While wasting time on Twitter last week, a tweet containing a picture of a badge from the 80s that read “If the Tories had a soul, they’d sell it” caught my eye. It brought me back to a topic I’ve been mulling over for a year or so, sparked by the 30th anniversary of the Miners’ Strike. Sparked because miners’ strike badges are something that make up a small but significant part of my political badge collection. I have a corkboard in my spare bedroom into which I pin new badges that I’ve bought from anarchist bookfairs, had thrust into my hand on marches, and have dug, treasure-like, from baskets of miscellaneous tat in charity shops. They are something that I’ve never had the need to engage others in conversation about, but which I sometimes go and just look at. I look at them and think about all of the social justice struggles they represent. I think about the people who made and wore them, and who were committed to those struggles. I think about their short, pithy summation of thousands of pages of academic texts and activist pamphlets in a single image or quote. I think about them and smile because they connect me not only to these struggles, but also to my own political identity.

Badges featured heavily in my teenage ‘alternative’ phase. Mosher, goth, emo, whatever term best applies, badges were a symbol of my subcultural affiliation and adorned by rucksack (worn low on two shoulders, naturally) and occasionally pinned to a sartorially ill-judged tie. Whether graced by the name of a band I was currently enamoured with, or a self-deprecating statement of my teenage angst, they signalled my allegiance to an amorphous tribe of similarly musically inclined individuals.

The badges were one of the first things to go as I shed my teenage style when I found comfort in the warm intellectual arms of university. As a child I was weird because I was clever and politically outspoken and during secondary school these were increasingly used to label me as weird and undesirable. My subcultural style provided a more visible weirdness upon which people could focus and toward which they could direct their ire, but it also gave me a community of others with which I could identify. When I went to university I found a place where being clever and politically outspoken was positively encouraged and no longer needed a protective subcultural identity. Ultimately, my political mobilisation brought me back to badges, and watching my collection grow has illuminated my own development.

The first badge I remember buying was one I’d had my eye on for a while. At 18 I was working in a vintage clothes shop in Manchester and when I went to university I continued to work at weekends and during the holidays. Behind the counter hung a tatty denim waistcoat on which were displayed badges of various types. Most were depressingly representative my boss’s understanding of ‘vintage’, which was essentially fancy dress. So the neon peace signs sat side by side the type of badges given away as promotional material by building societies in the ‘80s. They were on sale because they were old, not because they were interesting or desirable. Yet in amongst the jumble-sale rejects sat a yellow circular badge with black writing that spoke to me. “Greenham Women are Everywhere” is shouted, its voice muffled by the glitter and neon that jostled for space on the waistcoat. After looking at it for a few weeks, I sacrificed all of £2 from my (well below) minimum wage and took it home. The women’s peace camp at Greenham was born years before I was, but its place in my consciousness at 18 is testament to its legacy for feminist activism. Raised by a feminist mother whose campaigning against the first gulf war saw me spending an enjoyable amount of time in local authority crèches, Greenham always figured in my understanding of the feminist and peace movements, despite never having visited it. The Greenham Women badge linked me to those women and their struggle, as well as to my mother and her activism. It signified a community even more amorphous than the musical subculture I’d taken solace in, but even more important and, I hoped, longer lasting.

I lost the badge years ago, along with two others (an Aids awareness badge and an anti-racist one) when I lost the jacket they were pinned to. Losing the other two badges didn’t bother me, but losing the Greenham badge still saddens me whenever I look at my corkboard. It had no monetary or use value, but a large part of its importance to me lay in its original ephemerality. It was of its time and I shouldn’t imagine it was ever intended to outlast the camp. But its message remains true 30 odd years after Greenham began, and those women are still everywhere.

I began writing this piece as a way to unblock myself in the midst of my thesis-writing nightmare. The chapter I’m working on it bitty and largely incoherent, so I decided to write about something completely unrelated. But in doing so I’ve realised that even this is related, which is helpful. Hopefully when I get back to writing tomorrow everything will flow a little easier. The badges I still own all have their own stories to tell so I might follow up with a couple of other pieces if I get the time. They might be slightly more sociological, but maybe not. We’ll see.

 
 
So as the end of my third year approaches, and the terrifying beginning of my fourth and final PhD year looms into view I’ve really begun to panic about my data collection.

The data that I currently have is amazing. The interviews I’ve conducted so far have tended toward the hour mark, with some exceeding it as both interviewer and interviewee seem to get carried away finding new topics  and fresh perspectives on old ones. Every interview has been a fresh occasion to be amazed and inspired by the work that young women are doing not only for social and climate justice campaigns but also within their own lives and communities.

Participant observation in a wide range of activism and group contexts for over 150 hours so far has yielded insights into the complexity of organisation and interactions that are far more valuable than quantitative methods such as questionnaires would have
produced.

