Critical Review on Civil society and social movements in migrant communities

• In Event: Education and Migrant Communities

Proposal

Migratory flows characterize our world due to social crises across the globe. In Europe and the U.S., opponents of migration maintain unprecedented fears of the “other” moving in and reconfiguring cultural norms and power relations accompanied by racist nativism and xenophobia (Ngo, 2017; Portes, 2010). As policy interventions and hostile rhetoric are mobilized against the alleged invasion of “strangers” to society, there remains activism on the part of migrant groups seeking social change (Bauman, 2016). As migration becomes a prominent feature of global civil society, we ponder how migrants’ presence, resistance, and activism (re)shapes the social structure of societies. Portes (2010) argues, “social change, truly revolutionary social change, requires the transformation of the value system or the remaking of the society’s class structure” (p. 1548). Further, social movement research contends that often change occurs from more privileged middle-class groups (Pardo, 1998) rather than from marginalized ones such as those in our respective studies. We expand on this literature to argue that undocumented migrant groups engage in civil society, and their activism ought to be a recognized social movement despite their invisible, low-status in society.
This primarily theoretical paper addresses these concerns by reviewing conceptual and empirical literature about civil society and social movements, and applying it to our longitudinal ethnographic research on undocumented migrant groups. Our concern in this paper is with how to theorize the activism and resistance--as a social movement--of marginalized undocumented migrant groups across comparative contextsWe propose theoretical questions that guide the paper: Can concepts of civil society and social movements, developed in western contexts, be used to describe actions of transnational migrant groups for education equity? If so, why is the discussion of their emerging sphere of collective actions useful for studies of migrants and education? To answer these questions, the paper will have three sections. First, we explore theoretical and empirical research about civil society in relation to social movements. Second, we discuss our longitudinal ethnographies that prompted questions about what counts as social movements/change for undocumented migrant groups, including context and data collection/analysis for this project. To this end, we discuss the theme of everyday resistance as a key finding in our work (Scott, 1985).Third, we offer theoretical implications for understanding undocumented migrant experiences through the (re)centering their experiences in the conceptualization of social movements.
The key concepts which set the foundation for our comparative theorizing are concerned with social movements and civil society. First, social movements are broadly defined as “distinct social processes, consisting of the mechanisms through which actors engaged in collective action [...] are involved in conflictual relations [...] linked by dense informal networks [and] share a distinct collective identity” (della Porta & Diani, 2006, p.20). These processes are tied up with that of civil society. Gramsci (1971) divides superstructure into two major levels: one is civil society, which is the ensemble of organisms commonly considered private. The other one is the political society, or the State. Civil society is conceptualized as the realm of organized activity outside the immediate control of the State and includes organizations such as churches, trade unions, schools, and so on. According to Gramsci, civil society’s ways of establishing and organizing relationships and consciousness are deeply political, particularly as it corresponds to hegemony, while political society or State corresponds to direct domination.
Second, Calhoun (1992, 1994) contends that civil society includes a public sphere in which a rational-critical discourse can occur occur about how different groups' interests can relate and organize democratic efforts against state control. Despite the perceived democratic nature of the public sphere--where presumably public opinion is freely formed and accessed by all citizens--the reality is it is a “bourgeois sphere” that excludes certain people based on race, class, and gender, and is fraught with social, economic, cultural, and linguistic inequality (Calhoun, 1992; Fraser, 1992).
In the transnational contexts of our ethnographic research, we observed various forms of activism and resistance on local levels. Given that social movements seek large-scale structural change with direct political action, these moments in our work wouldn’t traditionally be considered as sustaining. However, we argue that our comparative contexts link through their strangeness to the civil societies in which they are outsiders. In both cases, the populations are working outside of the given public sphere, and in what is considered the “trenches” of civil society (Gramsci, 1971). The trenches are situated within the concept of hegemony, social change within this space is difficult but not impossible. Migrant groups mobilize to occupy a certain degree of social space supported by emerging networks and transforming collective identities. Specifically, this comparative work examines how these local acts of movements changed people’s perceptions of who they are, what they can do, and how they can do it. The comparison between different groups in different geo-political contexts allows us to look further into the migration literature and to “examine the relations between migration and change under a transnational lens” (Portes, 2010, p. 1556). They are strangers to each other and to their home-space/civil society/public sphere, and yet, their struggles and activism across contexts familiarize them.
This paper argues that the social and cultural space created by the migrant communities themselves have encouraged the formation of the sense of belonging and community. The implications of (re)centering migrant experiences in theoretical and empirical literature reflect our goal to advocate for a more “inconvenient” education research as it pertains to the politics of belonging and active agency of migrant communities. Given the increasingly transnational mobility of people, culture, language, and ideas, it has become critically important to learn from the experiences of migrant communities that have been in the margins in these transnational spaces.

Authors

• Min Yu, Wayne State University

• Sophia Rodriguez, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Jeremy Acree, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

• Cathryn Bennett, University of North Carolina, Greensboro