The 10th CBEES Annual Conference titled "Shaping Futures: The Baltics and Eastern Europe in the World" was held between 28-29 November 2024 at Södertörn University. At the panel “(Re)conceptualizing and (re)claiming of rights in times of crisis”, three members of Sustainaction presented their research.
Anna Ratecka's presentation discussed practices of belonging and othering of sex workers within the Polish feminist and LGBTQ+ movements. Tracing the local trajectories of feminist mobilisations, she provided insights into the debates and emotions this has triggered within feminist counter-publics in Poland. The presentation reconstructed the different positions sex workers have held in the Polish feminist movement, from subjects of maternal control of anti-trafficking organisations to political actors voicing their political demands. The new mass feminist mobilisations after 2016, which focused on reproductive rights, also included both the rise of sex workers' activism and the backlash from anti-sex work feminists. Ratecka provided an insight into how emotions of belonging were played out in debates about the presence of sex workers and their demands in feminism. Sex workers' claims and activism aligned with the new intersectional and queer feminism that emerged during the period of right-wing rule in Poland and generated emotions of support and solidarity. In contrast, the anti-sex work feminist sought to redefine feminism as a single-issue movement, relying on gender essentialism. This resulted in feelings of exclusion and betrayal from the feminist community.
Elżbieta Korolczuk focused on the question of how civic action emerges and develops over time in the face of the polycrisis, which can be understood as a multitude of overlapping and interconnected crises unfolding in a world that is perceived as an increasingly uncertain and in a state of flux. The presentation started with an overview of the three phases of the development of civic activism in Poland, including mobilization of the late 1980s, NGOization in the 1990s, and the first decade of the XXI century, followed by the period of mobilization and politicization. Korolczuk argued that the latter phase can be seen as an attempt to mobilize in response to multiple crises, including political and environmental ones. Focusing on the period between 2015 and 2023, the researcher discussed new organizational forms and collective identities, which emerged during this time. These new trends included: mass engagement of new social groups (e.g. youth, small towns), an increased level of cooperation between various sectors (judiciary, women’s rights, environmental protection), as well as closer cooperation between formal and informal initiatives (e.g. new schemes emerged that allowed to distribute the funding among informal groups). Finally, the challenges that come with these new forms of organizing were discussed, such as the fact that in the case of multi-issue initiatives the issues with less traction tend to disappear (e.g. social rights) or that activists fighting on many fronts are more prone to experience exhaustion and burnout.
Dorottya Fekete presented her research about the civil disobedience movement of teachers in Hungary between 2022 and 2023. She highlighted how political opportunity structures changed during the time of the mobilization: increased opportunities due to the upcoming elections, and decreased opportunities due to restrictive and repressive measures by the government. Dorottya analyzed how frames evolved during the 1,5 years of contention through speech acts from selected protest events. She identified shifts in the diagnostic framing as thematic issues related to the crisis in the educational system were replaced by frames that connected the problems to limits on academic freedom stemming from democratic erosion. With the use of frame articulation and amplification, she discussed how previous frames, symbols, and catchphrases are reused and adapted to build on the collective memory of earlier mobilizations and draw continuity with other demonstrations.
Source: Szajki Bálint / 24.hu
Comments