EBOOK
About
Asked to name an activist, many people think of someone like Cesar Chavez or Rosa Parks-someone uniquely and passionately devoted to a cause. Yet, two-thirds of Americans report having belonged to a social movement, attended a protest, or engaged in some form of contentious political activity. Activism, in other words, is something that the vast majority of people engage in. This book examines these more common experiences to ask how and when people choose to engage with political causes. Corrigall-Brown reveals how individual characteristics and life experiences impact the pathway of participation, illustrating that the context and period in which a person engages are critical. This is the real picture of activism, one in which many people engage, in a multitude of ways and with varying degrees of continuity. This book challenges the current conceptualization of activism and pushes us to more systematically examine the varying ways that individuals participate in contentious politics over their lifetimes.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"The book is necessary reading for scholars who are interested in understanding what motivates entry into and exit from social activism. Corrigall-Brown's work will hopefully encourage a wave of new research that analytically demarcates and empirically evaluates the nuances of involvement as people engage in various challenges to the powers that be."
American Journal of Sociology
"Through a skillful use of quantitative and qualitative evidence, Patterns of Protest explains who is more likely to be a lifetime activist and who is more likely to be an intermittent participant or disengage from activism. This is a significant theoretical and empirical addition to our understanding of the dynamics of contentious citizenship across the life course."
Irvine