Paper short abstract:

This paper explores practices of slow activism in Birmingham, UK, and asks what this way of working makes possible in a city experiencing monumental and fast-paced change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores practices of slow activism: long-term, relational work decoupled from “temporalities of success” (Shange 2019) and definitions of progress that require goals, impact statements, and quantifiable results. Taking as ethnographic sites spaces in Birmingham, UK that bring together anti-poverty activists, third sector professionals, community leaders, and policy makers, this project seeks to understand how change is conceptualized, followed, and translated where privilege is given to the often uncomfortable attentiveness of slowness. These anti-poverty groups are working to create lasting social change through slowly building durational relationships—enacting new worlds in the present. This sits in marked contrast to the embattled urgency of traditional activist work, based in narratives of immediacy, with powerful, visible, overwhelming action, and the focus of anti-poverty policy, which pushes for the quickest and most efficient solutions. As Birmingham sits in the contradictory position of bankruptcy and rapid urban expansion, it has emerged as a pivotal site to investigate the politics of poverty and the necessary materialization of radical new anti-poverty strategies within more mainstream discourse. Additionally, this paper centers methodological questions around the cross-pollination of ethnographic and activist methodologies.