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Contribution short abstract

Social movement scholars often strive to make visible and learn from contentious branches of society, criticizing the hegemonic mainstream. As experiences from my fieldwork with Romanian activists show, however, this endeavor may be hindered by social movement studies’ own methodological frameworks.

Contribution long abstract

Academics studying political discontent often are fascinated with the potential for change that contentious actors convey, emphasizing „appearance“—the visibility of alternative social and political arrangements. However, this focus shouldn't only empower movements (which anyway bears a strange bias towards studying only the „nice“ movements!) but should also free academics from their own ingrained assumptions.

One issue is the term "movement" itself, being deeply rooted in a western historical trajectory of movement organisation, claim-making, and campaigning, which many of the digital/present, global/local, self-organized, leaderless etc. movements of our times escape. Another one is the attempt at reducing civil society to its mediating „functions“ in the „emerging democracies“ of the post-socialist space. Another one is the common approach of reducing protests to their policy making functions – sorting protests according to their issues, following structural paths of organizations and media in investigating them, and measuring the relevance and success of protest by participant numbers and policy outcomes.

Drawing from experiences from a political ethnography carried out in Romanian contentious politics spaces, I propose an analytical perspective that focuses on investigating tension instead – i.e., the very processes of dealing with the undecidabilities of the political. This way, forms of resisting hegemony become visible that otherwise remain hidden behind social movement studies’ „classical“ categories – and which oftentimes resist, and may liberate us from, these in themselves hegemonic categories per se.