 Even the diaries, although beset with their own problems of uptake and completion (I currently have 3!), have provided yet another viewpoint, not least on the huge number of hours that activists dedicate to their work; the back office, home and internet tasks that enable movements to function but which are largely unrecognised and undervalued.

And yet, with less than two months of my third year left I still need to interview 10 more people. My recruitment techniques have changed as time has gone on: initially I trawled the internet for groups and organisations that fit my anarchist/environmental focus and emailing them with information about the project and asking them to forward the email to their members. This elicited a few responses, but far fewer than I had hoped. Next I tried to publicise my research at events I was attending, such as anarchist bookfairs, and recruit participants face to face. This had a greater degree of success, but was hampered somewhat by my shyness. Most recently I’ve been using Twitter to try to recruit people: asking for retweets from people with relevant interests and followers. I was surprised by how many retweets I got, and at first was confident that this was *The Answer* to my recruitment problems, but while I had several offers, few have come to anything when I’ve tried to arrange interviews. All along I’ve been trying to use snowball sampling to reach people who are known to others, and in a one or two cases this has worked but not nearly as often as I would have hoped. Perhaps I’m not being persistent enough, but that’s
tied up with a bigger issue I’ll discuss below.

Problems associated with participant recruitment and retention are numerous on any research project and many of the standard issues of
time-commitment and access apply here but I’m finding recruitment for my PhD more difficult than I have on other projects I’ve worked on. I’ve been working through some of the issues in the faint hope of overcoming
them:

1)     
One issue that I had anticipated, and which has proved to be the case, is suspicion from activists about the legitimacy of my researcher status. The intelligence gathering tactics used by the police are notorious (Mark Kennedy being a recent but by no means lone case) and activists are right to be wary of outsiders. So I wasn’t in the least surprised when my supervisor told me she’s had an email asking whether I was a genuine PhD student. She was able to reassure them that I wasn’t planning to use the data for anything other than progressive and academic purposes but I
imagine most people with concerns about my status won’t go to those lengths, rather they’ll just not respond.

2)     
The second issue, and one that applies more widely than just my project, is that the people I am interested in talking to are incredibly busy. Although the time commitment is brief (generally a 1 hour interview in person or via Skype), it’s often just one more thing to try to shoehorn into an already packed schedule. The women I’ve interviewed are often working full-time, studying and campaigning for a number of groups at the same time. The issue of burn-out and over-commitment is one that I’m exploring in my research but I don’t want to contribute to it.

 3)    
I’m aware that referring to the participants I’m seeking as ‘activists’ may well lead some women to consider themselves ineligible.‘Activist’ is not an identity that is necessarily claimed by many who do activism, tied up as it is with issues of legitimacy and collective identity. I’d argue that this is particularly an issue for women. For some women cultural stereotypes around the abstract universal ‘Activist’ are such that it is incompatible with their own gender identities. Others undervalue their work (or have it undermined by others) to the extent that they don’t recognise their contribution in such a specific way. The ‘perfect standard’ that Chris Bobel has explored, one that is based on humility and rigor, is one that many women consider themselves to be unworthy of.
(Bobel’s work on menstrual activism is well worth a read, in particular her
article on ‘activist’ as a personal and collective identity:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14742830701497277)

 4)     
Authenticity and legitimacy of identity are issues that apply to me as well as my target sample and I’ve been contending with that on two fronts, both as an academic and as an activist. Frequently I feel like a fraud in both roles, often regardless of objective evidence or personal testimony to the contrary, and it’s by no means unique to me. But this, in combination with a generalised fear or reluctance of asking things of other people, has made recruiting participants all the more difficult. While I’ve now overcome a reluctance to talk about my research from fear of boring people, asking people to participate in my research seems like asking too much of them, putting too many demands on their time, or affording  myself an undeserved status or importance. It seems like nagging. The same illogical thought processes occur if I have to ‘chase up’ individuals who have dropped off the radar after initial email contact. Or if I’m following-up on diaries. Or if I’m trying to increase my sample through snowballing. One of my supervisors has said that I need to pester people, which is undoubtedly true because my current timidity certainly isn’t getting me anywhere. But first I need to feel entitled to pester people and that’s harder to do.

Over all I suspect there isn’t a magic bullet solution and that the way forward is to continue using all of the techniques I mentioned above to
attempt to recruit people, but with the looming shift to my final year the
pressure is on. Any advice or recommendations would be hugely appreciated so feel free to leave a comment. Don’t feel you have to though – I wouldn’t want to nag!

