Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

During the last ten years, rural social movements in the United States have been adopting unconventional identities and demands. Principal amongst such identities is the explicit embrace of the peasant, while the new demand that is being expressed is for agrarian reform. In this paper, I argue that these new qualities of US rural social movements have developed due to transnational networks. These networks, which include international conferences, coordinated visits to select sites abroad, activist exchanges between movements, as well as experiences of immigration, have contributed to significant changes in US rural mobilization. These changes, as I also argue, show a growing radicalization of rural contention in the United States, which becomes apparent after comparing current movement practices with key examples from the past. I document the dynamics of social movement radicalization, which I find in identity and demand formation, in a comparison of movements located in Wisconsin, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Florida. I select these movements given the variation in terms of their respective transnational connections and levels of radicalization. The fieldwork for this project was done over the course of 2016 and 2017, when I visited movement leaders and members at each site to conduct interviews, observe movement activities, and participate in conferences and meetings. I supplement the use of interviews and participatory observation with textual analysis of movement newsletters and documents.