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GENDER, PLACE, AND EVERYDAY LIFE
Fifteen years ago, Naomi Abrahams (1992, 342) urged scholars of political action to pay greater attention to individuals in their daily lives by acknowledging a range of activities as political: those that do not "directly target change in the political economy" and are part of "every arena of social life." Abrahams's argument connects with other feminist scholarship that has broadened concepts of political action and activism by extending the "public sphere" to encompass household and social relations and by highlighting the role of work (often, but not always, waged labor) in stimulating people's awareness of social problems and motivation to address them (e.g., Mansbridge 1990; Naples 1992; Ryan 1992; Staeheli and Cope 1994; Staeheli and Clarke 2003).
In this essay, we further explore notions of women's activism by focusing on the crucial role played by individuals embedded in communities in shaping the social networks and relations necessary for social change; these networks and relations that foster change begin in informal and localized interactions and may evolve into more formalized, institutional social movements. We highlight and seek to better understand the potential links between geographical embeddedness and small acts of social networking or social change, actions that may not in themselves create direct political action but that foster the social relationships that may enable future political action or organizations (as in the civil rights movement [Morris 1984]).
As geographers, we see activism as an issue of geographic scale (as do, for example, Staeheli 1994; Miller 2000; and Martin and Holloway 2005): Some person or group recognizes a problem (at what scale?) and takes some action(s) to address it (at what scale?) in order to create change (at what scale?). Fundamentally, this notion of activism conceptualizes individuals in terms of their social relationships, with varying geographies (e.g., near, far, electronic). Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt (1995) have demonstrated how place-based social networks cut across, link together, and help to construct diverse realms of everyday life, including those within the home, the workplace, the neighborhood, and the community. How activism shapes those relationships affects whether and how it is perceived as a movement (with formalized goals, articulated grievances, and the like).
We open the category activism to consider actions and activities that, because...