Darby, S and Chatterton, P orcid.org/0000-0001-9281-2230 (2019) Between and beyond social entrepreneur and activist: Transformative personas for social change. ACME : An International e-Journal for Critical Geographies, 18 (3). pp. 724-750. ISSN 1492-9732
Abstract
In this paper, we highlight emergent trends that we have observed from direct participation in civil society organisations, and importantly the potential they have to enact transformative social change. Specifically, drawing on in-depth participation with two community organisations in Leeds in the North of England, we highlight the limits of traditional personas of the social entrepreneur and social activist and tendencies that sit between and beyond them that are more hybrid and messy, but ultimately more disruptive and productive. Through our fieldwork, we identified four aspects to this: 1.) purposeful value-rationality and attempts to explicitly foreground values in the everyday; 2.) relations as co-constructed and interdependent; 3.) the cyclical and transformative nature of practices; and, 4.) the role of storytelling in narrating and supporting alternative future visions. Ultimately, at the heart of the dysfunction of both social entrepreneur and social activist personas is an absence of conscious acknowledgements of how our work is motivated by what we love, and what we feel a loss for; what we have become disconnected from, and what we urgently need to reconnect with beyond individualised notions of social change. We contend that acknowledging these and incorporating them into our social change work can nurture more transformative values, practices, identities and narratives.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This article is protected by copyright. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. |
Keywords: | Social activism; social entrepreneur; civil society; social change |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) > SOG: Cities & Social Justice (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 16 Oct 2019 13:48 |
Last Modified: | 17 Oct 2019 11:11 |
Published Version: | https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/vi... |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | University of British Columbia |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:152113 |
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