Space for emotion in the spaces of activism

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Abstract

This paper explores the role of emotions in activism. Although, increasingly, researchers have examined what emotions inspire or deter different forms of political and social movement activism, this paper takes a new direction by considering what spaces, practices and emotional stances are necessary to sustain individual and collective resistance in the long-term. We argue that we need to sustain activism through emotional reflexivity, building sustaining spaces to create space for emotion in activism. Using empirical examples from different forms of autonomous (anti-capitalist) activism in Britain, the role and importance of emotions to the sustainability of activism is explored. In particular, we consider the role of different spaces in sustaining activists through the cycles of protest, what spaces of activism can be opened up by a closer attention to emotions, and how the spaces in which protest and other activist practices take place shape the emotional and affective engagements of participants. As autonomous forms of activism attempt to prefiguratively enact new post-capitalist social relations in the here and now, we suggest there is still some way to go in changing affective relationships within many of these groups.

Introduction

Some of the long-term activists that I know … have become very rigid, have become very discouraged and very despairing and very tired. Not that I don't relate to any of those things, but … I want to be able to maintain both my own sense of hopefulness and energy and keenness, and my capacity to think freshly and act freshly and stay flexible (Marny, quoted in King, 2005: 163).

Over the last decade or so, social scientists have increasingly recognised the importance of emotions to the functioning and understanding of social movement activism. Pulido (2003: 47) refers to ‘emotions, psychological development, souls and passions’ as constituting the ‘interior’ dimensions of social movements, while for Kim (2002: 159), any account of social movement activism that overlooks its emotional dynamics “risks a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of collective action”. Thus in addition to physical energy, “mental and emotional energy are equally important because only healthy, happy and motivated people are able to contribute creativity and enthusiasm to a project” (Laughton, 2006: 16).

Despite these exhortations, many still consider the emotional aspects of collective action to be of peripheral importance. It is interesting that emotions were specifically included in a book which aimed to give ‘voice’ to silences in the study of collective action (Aminzade and McAdam, 2001). Yet in a review of a book about Activist Wisdom Grenfell (2006) questioned why it was necessary to include a whole chapter on ‘Hope and Despair’ – why not focus on something more important he asked?

This paper moves beyond a study of the role of emotions in mobilising collective action, or the specific emotions experienced during highly charged acts of resistance, and builds upon recent work that has addressed the geographies of emotional labour in activism (Bosco, 2007). As Marny illustrates, the interior emotional life of activist movements can be fraught, demotivating and distressing, but many activists have taken positive steps to address the emotional causes and consequences of ‘burn-out’, and re-evaluated how they relate to other activists. In this there have been recent calls that

By acknowledging that protest encounters are emotionally laden, relational, hybrid, corporeal and contingent, possibilities open up for breaking the silences that divide us and overcoming ontological divisions such as activist and non-activist. From the conversations, questions arise such as what roles do we adopt in protest situations, what are our emotional responses, and how can we go beyond pre-determined identities and problematise our identities? (Chatterton, 2006: 260).

Between us, the authors of this paper have been involved in social movement activism of various kinds for more than 35 years. We have both been accused of capitalising on our previous activist involvements in order to promote our academic careers (Brown, 2007; Pickerill, 2008), and have been told by self-identified activists that we are ‘not really activists anymore’. Yet we both remain committed to resisting injustice and engaging in constructive direct action, to experimenting with autonomous spaces and post-capitalist social relations. In these endeavours we draw sustenance from the embodied and affective memories of past actions and the maelstrom of emotions we have experienced during periods of intense resistance and social movement activity.

This paper offers a hopeful and reparative engagement with the role of emotions in activist spaces, with a view to elaborating how creating space for emotional reflexivity within activist spaces can contribute to making our individual and collective engagements in activism and resistance more sustainable over time. In doing so, we draw on our own experiences of these spaces, as well as those of others. This, then, is both an academic endeavour and a personal reflection upon the need for greater contemplation of the role of emotions within activism. In particular we are concerned with sustaining long-term activism through practices of emotional reflexivity (King, 2005) through which activists (individually and collectively) can reflect on their emotional needs and commitments, and find means of negotiating these alongside on-going resistance and involvement in social movements. Key to this process is understanding the relationship between emotional reflexivity and emotional sustainability. We argue that we need to sustain activism through emotional reflexivity, building sustaining spaces to create space for emotion in activism. The specifics of what these ‘spaces’ for emotion are, and the forms that such reflexivity might take are explored throughout the paper. However, although emotional reflexivity has long been employed by academics, both in their own practices (Fuller and Kitchen, 2004) and in exploring activism (King, 2004, Mills and Kleinman, 1988), its meanings and implications for developing more sustainable forms of activism remain underdeveloped.

