This article examines identity talk in several peace movement organizations from 1982 to 1991. Identity talk directs attention to how identity discourse concretizes activists' perceptions of social movement dramas, demonstrates personal identity, reconstructs individuals' biographies, imputes group identities, and aligns personal and collective identities. Six types of identity talk are identified and illustrated: associational declarations, disillusionment anecdotes, atrocity tales, personal is political reports, guide narratives, and war stories. These stories revolve around the themes of becoming aware, active, committed, and weary. Suggestions are offered for possible future research.

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This paper seeks to illuminate how social movements collectively construct and communicate power. Drawing on insights from dramaturgy as well as from field research of several movements, the article demonstrates how social movements are dramas routinely concerned with challenging or sustaining interpretations of power relations. Four dramatic techniques associated with such communicative processes are identified and elaborated: scripting, staging, performing and interpreting. It is suggested that movement outcomes hinge in part upon how well activists employ these techniques and manage various emergent contingencies and tensions. The paper concludes with a discussion of several sets of theoretical and empirical implications.

Despite significant contributions, movement frame analyses have tended to focus on ideological construction within and between social movement organizations at single moments in time or during protest cycles. By integrating framing and abeyance concepts, this article extends the framing perspective to examine historical continuities, transformations, and intenveavings of ideological themes in US. agrarian mobilization. We develop the concept of a "repertoire of interpretations" as a means of analyzing the persistence and vanable alignments of three master frames: agrarian fundamentalism, competitive capitalism, and producer ideology. Relationships between these master frames are considered in terms of constitutive and ancillary salience and are explored with reference to abeyance processes.Framing concepts have played a central role in revitalizing and redefining a social psychology of collective action, as well as animating movement theory and research generally (Gamson, Fireman, and Rytina

This article demonstrates Gamson's claim that behind the apparent agreement implied by ''consensus frames'' lies considerable dissensus. Ironically, the very potency of consensus frames may generate contested claims to the ownership of a social problem. Food security is a potent consensus frame that has generated at least three distinct collective action frames: food security as hunger; food security as a component of a community's developmental whole; and food security as minimizing risks with respect to an industrialized food system's vulnerability to both ''normal accidents'' as well as the ''intentional accidents'' associated with agriterrorism. We show that each collective action frame reflects internal normative variation identified here with Goffman's ''keying'' concept. These keys suggest power differentials in the endorsement or critique of dominant institutional practices. Each frame and associated keys reflect distinct sets of interests by collective actors, such as demands for substantively different applications of science and technology. The prognostic framing of the community food security movement coincidentally holds potential for reducing not only the accidental risks of productivist agriculture but also the uncertainty induced by the risk of terrorist exploitation of those vulnerabilities. The article explores power differentials and variable levels of oppositional consciousness as mechanisms by which keys generate contentious politics within frames while serving as potential bridges between frames. This contested ownership of food security has implications for the associated movements' and organizations' capacity to influence the structure of the agrifood system as well as the broader socioeconomic organization of rural regions.