Typing People's Struggles: Circuits of Motivation and Mobilization in Environmental Justice Organizing

Background and Purpose:

This paper presents data from an ethnographic study of community organizing in India’s “people’s struggles,” a mode of grassroots mobilization primarily concerned with the impacts of industrial pollution, land rights, and other environmental conflicts. The term “social movement” is often used to describe a pattern of events that are all, in some crucial sense, instances of the same type (Nash, 2005). For Indian organizers seeking to build a “people’s struggle movement,” a major challenge was how to make diverse campaigns and protests recognizable as instances of a broader type of mobilization. I explore how these organizers made use of a magazine in their attempts to accomplish this “typing” work, tracking the impacts and limitations of the magazine on people’s struggles. In doing so, I illustrate how ethnography can be used to describe complex, looping causal relations that are crucial to understanding organizing processes.

Methods:

This presentation reports findings from thirty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the southern state of Kerala, India between 2005 and 2014. The presentation focuses on findings from one of two major fieldsites during this period: a magazine that served as a hub for environmental justice organizing. 37 informal interviews and 60 semi-structured interviews were conducted concurrently with 900 hours of participant observation. Two researchers (the primary investigator and a trained local assistant) were present during participant observation, and fieldnotes were compared daily to reduce bias. In-situ coding employed MAXQDA qualitative analysis software to identify emergent themes, which were iteratively refined based on further analysis of fieldnotes, recordings, and interviews.

Results:

The Keraleeyam magazine contributed to the “typing” of diverse campaigns as “people’s struggles” in three inter-related ways. First, the magazine represented the campaigns as similar on its pages. Second, the magazine offered an institutional hub for an alignment of values among organizers, producing a moral community with a shared vision for change. Third, and more indirectly, members of this moral community promoted organizing processes that conformed to these shared values. These three causal processes fed into one another in a cyclical fashion, such that each reinforced the others. However, countervailing processes also limited the effects of the magazine and organizers associated with it.

Implications:

This study contributes to our understanding of the possible roles of media in community organizing. In particular, it demonstrates how the production and distribution of media can contribute to social mobilization via processes other than representation or framing (cf., Benford and Snow, 2000). More generally, the study illustrates the power of ethnography to integrate diverse kinds of causal influence in a single explanation.