Sociology seminar series: Em Temple-Malt & Luke Yates
| Starts: | 14:00 7 May 2014 |
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| Ends: | 14:00 7 May 2014 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Dr Luke Yates |
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Em Temple-Malt: 'Encounters with acquaintances and strangers: civil partnership and relational displays'
Luke Yates: 'Everyday Politics, Social Practices and Movement Networks: Daily Life in Barcelona’s Social Centres'
The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much contemporary social science theory. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to moments of mobilisation, and to movements with clear organisational boundaries, tactics and goals. Exceptions have explored movements’ collective identity, their ‘free spaces’ and prefigurative politics, but such processes are framed as important only in accounting for movements in ‘abeyance’, or in explaining movement persistence. This presentation focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organisation are continually being developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicised and politicising as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres. Following Alberto Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilisation to occur. However, they not only underpin mobilisation, but are themselves politically expressive and prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The variety of political forms – adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinised everyday practices, allow diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non-activists. An approach which focuses on practices and networks rather than mobilisation and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive.
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Room G.019
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
