SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND ACTIVISM IN THE USA

What can we learn when we listen closely to and engage in dialogue with social movement activists?

Social Movements and Activism in the USA addresses this question for a group of progressive activists in Hartford, Connecticut, who do community, labor, feminist, gay and lesbian, peace, and anti-racist organizing. Situated within the twenty-first-century landscape of post-industrialism and neo-liberalism and drawing on oral histories, the book argues for a dialogic and integrative approach to social movement activism. The dialogue between scholar and activist captures the interpretive nature of activists' identity, the variable ways activists decide on strategies and goals, the external constraints on activism, and the creative ways activists manoeuvre around these constraints. This dialogic approach makes the book accessible and useful to students, scholars, and activists alike. The integrative nature of the text refers to its theoretical approach. Rather than advancing a new theory of social movements, it uses existing approaches as a tool kit to examine the what, how, who, and why of social movement activism.

Stephen Valocchi is Professor of Sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (with Robert C. Corber), and has also written numerous essays on progressive social movements in the United States, which have appeared in Mobilization, Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, and Social Problems.