -- Overtalkers : coping with the universal pet peeve -- Class speech differences V : anger, swearing, and insults -- Activists behaving badly : responses to extreme behavior violations -- Class speech differences VI : missing class talk -- Conclusion : building a movement with the strengths of all class cultures

Americans are noted for not talking about social class. Does the same hold true for progressive group members? A study of 25 U.S. social movement organizations found that two class categories of progressive activists avoided explicit talk of class and, when asked about class identity, resisted the question or garbled their answers. First, lifelong working-class and poor activists (those lacking college degrees and professional/managerial jobs in both the current and the prior generation) were less likely to use conventional class terms. Second, voluntarily downwardly mobile activists (college graduates raised by professional parents who had chosen to work part-time jobs or no jobs to free up time for activism or to enact environmental or antimaterialist values) tended to equate themselves with involuntarily low-income people, misrecognizing their higher cultural capital. In the absence of clear, open class identities within activist groups, distorted class talk filled the vacuum. Falsely posing as working class sometimes conferred status. References to class and race privilege were sometimes used as insults. When the bottom half of the 99 percent do not name their class identity, and when some class-privileged activists deny their cultural capital, such missing class identities may harm the development of group cohesion in social movement groups.

Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. The Epistemology and Hybridity of Participatory Action Research: What and Whose Truth Is It? -- Part I. Social Justice Organizing -- Chapter 3. The Activist Class Cultures Project: Helping Activists Become More Class Inclusive -- Chapter 4. Fighting Antihomeless Laws and the Criminalization of Poverty through Participatory Action Research -- Chapter 5. Organizers and Academics Together: The Household Energy Security Crisis and Utility Justice Organizing -- Part II. Worker Rights Activism -- Chapter 6. Shaping Organizing Strategy and Public Policy for an Invisible Workforce: Restaurant Opportunities Center -- Chapter 7. Worker-Led Research Makes the Case for Labor Justice for Massachusetts Domestic Workers: Social Research and Social Change at the Grassroots -- Chapter 8. Power Sharing through Participatory Action Research with a Latino Forest Worker Community -- Chapter 9. Making Injustice Visible: National Day Laborer Organizing Network's Research and Action -- Chapter 10. Milking Research for Social Change: Immigrant Dairy Farmworkers in Upstate New York -- Chapter 11. Building a Better Texas: Participatory Research Wins for Texas Workers -- Part III. Language, Literacy, and Heritage -- Chapter 12. Mobilizing and Organizing Nimiipuu to Protect the Environment: Fighting to Protect Ancestral Lands in Idaho -- Chapter 13. Building Future Language Leaders in a Participatory Action Research Model -- Chapter 14. Conclusion: Linking Research to Social Action -- Notes on Contributors -- About the Foundation -- Index.