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Coherent Biographies and Exemplary Selves: Narratives of Identity among Climate Change Activists in Finland and Malawi

Sun, August 17, 10:30am to 12:10pm, TBA

Abstract

Based on 64 interviews with climate-change activists and NGO workers in Finland and Malawi, this paper re-conceptualizes the relationship between collective identity-projects and social movement/NGO work. Choosing what we term “a comparison of edges”—comparing cases in strikingly different contexts—allows us to see permutations in the form of identity afforded by ostensibly similar participation in a transnational social movement. Finnish activists and NGO workers narrated a biography that highlighted the social good they pursued, and related this biography to their participation and identity. Their Malawian counterparts linked their identity to NGO work through narrating an individualized mobility project that allowed them to construct their identities as upwardly striving, aspiring-elites. Through this juxtaposition of cases we re-conceptualize the ways in which collective identities are leveraged to understand how participation in a social movement is made meaningful in participants’ lives.

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