The Identity Dilemma

Social Movements and Collective Identity

Edited by Aidan McGarry and James M. Jasper
Book Cover

PB: $30.95
EAN: 978-1-4399-1252-2
Publication: Jul 15

HC: $85.50
EAN: 978-1-4399-1251-5
Publication: May 15

Ebook: $30.95
EAN: 978-1-4399-1253-9
Publication:

228 pages
6 x 9
7 tables, 10 figs.

Are identity politics good or bad for social movements?

Description

Collective identities are politically necessary, or at least useful, as banners for recruiting others and engaging opponents and the state. However, not every member fits or accepts the label in the same way or to the same degree. The Identity Dilemma provides eight diverse case studies of social movements to show the benefits, risks, and tradeoffs when a group develops a strong sense of collective identity.

The editors and contributors to this pathbreaking volume examine how collective identities can provide powerful advantages but also generate conflicts. The various chapters help to develop our understanding of collective identity from how strategic identities are developed for protest groups to how stigmatized groups negotiate identity dilemmas.

Ultimately, The Identity Dilemma contributes a new strategic approach to understanding social movements that highlights the choices and tensions that groups inevitably face in articulating their ideas and interests.

Contributors include: Marian Barnes, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Umut Korkut, Elzbieta Korolczuk, John Nagle, Clare Saunders, Neil Stammers, Marisa Tramontano, Huub Van Baar, and the editors.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Identity Dilemma, Social Movements, and Contested Identity • James M. Jasper and Aidan McGarry
1 Scholarly Research on Collective Identities • James M. Jasper, Marisa Tramontano, and Aidan McGarry

Part I: Strategic Identities in Protest Movements
2 “Sectarianism: Danger”: Nonsectarian Social Movements and Identity Politics in Divided Societies • John Nagle
3 Autonomous Social Movements and the Paradox of Antiidentitarian Collective Identity • Cristina Flesher Fominaya
4 The Challenges of Using Survey Instruments to Measure the Identities of Environmental Protesters • Clare Saunders
5 Contested Identities in Struggles for Human Rights: A Long View • Neil Stammers

Part II: Stigmatized Groups and Collective Identity Dilemmas
6 Survivors, Consumers, or Experts by Experience? Assigned, Chosen, and Contested Identities in the Mental Health Service User Movement • Marian Barnes
7 Enacting Memory and the Hard Labor of Identity Formation: Rethinking the Romani Movement and Its Historiography • Huub van Baar
8 Those Who Are Full Can Never Understand the Hungry: Challenging the Meaning of Infertility in Poland • Elżbieta Korolczuk
9 Making the Extreme into the Ordinary: Cultural Legacies and the Identity Work of Hungary’s Right • Umut Korkut
Contributors
Index

About the Author(s)

Aidan McGarry is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Brighton, UK. His research focuses on marginalized minority groups and has been published in journals including Ethnicities, Ethnic and Migration Studies, Critical Social Policy, Ethnopolitics and Social Movement Studies.

James M. Jasper teaches sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Protest: A Cultural Introduction to Social Movements and The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements.


Subjects

Community Organizing and Social Movements
Political Science and Public Policy
Sociology

In the Series

  • Politics, History, and Social Change edited by John C. Torpey

    This series will disseminate serious works that analyze the social changes that have transformed our world during the twentieth century and beyond. The main topics to be addressed include international migration; human rights; the political uses of history; the past and future of the nation-state; decolonization and the legacy of imperialism; and global inequality. The series will also translate into English outstanding works by scholars writing in other languages.