Constructing the Time of Crisis: Community Organizing during COVID-19

Social movement scholars identify both one’s context (political opportunity) and the narrative construction of one’s context (framing) as central to social movements’ success. How might varied framing approaches to the same context impact different groups’ outcomes? This paper draws on 54 interviews with activists who engaged in different social movement organizations across the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. A significant driver of organizational outcomes was the group’s approach to time. Some groups (the “emergency responders”) viewed the pandemic as a crisis and rupture: they focused on creating new projects to meet new conditions, recruiting new members, and increasing time involvement from members. Other groups (the “long haul-ers”) viewed the pandemic as a continuation of existing conditions: they focused on sustaining their existing membership and work. Emergency responder groups tended to carry out intensive work for 3-9 months, and then collapse, in part because dedicating so much time towards external activities left less time for internal organizational processes. Long haul-er groups were less innovative in responding to pandemic conditions, but more stable over the long haul. Part of the stability for long haul-er groups came from the presence of experienced organizers, who were able to frame the pandemic and success in particular temporal ways. These organizers framed the pandemic as part of a longer trajectory of past and future crises. They also framed their organizations’ work as part of a longer time horizon, which decreased members’ burnout and frustration by helping them understand their work as contributing something meaningful, despite short-term feelings of overwhelm and failure. The COVID-19 pandemic was thus, not only an objectively unique moment for social movements, but also a moment of temporal meaning-making that produced differential social movement trajectories. This has implication for how we understand political struggle in the face of crisis.