 
 
I've been slipping on the blog front again. Or more accurately falling face-first into inactivity. I'd love to blame teaching or work or have some such excuse but really it's just because I've been focusing on other things. So I'll try to get around to posting something soon but in the meantime, I read a really good piece on guilt and activism recently which is worth sharing:

http://peacenews.info/node/7292/diary-aneaka-kellay
 
 
I'm still thinking a lot about emotions and their role in social movements, but transcribing an interview recently got me thinking about the role of emotions in burn-out, and how awareness of our own and others' emotional needs as activists can prevent us overloading. In the process I stumbled across a great post about the need for radical self-care so thought I would share:
http://abortiongang.org/2013/03/radical-self-care/
 
 
Yesterday I went along to a talk by Andy Atkins, the executive director of Friends of the Earth (FoE) UK that was organised jointly by the University of Leicester’s geography society and Leicester FoE. The subject being ‘Economy and the environment: Friends or enemies?’ I was prepared for it to be a little dry, but it was far from it. I tweeted most of the way through so for an indication of the sorts of things covered find me on Twitter @RoseHolyoak.

After the talk a group of us from Geography and LFoE headed to a local restaurant and for part of the evening I sat next to Andy. While waiting for the wine to come (or that's what I was doing anyway) we got talking about the differences in environmental and development organisations, in particular the gender make-up of them. Having previously worked for Cafod and Tearfund, he was struck when he moved to FoE by how much more male-dominated it was in comparison. So the question was, why are women underrepresented in the higher echelons of environmental organisations?

Andy cited the religious roots of many organisations such as Oxfam, Cafod and Tearfund, suggesting that spiritually informed charitable work, particularly in the 19th century,  was an respectable way for (more privileged) women to occupy their time. Similarly, the caring aspect of such charitable work can be viewed as drawing on conventionally feminine roles. The collaborative and cooperative organisational culture that Andy perceived within these organisations could very well be part of the reason why women are so successful within then; working practices that align with the roles and skills which women have been socialised to excel at makes organisations conducive to women’s advancement.

While the above is certainly a credible argument, I wondered why the same didn’t hold for environmentalism. Many of the earliest environmental organisations came out of women’s campaigning during the Victorian era, around similarly ‘feminine’ issues. The formation of the RSPB in 1891 was the result of the merger of two conservation groups: the Plumage League founded in Didsbury, Manchester, in 1889 by Emily Williamson; and the Croydon-based Fur and Feathers League, founded by a Mrs Phillips (Desmond 2008). Much of the need for such a conservation group was due to the popularity amongst wealthier women for exotic furs and bird’s feathers as part of clothes and fashion accessories, and so women were best placed to become aware of these issues. Octavia Hill, meanwhile, co-founder of what would become the National Trust, was an early social reformer who as well as working to improve the lives of London’s slum-dwelling communities also promoted the preservation of open spaces for the benefit of the working class.

As such it’s worth wondering why the legacy of these women’s efforts were not a part of the revival of environmentalism during the 1960s – the same period during which many development charities were founded. One aspect worth considering is the extent to which the environmental revival (or rather revolution, as emerging groups were markedly more radical than their earlier forebears) was both male-led and culturally masculine. While Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ may have been the watershed moment in alerting many to the implications of environmental destruction, for the most part radical environmental groups such as Greenpeace and FoE were founded by men, with much of their work being characterised by pioneering forms of direct action. At risk of oversimplifying things, it’s much easier to chase down whaling ships in the Atlantic if you have a wife at home to care for your children and maintain the house while you’re away.

Furthermore, while many of these groups started life with decentralised, non-hierarchical structures, as they have increasingly gained political legitimacy, their organisational structures have largely formalised to mirror those of science and industry (Seager 1993:10). The formalised hierarchy of many of the more established organisations is such that they are less attractive to women, whose participation is largely concentrated in grassroots, community-based voluntary roles. While education and community-engagement are undoubtedly crucial to the operation of these organisations, such efforts are not considered ‘work’ to the same extent, with status and legitimacy more often attached to the specialised areas of lobbying, research and litigation to which women have less access. Community work is unpaid or low-paid and frequently part-time and as such does not facilitate the same access to formal promotion structures that other roles do (Seager 1993).

Another aspect worth considering when looking at women’s underrepresentation at the higher levels of environmental organisations is the centrality of science and technology to environmental policy-making. There has long been concern over women’s participation in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects and recent figures showing that women, while still often in a minority, are enrolling in undergraduate courses in STM subjects in increasing numbers should be cause for optimism (Handelsman et al 2005). However, a closer look reveals that women’s representation decreases the further up the career ladder you go. And this is not just due to a historical legacy such that the majority of professors, because of their age, are male; recent research has empirically shown that women are discriminated against in the recruitment process (Moss-Racusin et al 2012).

Finally, women’s additional responsibilities – ranging from raising children, cooking and cleaning, to caring for elderly relatives – are such that the ‘second shift’ (Hochschild 1989) applies to women working in environmental organisations as much as anywhere else. Maybe the mistake here is to be looking at why women are underrepresented in environmental organisations and focus instead on why they are better represented in others to see what we could learn. Sadly, by that point the waiting staff had brought the wine so I was otherwise distracted.


