Facing uncertainties exacerbated by current political, economic, social and health-related crises across the globe, grassroots activism has been gaining prominence. In this panel we investigate small-scale grassroots projects, set up and run at the local level, by one or few activists. This form of activism includes projects of different types which, despite their varieties, pursue a common aim of enhancing resilience, forging transformations in local communities and reimagining societies, focusing, on ecology, women empowerment, social economy, cooperatives, youth education, and many other areas. Even if these projects are small in scope and mostly invisible to a larger public, they can, arguably, be important vehicles of bringing direct change to people, especially in marginalized settings. They can also be a laboratory of ideas and practices that may inspire wider societal changes, ranging from reformative to revolutionary.
Theoretically, these projects do not fit easily in the social movement literature because they do not have the predominantly organized structures, explicit aims, broad claims, or adequate resources that define a social movement (Tilly, 2020). They can rather be seen as forms of resistance that challenge culturally accepted norms or patterns of behavior that have negative consequences for certain groups of marginalized people or, as prefigurative practices which at the local scale test various ideas and attempt to forge alternatives to the status quo (Yates, 2015). Even though they are small in scale, the total of initiatives taking place in a certain area may work like a “quiet encroachment” (Bayat, 2013), through which marginalized communities directly work towards envisioning alternative futures, sometimes taking inspiration from the past.
By bringing together anthropologists who are investigating such projects, the panel aims to find similarities and differences in small-scale grassroots activism in various regions across the globe, and to see how these initiatives can be analyzed theoretically.