Thus we conceptualise emotional reflexivity in broad terms; to include being consciously aware of emotions, of paying attention to emotions (individually and collectively, such as during meetings), and to incorporate what Barker et al. (2008: 433) call ‘skillful emotional self-management’. This they conceive as including practical acts such as constructing collective rituals as well as ‘mindfulness’ – drawing upon the work of Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh to develop particular skills (often with the help of meditation) of being consciously self-aware of the present moment and of our feelings, and to act non-judgementally. Emotional sustainability, in this context, is the ability to understand one's emotional responses and process them in order to continue to act effectively as an activist.

The activist spaces that we consider in this analysis are primarily those that operate on the basis of a desire for autonomy through a commitment to horizontal, participatory organising, and, are primarily in Britain2 (Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006). We draw empirically from several different examples of such spaces. We incorporate our life experiences with insights from a variety of research projects we have undertaken with anti-capitalist activists in recent years. This has included work with queer activists in London, activists involved with social centres, anti-war activism, and a case study of activists involved in Low Impact Developments (LIDs) in Britain.3 LIDs, and other autonomous spaces, can (quite literally) create space for activists to reflect on their emotional needs, balancing activism with other aspects of their lives, and to enact new practices that can sustain this emotional balance to enable on-going sustainable resistance. Thus the empirical elements of this paper include personal reflections, participatory work with a number of groups and in-depth interviews, particularly with LID residents.

Despite this focus, these spaces are not discrete and the concept of who is ‘activist’ and thus ‘non-activist’ is contested and fluid.4 This contestation is partly what we are exploring here, specifically in relation to the emotional intensity of maintaining particular activist identities. At times, as during direct action, activists forge a collective identity inscribed through particular behaviours, language, dress, and practices (Della Porta and Diani, 1999). Such an identity serves a purpose in creating powerful bonds between participants necessary to outweigh the potential costs of taking part in collective action. However, it can also serve to separate the notion of an ‘activist’ from others, marginalising the many who might be politically sympathetic (Bobel, 2007). In reality activist identities are complex, multi-layered and hybrid and there will always be definitional problems in their articulation. We return to this complexity throughout.

Our core arguments in this paper are first, that we need to pay attention to the different spaces of activism in order to better understand the complexities of the relationship between emotions and activism. The spaces that we address extend beyond physical places, to a consideration of the conduct of the self and interpersonal relationships in activist encounters, and our analysis pays due attention to how these relationships change over time, and through the life course. We argue that the characterisation of these spaces better enables us to unpack the complexity of emotions in activism, and to identify those practices that might facilitate on-going commitments to activism. Our second core argument is that although within these spaces it is possible to identify much good work that already promotes emotional reflexivity for sustaining activism, there are areas which require much further attention, and a broader need to make explicit the link between improved emotional reflexivity and developing more sustainable forms of activism.

What follows is organised around two main sections. The first offers a short review of recent writing on the importance of emotions to research on activism, social movements organising, and acts of resistance. The second focuses on four spaces of emotions (place, temporal, the self, and interpersonal) where we identify, through our empirical work, activist approaches and practices that contribute to, but which can also undermine, (emotional) sustainability within autonomous social movements. We recognise that there are still powerful normative assumptions (often highly gendered) that persist within autonomous movements, and hence we explore how activism might be sustained through paying greater attention to emotional reflexivity in activist spaces.

Section snippets

The importance of emotions in activism

We conceive emotions quite broadly, and in our discussion refer to hope, fear, humour, happiness, compassion, love, grief, anger, envy, empathy, passion, and frustration. Yet we face a challenge in defining these emotions more closely. In considering happiness, for example, it is important to draw on philosophical, psychological, and social science perspectives. The emotion is “mainly affected by our basic temperament and attitudes and by key features of our life situation – our relationships,

Spaces of emotions

Having summarised work on emotions and activism we now turn to a more empirical consideration of the importance of spaces to emotional reflexivity and sustainability. The role of emotions in activism are multifarious, shifting, and exist in a number of very different moments. In other words, our emotional journeys through activism incorporate different relationships, times, places, scales, memories and more. There is a parallel between our analysis and recent work (Leitner et al., 2008) that

Conclusions

The focus of this paper has been on a better understanding of the processes of emotional sustainability within autonomous activism. We began from the premise, as Gould (2004) asserts, that ‘attention to emotions illuminates, and facilitates investigation into … the question of movement sustainability’ (173). We have argued that we need to sustain activism through emotional reflexivity, creating sustaining spaces to create space for emotion in activism. To do this we need to pay attention to the

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