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The Social Basis for Movement Formation and Mobilization The major approach of this volume is to employ an event history analysis of protest activities to better understand protest actions in the disability community . In this chapter, we provide some complementary discussion based on two additional data sources-personal interviews by one of the authors with protest leaders and archival materials on protest organizations. (Some of these data have been incorporated into previous work by the authors.) These sources allow us to consider factors that cannot be studied as effectively from media accounts ofprotests. Through this analysis, we hope to suggest how social movement organizations developed and mobilized, and to suggest some key factors in the success of social movements. THE BASIS FOR MOVEMENT FORMATION AND MOBILIZATION Drawing on the sociological literature on social movements, our analysis is based on the assumption that a disadvantaged social position by itself is not sufficient to generate a social movement (Marx and McAdam, 1994). Many groups suffer difficult and grievous treatment without mobilizing collectively on their own behalf because they lack the cultural and social structural prerequisites for collective action. The capacity for protest activity by members of the disability community was based on mutually reinforcing cultural and social structural factors, which came together in the 1970s. In the 1970s, disability consciousness became tied to distinct social structures that fostered the development of a political protest. These structures included common social spaces, interpersonal and interorganizational networks, and access to political resources (Scotch, 1998). Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, additional structures developed, in some cases as the result of deliberate social construction and in others as a byproduct of emerging communication technologies. 57 58 Movement Formation and Mobilization ofActivists COMMON SOCIAL SPACE The issue of achieving common social space is more of a challenge to the disability community than it has been for many other social movements. The labor movement, for example, grew up within workplaces such as factories, mines, farms, and, more recently, offices. The black civil rights movement grew up within the easily defined geographic and cultural boundaries of the African American community, and in the 1950s and 1960s, more particularly within African American churches and colleges. Activities and organizations within the gay rights movement typically built upon existing sites of interaction within the gay community such as gay bars and bathhouses , and later, voluntary associations concerned with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In contrast, for many people with disabilities, finding common social space was more problematic due to the demographic and geographic dispersion of disability, and to the constraints on transportation, communication, and freedom of movement associated with many impairments. Many people with disabilities had little contact with others with similar impairments and even less with people who had different conditions. For many, the social consequences of having a disability and thus being out of public life and dependent on nondisabled caregivers tended to exacerbate the social isolation. Medical treatment facilities and segregated special facilities did serve as points of convergence, however. Thus, the earliest common spaces associated with the development ofthe disability community were often rehabilitation hospitals, special social clubs, and children's camps, or activities of charitable organizations for (as opposed to of) people with impairments. Several movement leaders who were interviewed mentioned such facilities as their first contact with other people with disabilities and as places where feelings of commonality and solidarity on the basis of disability were fostered. In 1970, the Physically Disabled Student Program (PDSP) was founded at the University of California, Berkeley. It was a student-run housing and service program, established with a federal grant, that employed a model of independent living subsequently embodied in university and community-based centers around the country (Stein, 1980; Varela, 1979). A number of subsequent leaders of the Bay Area's disability movement, including Ed Roberts, were associated with PDSP and its successor, Berkeley's Center for Independent Living. Judy Heumann, a founder of Disabled in Action of New York and an important national disability rights leader since the 1970s, felt that her participation in an Easter Seals summer camp for disabled children was important in developing a sense ofdisability community that crossed lines of impairments and that the camp also was a source of subsequent networking. In addition to these externally controlled settings, there has been a history of voluntary associations among certain groups ofpeople with impairments. Disabled veterans have long had spaces and organizations of their own, although their organizations have typically not interacted with other groups...

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