Organizing Struggles from Below

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel brings the tradition of labor, community and social movement organizing into conversation with democratic theory and theories of political action. Taken together, the papers on this panel seek to address a core set of questions about how organizing relates to and is distinguished from other forms of political action, participation, and organization -- including mobilization, political education, statesmanship, power, and order. Is organizing best understood as a means toward an end, or an end in its own right? How can theorizing organizing as transformative action reshape understandings of mobilization, democratic participation, and political order? How might focusing on the quiet, intersubjective, and horizontal work of organizing provide a counterweight to social movement theories that prioritize mobilization, crowds, and the vertical work of “bottom up” resistance? Can organizing offer a populist, grassroots alternative to realist theories of power, interests, and order that prioritize states and statesmen? What can organizers teach us about how political subjectivities are transformed, new futures imagined, and capacities for collective agency built and sustained?

Each individual contribution to the panel situates organizing within a distinct conceptual terrain. While Inouye frames organizing as a form of radical pedagogy in which both relations of hierarchy and horizontality are at stake, Phulwani’s paper devises a realist theory of “popular organizing” as a challenge to overly static, statist conceptions of order. Pairing Arendt’s theorization of action with Dewey’s insights on democratic imagination, Woodly develops a relational account of organizing as the collaborative, creative work of “understanding [oneself] and the world anew.” Pineda, in turn, takes up the relationship between organizing and mobilization, and suggests that the work of organizing can guard against key dangers of populist protest that often render it both exclusive and ephemeral. The theoretical resources that this panel draws on are thus varied and rich -- including work in pragmatism, realism, democratic theory, feminism, radical pedagogy, and theories of political action -- alongside and intertwined with careful attention to historical social movements of marginalized peoples in the United States, from the Highlander Folk School’s involvement in the Southern labor movement of the 1930s and the long civil rights movement to the contemporary Movement for Black Lives. Collectively, these papers suggest that organizing -- though often overlooked and undertheorized -- offers a compelling and complex source of insights for political theories of democracy, agency, action, and order.

This panel also resonates with the guiding questions behind this year’s theme, “Populism and Privilege,” and in particular the divisional call for proposals from Foundations of Political Theory. Central to all the papers on this panel is a consideration of how the work of organizing forges and maintains “political struggles from below” by challenging current relations of power, cultivating new forms of solidarity and identification, transforming political subjects into democratic agents, and revitalizing avenues for political participation. As a form of political action that is relational, intersubjective, dynamic, pragmatic, and pedagogical, organizing is crucial to the cultivation of alternative populisms and re-imaginings of who the people are and how they enact power.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Organizer as Radical Pedagogue: Myles Horton’s Theory of Democratic Education - Mie Inouye, Yale University

• From Order to Organizing: Rethinking Political Realism & Radical Democracy - Vijay Phulwani, Cornell University

• To Be Transformed in the Service of the Work: The Organizing Philosophy of M4BL - Deva Woodly, New School for Social Research

• The Organized Crowd: Organizing, Mobilizing, and Democratic Agency - Erin Pineda, Smith College

Chair

• Lisa J. Disch University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Discussant

• Ali Aslam Mount Holyoke College