Colin Barker Prize

At the 2023 edition of AFPP we inaugurated a new prize for the best paper presented by a postgraduate researcher or unwaged delegate. The prize remembers Colin Barker, who founded AFPP in 1995 along with Mike Tyldesley. Colin’s intellectual generosity and enthusiastic support for scholars at the earliest stages of their careers helped make the conference such a welcoming place in which to try out new ideas, and had a direct impact on a number of members of the current organising committee. The prize is intended to continue the encouragement of the next generation of social movement scholars at AFPP.

Congratulations to all of our prize winners for their excellent contributions to the conference. 

2024 Colin Barker Prize recipients:

Andres Emiliano Sierra Martinez for ‘Neighbourhood environmental activism as a theme of urban social movements and protest: analytical insights from a case study in Mexico City’.

Abstract: This paper discusses contemporary trajectories of environmentalism in urban social movements in Mexico City. These analytical insights derive from the empirical engagement with the emergence of the Water Defence Committee of Santo Domingo (WDC) as a neighbour-based organisation that coordinates protest and neighbour solidarity facing water scarcity in Santo Domingo, Mexico City. Discussions on urban social movements have considered neighbourhood organisations in analyses of political democratisation and resistance to exclusion (Borja, 2010; Meyer & Boudreau, 2012). Similar studies also concentrate on proximity and density as elements of everyday politics in urban settings (Beveridge & Koch, 2018; Cochrane, 2018). This paper contributes to such discussions by offering evidence to understand the complexity and potential that neighbour relationships represent for processes of popular protest. Considering sociological descriptions of the neighbour relationship and the consequences of water scarcity in connection to environmental justice agendas (Agyeman et al., 2016; Painter, 2012), this paper explores neighbourhood environmentalist activism as a theme of urban social movements and protests. The paper argues that this form of activism is marked by expressions of place attachment (or self-identification with a landscape) and by processes of resonance (understood as an amplification of local capacities). The case study helps to map emergent themes in urban social movements and to problematise place attachment and resonance as contingent elements of spatial solidarity beyond romanticised descriptions of precarity.

Loren Lok Yung Ma for ‘Different struggles, same oppressor: the role of identity in the Anti-CCP coalition between Hong Kongers, Tibetans and Uyghurs’.

Abstract: In recent years, Hong Kong, Tibetan and Uyghur organisations have started to co-organise protests against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in major cities around the world. Proponents of collective identity theories suggested that collective identity was required for mobilisation in collective actions, but later scholars viewed tolerant identities as more effective as it promoted flexibility and inclusiveness. Given that the three diasporic groups in this coalition had very distinct cultures and identities, how were they able to overcome their differences to form a coalition and what was the role of identity in it? Through semi-structured interviews with 8 joint-protests organisers/activists, this study showed that tolerant – instead of collective – identities that were Anti-CCP and yet non- exclusive and encouraged identification with group-level collective identities were able, and more suitable, in providing a sense of solidarity among them. This was explained by each group’s varying extent of struggles with constructing, asserting and/or maintaining their collective identities – as HongKongers, Tibetans or Uyghurs – opposite to the Chinese identity, which was an important element of their respective social movements. Their recognition of shared experiences and grievances also helped them to overcome their differences and learn from each other. Framing of the joint-protests were found to be shaped by these tolerant identities and the groups’ shared experience of relocation. The master frames of “Anti-CCP” and “human rights” used in the coalition further showed the highly contentious nature of their collective actions. Overall, this study demonstrated the complex and multi-layered role of identity in this coalition – collective identity at group-level and tolerant identities at coalition-level – challenging the dichotomy between collective and tolerant identities theories and expanding our understanding on transnational and diasporic social movements.

2023 Colin Barker Prize recipient: 

Jacob Stringer, for ‘Who Can Live the Housing Struggle? Gramsci’s common sense expanded through Bourdieu’

Abstract: Gramsci’s idea of ‘common sense’ is often treated as operating simply through discourse, particularly in Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxian formulation of articulation. But this may not be the most useful way for social movements to think about it. London Renter’s Union is discussed as a case study of a social movement organisation trying to articulate across class and race lines as it does radical community organising in London. An ethnographic study of the organisation shows that, despite a commitment to organising across class and race, London Renters Union still finds difficulty in attracting a diverse membership. Elements of how it organises don’t always seem to fit with the desire expressed by the union to be ‘led by the most affected renters’. The routine of meetings and planning sessions across a large geographic area exists within a ‘middle class’ milieu, advantaging those with higher education, professional jobs and more time. It is argued that it is not a new discursive common sense that can solve this. Rather, the problem lies in the organisation trying to induct its new members into ‘ways of being’ that are too far from their habitual ways of being and the places where they feel comfortable. Bourdieu’s idea of ‘habitus’ will be introduced to help explain why different people feel psychologically or physically comfortable in different environments and places, in the process expanding Gramsci’s idea of ‘common sense’ to make it more material and embodied. This re-conceptualisation of common sense/good sense to include habitus enables a discussion of whether and how radical community organising can feel ‘liveable’ from multiple class positions. It is proposed that it could be of benefit to London Renters Union and other social movement organisations to imagine themselves as needing to articulate with habitus, or common sense ‘ways of being’.