Trajectories through the Field: Pragmatic Reflexivity and the Changing Social Locations of Environmentalists
a) Their social and political trajectories, and;
b) The pragmatic processes of deliberation that underpin their changing involvement in environmentalism.
Activists discussed in this paper share a common site of emergence in and around Australian anti-forestry campaigns in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They subsequently moved through an array of different groups and campaigns at a variety of scales. Their trajectories highlight a range of directional possibilities including pathways towards left-wing, liberal and far-right forms of environmentalism.
I interrogate activist reflexivity and how this affects the ‘where’ and ‘how’ of their unfolding participation in environmentalist action. Following Pierre Bourdieu, environmentalism is conceptualised as a social field with shared doxic beliefs and internal struggles. From their youthful emergence in the field, activists’ social locations change over time as they reassess and adjust their practices. Activists pragmatically balance their involvement in environmental struggles with complex demands coming from other social fields in which they are invested.
They are engaged in a struggle for viability in what Ghassan Hage (2022) describes as a ‘critical political economy of being’. This is highlighted by shifting political identities, repertoires and scales of action. These shifts do not only affect individual activists. They also affect the formation and dissolution of the groups to which they belong and the kinds of collective action that is developed. Activists bring skills and insights honed in prior struggles with them to their new social locations. This can result in the formation of novel and innovative practices and communities at the fringes of the field. However, it may also lead to the strengthening of conservative doxa and structures of power.