MamaBakers as Everyday Makers: the political is personal

ABSTRACT

Henrik Bang's concept of the Everyday Maker as a new type of political identity has been increasingly utilised in empirical research across a wide range of settings. In an age with numerous accounts of the changing nature of political participation, Bang's framework enables a critical investigation of contemporary participation. Although one of the key defining characteristics of the Everyday Maker is that their activity often occurs outside the formal political sphere, there is no empirical work to date which uses Bang's frame to examine gendered activities which appear private and social, with no obvious connections to the ‘political’. To address this omission, this article explores women's participation in an Australian community group, MamaBake using the Everyday Maker framework to provide an alternative reading of what might be termed personalised politics. The article argues that the new type of political identity, is also prevalent in the social context, and demonstrates why this is relevant to the study of political participation. It also challenges the idea that the new forms are increasingly characterised by ‘engagement norms’. The data for the case study research is drawn from a survey of the MamaBake members, and interviews with the real life participants.

KEYWORDS:

• Political participation
• citizenship norms
• individualisation
• MamaBake
• Australia

Notes on Contributor

Pio Rowe is a PhD student at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra.

Notes

1. As Boler et al. (2014, 439) so aptly note:

It is difficult to miss the irony that at a time when women are increasingly adopting distinctive and potent leadership roles within contemporary social movement organizational structures, a commitment to horizontalism and an ethos of leaderless movement renders any identification of leaders unwelcome.