Content area
Abstract
Issue Title: Qualitative Methods and Social Movement Research
Participant-observation can teach us much about the everyday meanings of doing social activism. I conceptualize these "implicit meanings" in relation to work in the sociology of culture, and social movement studies, and give examples from activists' everyday interaction. A participant-observer's forays into implicit meanings illuminate three dimensions of activists' experiences: the ways activists practice democratic citizenship in their groups, the ways they build group ties, and the ways they define the meaning of activism itself. By probing these implicit meanings, we can address questions that concern many social movement scholars. We increase our understanding of how movements grow, accomodate conflict, and build alliances, and we can specify which insights are useful in theories of contemporary or "new" social movements. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]