Protest Event, Political Culture, and Biography: Post-protest Local Activism in Russia

Abstract

A biographical approach in social science is usually applied to study the life courses of a particular group of people or to explain individual action and meaning-making through biographical determinants. This article aims to develop the biographical approach by showing how it can be used to explain changes in political culture resulting from protest events. Using the case of post-protest local activism in Russia as an example, it demonstrates that a focus on activists’ biographies allows researchers to better understand how the nationwide protest event of 2011–12 changed the political culture of local activism. By focusing on biography, researchers can discover a very important feature of a protest event: its ability to make possible the meeting of people with biographical trajectories that would ordinarily take them in different directions. Consequently, events create opportunities for bringing opposite meanings, skills, and schemes of action together, thereby, allowing a cultural change to emerge. The article suggests that the proposed explanatory model develops biographical sociology by giving biography more power, informs the sociology of event, social movement studies, and political culture theories.