The Political-Personal Nexus In Social Activism: Relational Adversity, Affective Solidarities and Everyday Protection

This panel examines the political-personal nexuses in activism by bringing together diverse strands of scholarship that seek to understand how personal lives and political participation mutually shape and constitute one another. While existing research has shown that political attacks often take deeply personal forms and permeate activists’ everyday lives, and that intimate relationships, education and other social encounters can motivate or constrain political participation, these political-personal nexuses remain insufficiently theorised.

This panel aims to enable a deeper theorisation of how political and personal spheres intersect and mutually constitute each other across different forms of activism and socio-political contexts. We call for papers that pay special attention to the ways in which state repression, violence by political opponents, and sometimes even stigmatisation and conflicts within movements are enabled or intensified through everyday forms of sexism, ableism, racism, homophobia and other forms of exclusion. At the same time, the panel explores how activist personal spaces and relationships can become sites of care, affective solidarity and everyday protection, hence sustaining political participation. This renewed focus on the political-personal nexus can advance a relational understanding of activism by examining how salient social divisions and inequalities are reproduced, negotiated or challenged within activists’ overlapping intimate, personal and political worlds, as these intersect and connect across specific times and spaces

These conversations will contribute to the longstanding concerns of RC48 on social movement mobilisation, citizenship and rights, political subjectivities, and everyday forms of resistance.

Keywords: political-personal nexus; relational activism; affective solidarity; everyday protection; repression; social movements