Social Movement Workshop: John Krinsky and Benjamin Case

An intercampus exchange of advanced social movement scholarship

Friday, February 25, 2022 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM EST
Online (Zoom)

Friday, February 25, 2022 at 2:00 pm (EST)

Presenters: John Krinsky (CUNY) and Benjamin Case (Univ. of Pittsburgh)

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Join us for a discussion on cutting-edge research carried out by advanced PhD students, faculty, postdocs, and movement-based activist scholars. This workshop is a new collaborative exchange between academic institutions with specialties in social movement research.

Presenter: John Krinsky

John Krinsky has taught political science at the City College of New York for 20 years. An urban planner and sociologist by training, he has published on social movements, organizing, work, and urban politics and policy. His books include Free Labor: Workfare and the Contested Language of Neoliberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Who Cleans the Park? Public Work and Urban Governance in New York City (with Maud Simonet; University of Chicago Press, 2017); and Marxism and Social Movements (ed. with Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen; Brill/Haymarket 2013). Krinsky is a founding board member of the New York City Community Land Initiative, a coalition of more than two dozen housing, community development, and land justice organizations in New York City focused on socializing control of land and housing. With James Jasper, he coordinated the Politics and Protest Workshop at the City of New York Graduate Center for ten years, and, two years ago, helped to found its successor, the Society and Protest Workshop at the Graduate Center.

"Organizing, Structure, Movement"

This paper is an attempt to tease out the ways that community organizing--and especially the "structure-based organizing" that relies on building a base of members in permanent or semi-permanent organizations relates to social movements, and especially moments of upheaval. Because neither this link nor multiple definitions are often specified, US social movement scholars and activists (especially, because of structure-based organizing's hold in the US) have a difficult time articulating what these connections might be. And yet, these connections are critical to understand if we want to build on community organizing's potential and not squander moments of broader upheaval and wonder why nothing came of them.

Presenter: Benjamin Case

Benjamin Case is a social movement scholar and organizer with over two decades in political, community, and labor struggles. He has a PhD in sociology from the University of Pittsburgh and a Masters of Public Administration from New York University. He is, currently, a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University's Center for Work and Democracy, an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an affiliate with the Resistance Studies Initiative. His book, Street Rebellion: Resistance Between Violence and Nonviolence is forthcoming in 2022 from AK Press.

"Violence, Nonviolence, and Riotous Resistance"

How do we understand riots as part of social movement uprisings? In recent decades, the field of nonviolence studies has popularized a strategic nonviolence framework to assess movement actions. Though popular, this framework is problematic. First, there is weak empirical support for the claim that any violent actions on the part of claimants demobilize movements. Current quantitative findings on the demobilizing effects of violent protest rely on a false dichotomy between violence and nonviolence that obscures the effects of low-level violent actions like riots. Using existing data I show that riots are in fact associated with increased nonviolent demonstrations during moments of uprising. Second, the strategic nonviolence framing encourages an instrumental view of tactics that is prone to miss the symbolic and emotional aspects of different types of collective actions. Through in-depth interviews with anarchists in the U.S. and student activists in South Africa, I explore the experiential effects of the riot, and find that rioting can have deeply empowering emotional impacts on participants, with lasting effects that sustain activists’ political engagement. Overall, this mixed-methods study demonstrates that low-level violent actions interact with movements in far more dynamic ways than dominant theories have understood.