You are warmly invited to a seminar with Anna-Britt Coe, Department of Sociology, Umeå University.
Abstract
Political generations has become a robust concept for explaining continuity and change in social movements. Current research treats the formative process of political generations as either separate from or folded into political contexts. My study among two generations of feminist activism in Ecuador and Peru found that each cohort interacted with two socio-political conditions - prevailing gender relations and notions of political action - by living in and breaking from these. Interactions with socio-political conditions took different forms for each cohort, leading each one developed distinct understandings and practices of feminist activism. I argue for a third perspective that theorizes these interactions as a mesostructure, where process and structure meet. By conceptualizing conditions as an on-going process, mesostructure clarifies the consequences these interactions continued to have for movement goals, strategies, and relationships overtime. For the earlier generation, which became active between the late 1970s and early 1990s, consequences meant practicing militancy to achieve goals, deploying vanguardism to execute a comprehensive strategy, and exerting autonomy to manage the actions of the powerful. Focusing on the interactions between movement agency and political contexts provides a more comprehensive account of the mechanism of change spurring the formation political generations in social movements.
Join Zoom Meeting
The event is hybrid (Kapitalet and zoom)
https://umu.zoom.us/j/62189854854
