In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Lived and Remembered:Social Change through the Prism of Activist Life
  • Lana Dee Povitz (bio) and Steven High (bio)

ONE OF THE TRUISMS of social movement history is that change never just happens. It has to be diligently, painstakingly fought for, with each victory lifted up and each defeat honestly faced for future wisdom. As historians of social movements, we are always edging as close as we can to the warm-blooded specifics of how change gets made; we see it as our project to illuminate the complex of material, endlessly contingent forces that have shaped the worlds we now inhabit. Across the distance of space and time, activists—loosely defined for our purposes as those who have taken coordinated action to bring about systemic political change—have devoted significant portions of their lives to these pursuits.

In this special issue of Histoire sociale / Social History, we ask the following questions: What do we learn when we view social struggle through the lens of a life, or lives, rather than an issue, a place, or a period of time? What comes into focus if we strip a struggle down to its most essential elements: human beings? And if we think of people's lives as the medium for their political work—their canvas, their blank notebook, their chunk of wet clay—what larger insights do we glean about activism? Given the vast historiography on social movements, our desire in creating this special issue was to throw the spotlight onto matters that have all too often been relegated to footnotes, left to other disciplines, or left out altogether.1 We wanted to better understand the impact of interpersonal [End Page 195] relationships on activism, as well as the more diffuse roles that affect and emotion play in social movements.2 We sought greater clarity about how people have come to self-identify as activists and the importance of reflexivity and intersubjectivity to that process.3 By calling for fine-grained historical studies that seek to understand these questions better, we hoped to see how different forms of activism have been connected, how apparently discrete movements have been related to one another, and how activism has been sustained over the course of a lifetime.4 We also wondered how fleshing out the interpersonal and emotional lives of activists might help us grasp the forces that have thwarted or constrained political action. Such constraints have not only been "out there"—oppressive legal systems [End Page 196] or social norms—but also internal. Differences in mental health or ability and intramovement conflict are just two examples of challenges navigated over the course of an activist life. While both are discussed often in contemporary activist circles (indeed, at times these subjects seem to dominate), we sought a fuller sense of how activists addressed them in the past.5

The response to our call for papers exceeded our expectations. More than 70 scholars responded to our appeal, making it extremely difficult to winnow the numbers down to just one special issue. The theme clearly resonated. On the whole, the articles featured here shed light on how movements for social change have flowed into one another and, crucially, how they have done so through the medium of relationships. We also observed something we know experientially from our own activist lives: how often interpersonal relationships have been the agents of activation, bringing people to consciousness, cementing people to projects or causes, and catalyzing major, sometimes unexpected, shifts in political orientation. In some cases, our contributors offered us fleeting glimpses of the absence of relationships: isolation and its chilling effects. If activist lives have been the bones of social movements, we find that relationships have been their connective tissue.6

The activist lives framework offers an important, scaled-down counterpoint to more macro-focused social movement studies. Our contributors cover activism contained in the neighbourhood (such as Toronto's Trefann Court) and at the workplace (a nickel factory in Sudbury, Ontario; elevator buildings across New York City); struggles that were clandestine (as with Uruguayan anarchists or rebels in Basque territory), national (France's Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire), and transnational (like Femen, a radical feminist group that began in...

pdf

Share