Investigating the Category of the Activist

Social science researchers have explored the ways in which social actors act upon reality: whether by imagining alternative lifeworlds and striving to change the circumstances in which they live, or by actively working towards the maintenance of the status quo.

However, the categories of “activism” and “activist” tend to be imbued with a set of normative understandings. Thus, “activists” are predominantly perceived as (post-)modern subjects, fighting for “progressive” causes, and often considered as a part of a social movement.

Our contribution interrogates such normative understandings behind the category of the activist to elucidate what kind of subject positions and political subjectivities are articulated within the social sciences and beyond. Instead of taking activism/activists as a “given”, we ask: When and how do the terms activism and activist emerge? What are the criteria for becoming/being /remaining activists? How do we deal with the multiplicity of emic terms used to describe activism? And finally, what is the role of social scientists in the process of defining or recognizing certain social actors as activists?

Thinking with the cases of far-right youth militants in southern and Central Europe together with queer youth activists in the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., we aim to inspire a discussion on the limits and affordances of the categories of “activist.” Taking these two disparate ethnographic cases studies as a point of departure and putting them in dialogue with theoretical debates and conversations with our interlocutors and colleagues, we propose some challenges to existing assumptions about the category of the “activist” as an analytical and descriptive category, thereby contributing reflexively to a critical and emergent field of inquiry within and beyond social movement studies.