Precarity and Privilege in Animal Rights Activists' Trajectories of Interest-Driven Participation

• In Event: 43.052 - Politics in the Foreground and Background of Learning: Analyses of Power and Learning Across Settings

Abstract

This paper considers animal liberation activism as a case of interest-based learning. Azevedo’s (2011, 2013) concept of “lines of practice” suggests how patterns of interest-driven activity cluster at intersections between individuals’ “preferences” and “conditions of practice” in their environment. Building on this work, this paper locates “conditions of practice” more explicitly within systems of power.

Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) is an animal liberation activist network that uses nonviolent direct action. From late 2014 to 2017, I conducted participant observation and 20 unstructured interviews with activists in California. In DxE, learning and participation entail differential legal and bodily risk, conditions of “precarity” produced by political processes that marginalize some people according to their identities (Butler, 2009). Experiences of oppression and privilege often figure in the stories DxE activists tell about their interest development. In this paper, I present ethnographic data to analyze how precarity and privilege shape trajectories of interest and participation in DxE. Pseudonyms are used.

As might be expected, precarity sometimes constrained interest development and participation, preventing activists from participating in protests and investigations that might lead to arrest. One woman worried about participating in animal rescues, even though this was a valued form of practice in the group. “I would fear being raped in jail, beat up,” she told me.

Other times, experiences of oppression sometimes opened or reinforced areas of interest in animal rights. For example, one young woman named Ilana told me her story of coming to the U.S. from Latin America with a man she had trusted. However, once she arrived in the U.S., the man began to verbally and physically abuse her. “I was in my room, like in a corner all day,” she said in an interview. As a new immigrant, Ilana felt trapped. Her abuser threatened to have her deported and drew on misogynistic discourses that blame women for their abuse. Once she escaped, she said, “I knew what suffering was like. So I didn’t want anyone to have to go through what I went [through], and I felt like it was not something just about humans because animals feel the same too.”

Finally, a concern for social justice led some activists to exercise their relative privilege in ways that also shaped their trajectories. For instance, a young woman named Daniel explained why she was training to be a police liaison, saying, “One of the reasons that I want to be a police liaison is to contribute to my community but also because I AM white. I have more privilege, and I feel like, okay, this is a way that I can really exercise my privilege in a way that is going to protect my community.” Daniel’s line of practice in the role of police liaison is shaped by a sense of duty that emerges from her concern for the conditions of precarity affecting others in her community.

Attending to the politics of social difference in DxE demonstrates the value of analyzing precarity and privilege in interest-based learning.

Author

• Tanner Vea, The Pennsylvania State University