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- Convenors:
-
Marie Sandberg
(University of Copenhagen)
Tine Damsholt (University of Copenhagen)
Fredrik Nilsson (Åbo Akademi University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Resistance
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Grass-root initiatives and volunteer networks for refugee relief, climate activism and most recently 'corona-networks' are on the rise. Discussing previous examples of social and religious activism in history, this panel explores 'the vernaculars' of everyday mobilisation in past and present.
Long Abstract:
Human mobility, climate change and pandemics are increasingly putting questions of collective responsibility and joint decision making to the test. At civil society level grass-root initiatives, refugee relief networks and climate activism have been on the rise within the past decade. Most recently the covid-19 pandemic has spurred a wide range of 'corona networks' and neighbour to neighbour assistance with e.g. grocery shopping and home cleaning aimed at vulnerable co-citizens. These mobilisations are local reactions to global issues. They create new forms of everyday activism and informal modes of volunteering. In order to capture the plurality of such small-scale and less organized modes of helping out in everyday life, terms like "vernacular humanitarianism" (Brkovic 2017) or "everyday humanitarianism" (Richey 2018) have been suggested. Whereas the activities mentioned above can be seen as new modes of everyday mobilisations, mobilising the everyday into social movements is not a new phenomenon. During WWI, the everyday was mobilised in order to help prisoners of war and is described as the great humanitarian awakening. In the 19th century, philanthropic organisations mobilised especially bourgeois females in order to help, but also to educate and improve the working class. We invite papers exploring 'the vernaculars' of everyday mobilisation in past and present. We will in particular be looking for papers with perspectives of culture history on everyday mobilisations and/or papers who aim to discuss current events in light of previous examples of social and religious activism, movements, citizens risings or the like.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper pursues the thesis that in the civil society movement of refugee aid from 2015 a specific form of everyday life - care work - functions as the central practice complex with which the many and contradicting actors of the movement are held together into a whole.
Paper long abstract:
The motivations of the massive civil society movement of refugee aid of 2015 are diverse and seemingly contradictory. Some are explicitly political, others are not; some remain distant, some want to form close friendships with refugees. What held this broad coalition together? In this paper, based on fieldwork and interviews with a broad range of people involved with refugee aid in a southwest German town, I will argue that a specific form of everyday life is mobilized in order to bridge contradictions in the movement: care work. Pragmatic and urgent, care activities unfold their effect at the local level, potentially produce long-lasting, close social relationships (cf. Winker and Neumann 2019). It can run counter to “bureaucratic framings of vulnerability and deservingness” (Brković 2020:226), resulting in a utopian spillover by enlarging the scope of action (cf. Huke 2019) and shared feelings of success and/or frustration, which has the potential to link up the different actors of the movement. The “tactical de-politicization” (Adam 2018:315) of the care work means a common focus on the specific care work that bridges political differences and creates new alliances. The concept of care work opens up a twofold historical perspective: 1. the strong presence of women in the movement testifies to the history of the gendering of care work; 2. it opens questions of the relation of care work to protest work in refugee solidarity movements over time. Does care work play a larger role in 2015 compared to the 1980s and 1990s?
Paper short abstract:
This on-going autoethnography of a civil protest against Bibi Netanyahu in Israel examines the outcome of emergency Covid-19 measures that forced demonstrators to remain in a 1KM radius from home. This new imposed situation pushed protesters to discover their neighbours and the everyday they share
Paper long abstract:
Thousands of protesters against Netanyahu gathered on July 14 2020, near the official PM's home in Jerusalem. By August, tens of thousands demonstrated in a very noisy and unorganized form of resistance. Netanyahu attempted to lower the heat by implementing emergency Covid-19 laws against the opinion of medical officials, imposing a total lock-down on September 25. In reaction, protesters called for 1 km demonstrations and hundreds of thousands took to the streets near their home.
My autoethnography focuses on one such location - my street in Jerusalem and the dynamics created there. I do this by contextualizing it in relation to the history of protests in Israel, which used to be grounded on the idea of an orchestrated resistance that accepted representative democracy as a norm. I also examine it in relation to various forms of collective action that characterize these 2020 demonstrations where constant action has become a goal in itself.
Theoretically, this paper challenges some assumptions that underlie everyday forms of resistance (e.g., Lefebvre and de Certeau) in investigating current politics of proximity, which transformed considerably in the past fifty years. This case demonstrates how a political order "from above" reignited the interest and conversation among neighbours who met in the streets as protesters. Rather than subverting (tactically) a given order, these local demonstrations reacted (and still do) strategically in reconceptualizing democracy by replacing a stable idea of society with a social made by constant association (Latour 2005).