Paper short abstract:

Post-apartheid South African cities are host to significant social movement activism. This paper explores how individuals navigate within and between varied forms of politicized participation, framing such pathways as critical possibilities for future-making in and around institutions.

Paper long abstract:

Post-apartheid South African cities are host to significant social movement activism, ranging from street protests to civil society organizations, and land occupations to litigation. In addition to struggling for justice and equity on myriad social topics, movements are also far from homogenous in their internal politics, tactics, or structures. Academic work often speaks of politicized participation in relatively flattened ways, though, rarely discussing variations in politics, position, or engagement inside movements. This paper explores how individuals navigate within and between varied forms of politicized participation, drawing from interviews conducted between 2010 and 2019 in Cape Town with dozens of activists from community-based groups advocating for improved access to basic services for informal settlements. Through ethnographic vignettes, I examine the participatory contours of individuals who defy easy categorization: some are simultaneously active in groups with seemingly contradictory political positions, some present critiques of groups within which they are active members, and others move between organizational affiliations to expand networking and organizing skills. I frame these diverse experiences as critical ways through which individuals enact agency, explore possibilities for improved personal and collective lives, respond to challenges, and produce narratives of hope for their political endeavors. Grounding movements within the varied pathways of their members, instead of within a single mode of engagement or membership, provides a way to see politics as not merely the organizational director’s opportunity to shout “Amandla!” (power) at a rally, but also as the possibilities for change and future-making constantly at work in and around institutions.