Modalities of Experience: Notes from Michel de Certeau on Social Organization/Mobilization

• In Event: Discursive Tactics for Social Change: Research on Activist Organizations and Social Movements

Abstract

Recent students of social organization/mobilization have developed an understanding of experience in which emotion is pitted against reason, the conscious against the unconscious, and language or discourse against practices. Michel de Certeau’s work gives us a vocabulary to return to a more constitutive understanding of experience. It provides us with a rhetorical framework, aptly titled as the arts of everyday life, for thinking of the modalities of experience. This paper uses de Certeau’s vocabulary to interpret/translate the experiences of the members of the largest women’s organization in India to develop its argument.

Author

• Yogita Sharma, University of Texas, San Antonio