This article looks at how grassroots actors engage with dramatic situations of crisis.

What is it about?

Merging strands of sociolinguistic scholarship with social movement theory, the concepts of ‘stance’ and ‘stance-taking’ are presented as a way to understand how individuals collectively exert their agency in the face of macro-structural instabilities and uncertainties. Stance is defined as the agentive and solidaristic position taken up by a group of actors in order to navigate and overcome destabilizing moments of social rupture. Consequentially, stance-taking is defined as the situational ensemble of discursive, organizational and dramaturgical practice through which stances are ultimately developed and deployed. In addition to shedding light on how people articulate their agency under conditions of macro-structural volatility, analysis of the social construction of stance promotes multi-dimensional understandings of how social movements intensify and expand in times of crisis.As a way to illustrate the analytical purchase of these concepts, attention is given to the stance-taking practices that fueled the rise of mass public protests in Buenos Aires, Argentina at the height of a severe national crisis in 2001.

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Why is it important?

This article cross-pollinates research on 'stance' from sociolinguistics with social movement theory as a way to shed light on questions of agency and collective action in times of macro-structural rupture and uncertainty.