Intersectional Coalitions Dynamics, Resource Inequality, and Political Translation: An Ethnographic Comparison

• In Event: 2483 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Intersectionality and Progressive Social Movements

Abstract

This paper studies grassroots activists who install themselves as ‘political translators’ to address conflicts about race and gender within movement coalitions. Scholars have understood internal coalition conflicts in terms of market-based competition, with grassroots activists’ lack of resources forcing them to cooperate with professionalized NGOs and institutional sponsors (Minkoff and Agnone). I advance an intersectional perspective on coalitions by discussing the emergence of a ‘political translation’ collective following conflicts over race-based marginalization in the US global justice movement among the organizers of the US Social Forum coalition. This emergent collective of activists included many bilingual migrants, people of color and LGBT organizers who saw translation as a paradigm for developing a more equitable model of democracy in intersectional coalitions. Tracing their history back to civil rights activism, their impact lay in holding a third intersectional (translating) position between the national institutional NGO sector and local grassroots activists, without silencing or submitting to pressures from funders. They resisted pressure from funders to bring in their preferred speakers and impose their perspectives on the national planning assembly. In order to understand how the USSF coalition enacted a critical political translation process that avoided coalition breakup, I rely on a comparison focusing on the German Social Forum (GSF). The GSF, as the USSF, experienced conflicts about resource inequality and ethnicity intersecting with questions of gender-based marginalization and broke up following two years of conflict. Based on a seven-year ethnographic comparison of the USSF and the GSF my study shows how political translation can help movement coalitions survive internal communication breakdowns, as well as broaden their coalitions. My microsociological focus on intersectionality reveals the critical intentionality and impact of ‘bridge leaders’ (Robnett) and marginalized groups within coalitions (Ghaziani) to highlight the informal impact of activists who envisioned themselves as translators, rather than functioning as “neutral” brokers between different groups.

Author

• Nicole Doerr, University of Copenhagen