References:

Desmond, K. (2008) Planet Savers: 301 Extraordinary Environmentalists Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing

Handelsman, J. et al (2005) ‘More Women in Science’ Science vol.309 no.5738 pp. 1190-1191

Hochschild, A. (1989) The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, (with Anne Machung). New York: Viking Penguin

Moss-Racusin, C.A. et al (2012) ‘Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students’ PNAS vol.109 no.41 pp. 16474–16479

Seager, J. (1993) Earth Follies: Feminism, Politics and the Environment. London: Earthscan

 
 
In two weeks I'll be presenting a paper about some of my research as part of a panel on 'Women in Political Activism' at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender Graduate Seminar series at the University of Warwick.
My paper's entitled "Eco-Warriors and Earth-Mothers: Young Women Negotiating Femininity in Social Movement Activism in the UK" and looks at how femininity is produced and deployed by young women engaged in environmental and anarchist activism. I'll put up a full post on the topic closer to the time.
In the meantime I'm looking forward to meeting all the other presenters and hearing some exciting new research.

Full programme: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/rsw/research_centres/gender/graduateseminars/gsprogramme/
Wednesday 13th March 5-7pm
University of Warwick
 
 
Photo Credit: http://www.etsy.com/listing/28805225/less-guilt-more-action-button
After a fascinating conversation last week I’ve been spending a lot of time pondering the relevance and uses of guilt. It’s certainly not an emotion in short supply, and one with which I’m not unfamiliar. The very existence of this blog and my utter failure to write anything on it for the past 9 months is just one source of academia-related guilt I currently suffer from.

Last week I had a cup of tea and a chat with the wonderful Jenny Pickerill and we got on to the subject of guilt. She related how during a lecture to a group of environmental activists she explained that she had “given up guilt”, only to be met with surprise and disapproval: somehow abandoning guilt was akin to abandoning a commitment to activism. Guilt is certainly a prominent feature in environmental discourse, but the notion that guilt is an essential motivator for living well is oddly Catholic. While the relationship between green ideology and religion has been acknowledged previously (Asma 2010), it’s also the case that atheism and self-determination are not alien concepts to progressive movements.

Western privilege and consumer capitalism provide Greens (as well as so many others) with plenty to feel guilty about. Energy use. Food miles. Sweat-shop labour. Carbon footprints. Even our green choices (e.g. public transport), while better than the alternative (e.g. private vehicles), can still be cause for concern (e.g. I should have walked!). The issue with guilt though is whether or not it’s productive. For some, guilt and the associated need to undertake practices of sacrifice are means by which their lived experiences can match their inner ideals, and yet for others guilt is more closely associated with powerlessness. Anyone with even fleeting experiences of depression will likely be familiar with the paralysing impact of guilt. Failure to achieve a goal, regardless of how small it may be (get out of bed today, finish an essay, not eat an entire packet of biscuits in one sitting) most often results in self-criticism and regret rather than a motivating impulse to affect change. How useful is guilt as a motivator if it doesn’t motivate?

In the context of my research, I’m interested in how emotion, and in this case guilt, is gendered.  As Erica Jong, in Fear of Flying, provocatively writes “show me a women who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.” Guilt is by no means an innate feeling, but some people in society are socialised to feel it more, to internalise failure and perceived deviance. Perhaps unsurprisingly these people are largely the less powerful because guilt is a weapon of control. For women, pressures to be a perfect mother and raise happy, healthy children induce maternal guilt. Fear of sexual violence and shame relating to sexuality produce guilt relating to behaviour, dress and relationships. Ideals of perfect bodies and managed appearances feed in to guilt about exercise, eating and taking up space. Psychological studies, meanwhile, consistently find women reporting higher levels of guilt and shame than their male counterparts (Lutwak et al 1998; Benetti-McQuoid and Bursik 2005).

What does this all mean for activism, movements, and the individuals that make them what they are? For the moment I have no idea. Or rather lots of ideas that are not yet coherent. But perhaps, if I can stave off the guilt for a little longer, I might be able to make some sense of them.

References:

Asma, S.T. (2010) ‘Green Guilt’ The Chronicle of Higher Education <http://chronicle.com/article/Green-Guilt/63447/>

Benetti-McQuoid, J. and Bursik, Krisanne (2005) ‘Individual Differences in Experiences of and Responses to Guilt and Shame: Examining the Lenses of Gender and Gender Role’ Sex Roles 53(1-2) pp.133-142

Jong, E. (1973) Fear of Flying

Lutwak, N., Ferrarib, J.R. and Cheek, J.M. (1998) ‘Shame, guilt, and identity in men and women: the role of identity orientation and processing style in moral affects’ Personality and Individual Differences 25(6) pp.1027-1036