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What’s so Contentious about Free Food? Tactical Repertoires in the United States and France

Mon, August 18, 8:30 to 10:10am, TBA

Abstract

What do people “do” when they “do” politics? This paper investigates how the same social movement tactic—serving free food in a public place—is understood as “contentious politics” or not for different reasons by various actors. We use ethnographic fieldwork with two social movements to question the applicability of the unitary vision of state-centered social movement repertoires offered by the late Charles Tilly for understanding contemporary activism. While the concept of “repertoires” is useful for capturing how actors appear to have an internally coherent sense of what “doing politics” actually means, we argue that theories must account for the possibility that the same act can fall into multiple repertoires interpreted as targeting a wide range of institutions.

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