What is it about?
This paper uses ethnographic and qualitative data to examine the strategies used by neighborhood activists in post-Katrina New Orleans. At its core, the paper asks the question, how do activists respond to having little formal power over the issues they care about? It creates a model for these strategies. Creative coercion happens when: 1) activists are excluded from a network 2) these activists have little formal power and 3) activists pull an informal lever to impact policy or community.
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Why is it important?
Two trends make this paper particularly relevant to both the study of social movements and the current political moment: 1) increasingly, policy is happening in networked contexts where these types of informal relationships exist 2) social media is influencing the way activism happens, making informal social pressure and creativity more important to protest and participation.
Perspectives
I find myself coming back to this paper often, in part because activists so often find themselves in the frustrating position of feeling like they do not have the power to influence the issues they want to influence. This paper illuminates some of the strategies that activists use in these situations -- something that's transportable across surprisingly diverse contexts.
Stephen Danley
Rutgers The State University of New Jersey
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Creative Coercion in Post-Katrina New Orleans: a Neighborhood Strategy to Address Conflict in Networks, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies An Interdisciplinary Journal, March 2015, UTS ePress,
DOI: 10.5130/ccs.v7i1.4127.
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