“Transforming the World”: Using Research to Learn From Activists

Abstract

In this paper, I use evidence from the Global Feminisms Project (GFP) online archive to address three key questions: (1) How are activists created? (2) How do negative stereotypes affect activists? (3) How has the global decline in democracy affected collective action promoting social justice? Social scientists have addressed all of these issues with different kinds of data, often with samples from the United States that include both activists and non-activists. Instead, my colleagues and I draw on oral history interviews with long-term women's movement activists drawn from several different countries over the past two and a half decades. We encourage the use of archival materials like these to study other questions of importance to social scientists who seek to understand what stimulates and maintains activism, strategies used by activists, and the ways that changes over time in the social environment affect activists’ strategies.