No abstract

Social movement activists perform emotional labour that helps create and mobilise networks of collective action. The emotions of activism often contribute to social movements' different organisational geographies. Two grassroots networks of human rights activists that originated in Argentina (the "Madres de Plaza de Mayo" and "HIJOS") developed different emotional geographies over time. Both human rights movements were formed by relatives of victims of past human rights abuses and operated throughout Latin America and beyond. The movements incorporated activists and supporters who were linked by shared emotional bonds and by a common interpretation of the emotions of their activism. Activists in the two networks strategically deployed and framed the emotions of their activism in order to sustain it and to enhance possibilities for building broader networks of collective action. The comparison of these two human rights activist groups demonstrates that social movements' organisational and geographic trajectories are often related to activists' shared emotional connections and to the emotional labour that they perform through their networks. Copyright (c) 2007 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.

No abstract

This article provides a framework for analysing social movements and explaining how collective action can be sustained through networks. Drawing on current relational views of place and space, I offer a spatialized conception of social networks that critically synthesizes network theory, research on social movements, and the literature on the spatial dimensions of collective action. I examine the historic and contemporary network geographies of a group of human rights activists in Argentina (the Madres de Plaza de Mayo) and explain the duration of their activism over a period of more than two decades with regard to the concept of geographic flexibility. To be specific, first I show how, through the practice of place-based collective rituals, activists have maintained network cohesion and social proximity despite physical distance. Second, I examine how the construction of strategic networks that have operated at a variety of spatial scales has allowed the Madres to access resources that are important for sustaining mobilization strategies. Finally, I discuss how the symbolic depiction of places has been used as a tool to build and sustain network connections among different groups. I conclude by arguing that these three dimensions of the Madres' activism account for their successful development of geographically flexible networks, and that the concept of geographic flexibility provides a useful template for studies of the duration and continuity of collective action.Scholarly work on collective action over the past three decades has shown that attention to social networks is critical to understanding the development of social movements. To date, research has linked networks to the micro-level dynamics of activism and has shown that networks play a crucial role in processes of recruitment and collective identity construction (Melucci 1996;Snow et al. 1980). In addition, research has also indicated that networks are critical in the mobilization of activists and social movement organizations. Scholars have found that social networks contribute to linking local activism across different contexts and to creating transnational webs that facilitate the efficacy of collective action (Crugel 1999;Keck and Sikkink 1998;Taylor and Rupp 2001).Following network approaches to the analysis of collective action, this article develops a cross-disciplinary framework that shows the importance of the spatiality of different types of network relations in analysis of social movements. I seek to examine network processes -how networks operate at the onset and how relations among activists are formed and sustained -and their related spatial dimensions -the way relations among activists operate in places and across space. My overall objective

No abstract