Defining, Aligning, and Negotiating Futures: New Forms of Identity Work in an Urban Farming Project

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 2. Cultural Values and the City

Abstract

Collective identity is critical to motivating and sustaining participation in social movement groups. What organizes and sustains collective action when a group’s members do not share common identity traits such as race, class, religion or gender? This paper argues that shared ideas about the future, or future projections, are overlooked bases of collective identity in social movement groups, and that the processes of defining, aligning with and negotiating future projections constitute previously unrecognized forms of identity work. I support this argument with ethnographic, interview and archival data from a nascent urban farming project. After describing how project founders defined a compelling future of “sustainable community,” I identify a process called imaginative imputation through which a diverse set of participants aligned themselves with the project. “Coordination problems created critical points for negotiating new properties of the imagined future, ultimately weakening some individuals’ identification with, and commitment to, the urban farm.

Author

• Amy E. Jonason, Furman University