Bringing the Civic Landscape into Being: How Varied Patterns of Civic Action Respond to and Create Dilemmas in Empowerme
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Bringing the Civic Landscape into Being: How Varied Patterns of Civic Action Respond to and Create Dilemmas in Empowerment Projects Nina Eliasoph 1 & Daniel Cefaï 2 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
This paper proposes a process for locating civic action, in its varied forms, wherever it may appear. First, develop a clear, a priori definition of the qualities of action you consider “civic.” Simultaneously, observe actors’ varied “typifications (Schutz 1962, 1970; Cicourel 1991, 1993; Cefaï 1994)” that include action that you would call “civic.” We illustrate how to use this approach, using the case of “empowerment projects (Eliasoph Journal of Civil Society, 12(3), 247–265, 2016):” Observe the typifications that actors themselves experience in empowerment projects, by observing the dilemmas they experience. You will see that actors’ typical patterns of navigating those typical dilemmas often have typical unintended consequences, both for their own emotions, and for the researcher’s aspirations for civic action. In empowerment projects, typical patterns of navigating typical dilemmas tend to make important kinds of politically oriented civic action difficult to conduct. This kind of back-and-forth examination reveals the “civic landscape (Grubb and Henriksen 2018)” in the making. Keywords Civic . Empowerment . Ethnographic methods . Typification As soon as we stop assuming that civic action just naturally bubbles up in a sector labeled “civil society” (or “the voluntary sector,” or “the Third Sector”), we suddenly see civic action springing up in varied organizations that are not all labeled “civic,” and not springing up in some organizations that are labeled civic. Much research assumes that civic action bundles all
* Nina Eliasoph [email protected] Daniel Cefaï [email protected]
1
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
Eliasoph and Cefaï
sorts of “goods” together—solidarity, trust, consensual social improvement, combative political action, a bridge between personal interest and the common good, prevention of isolation and depression, upward mobility for participants when they learn a sense of responsibility through participation, respect and appreciation of diversity for participants who work side-byside with diverse others, among others. Up close, however, civic action pixelates into many distinct styles—some mainly sociable, some mainly charitable, some mainly about promoting vast political transformation, some mainly about grassroots self-help, some mainly about helping participants learn to be responsible so they can get jobs, and some mainly doing something else. This paper makes a programmatic suggestion, about how to locate civic action without relying on sectoral distinctions. We suggest starting in two places at once. Start with a clear, a priori definition of the quality of action you want to find, such as “civic.” At the same time, start by observing everyday interaction, to s
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