Re-thinking Contemporary Activism: From Community to Emplaced Sociality

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between activism, sociality and place. It analyses a case-study of selected social relations produced through activities related to an urban social movement - the UK network of the international Cittàslow (Slow City) movement. It specifically examines how social relationships contribute to the human agency that Cittàslow activism involves. In a recent Cultural Studies analysis of the Cittàslow movement, Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig (2006) have suggested that Cittàslow ‘communities’ drive processes of change. Here, following social anthropologists (Creed 2006; Amit in Amit & Rapport 2002) who call for an interrogation of the concept of ‘community’ in its local and academic uses, I propose a different analytical route. I suggest that Cittàslow activism is better understood by analysing how agency is produced through actual local embodied social relationships.

Keywords:

• Activism
• slow cities (Cittàslow)
• sociality
• community
• senses

Acknowledgments

As this article has developed it has benefited from the comments of a number of people whom I would like to thank: seminar participants at the Universities of Manchester, Loughborough, and Nottingham Trent; Dennis Smith (Loughbo-rough University, UK); the anonymous readers appointed by Ethnos; and John Postill (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) for both his comments and our discussions about sociality. The research this article is based on was made possible by funding initially from Loughborough University, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, and from 2005-7 from the Nuffield Foundation.

Notes

1. Cittàslow, an off-shoot of the Slow Food Movement (also founded in Italy, in 1986), was set up as a group of Italian Mayors met to think through how the principles of slow living embodied in the values of the Slow Food movement might be applied to urban living (see Knox 2005; Parkins & Craig 2006). For more details about Slow Food see www.slowfood.com, accessed 18th August 2006.

2. www.cittaslow.net/sezioni/Rete%20Internazionale/pagine.asp?idn=1 235, accessed 18th March 2008.

3. It should also be noted that their uses of community are situated in other ways. They are inextricable from UK government vocabularies (e.g. the ‘Community Plan’ local development documents) that use the term. Moreover, references to community, even when they are intended to mean a particular population rather than actual social bonds themselves, are not value free. Gerald Creed sums it up well when he notes how ‘people who deploy the term in one sense may unavoidably if not intentionally, invoke the other qualities popularly associated with it’ (2006:5). Both local people's and government characterisations of community as a potential field for sociality or ‘social cohesion’ carry the often positive connotations frequently associated with the term. This is precisely because ‘community’ has other possible definitions that, like Jen, people are often aware of.

4. A point suggested by John Postill (personal communication).

5. As John Postill (2006) has suggested in developing his concept of ‘patrol sociality’ to analyse the forms of sociality that develop in neighbourhood watch patrols in suburban Malaysia.