Social reproduction in European Environmental Protest Camp Movements: Ende Gelände and Reclaim the Power

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The most recent UN report has warned that there are only twelve years left to limit severe climate change (IPCC, 2018). How we organise in response becomes a pertinent question particularly in relation to grassroots political organising. This proposal aims to analyse how two of the most prominent social movement organisations in Germany and the UK are supported and sustained in order to understand the dynamics, potential and limitations of the contemporary grassroots political responses to the climate crisis. It will bring together arguments from social movement studies and feminist political theory in order to contribute to understandings of how organisations use alternative institutions, events and cultural practices for the social reproduction of their political activity. In particular, it examines the role of protest camps, temporary occupations that are used increasingly by movements as bases for political activity and for experimenting with and demonstrating alternative models of society. Research questions1. How can feminist theory inform better understanding of social movements everyday reproduction, and their success?2. What role do movement institutions, practical projects & infrastructure play within these protest camp movements?3. What is the political significance of protest camps in understanding contemporary direct action?Empirical Research MethodsThe project uses a set of qualitative research methods to explore the social reproduction, social relations and infrastructural resourcing of the case studies described above. For each of these methodological components my position in the movements will be significant: as a researcher who has been a part of the British climate movement for some time, it will be far less challenging for me to uncover key issues, tensions and emotions (Denscombe, 2017, p.83).Firstly, ethnographic participant observation of both movements will be used, based on several periods of study situated in the protest camps and participating in the activity of both movements. Ethnographic participant observation will 'capture the subjective mood, feeling, and tone' of events'contributing descriptive flesh to what might otherwise read as dry, distant, and disengaged analytic accounts.' (Juris and Khasnabish, 2013, p.3). I will focus on the role of the activists as knowledge producers encouraging them to map various aspects of the camps including their movement histories, the formation of the camps and the targets they have focussed on, with this component of the research providing much of the data for addressing RQ1 but also feeding into RQ2 and RQ3. Second, semi-structured interviews will be made with 10-15 activists from each group to provide insight into the various experiences and organisational techniques used, in particular helping address RQ2. Interviews will focus on the campers' interpretation of the camps and their accounts of the social interaction within them (Blaikie, 2010, p.207). They will be chosen based on their level of experience in organising the protest camps. Finally, documentary data from the camps will be analysed including 'external' communication and publicity put out by the camps and 'internal' guides and discussion documents used within the camps. Critical discourse analysis will relate discursive practices, events and texts to wider social and cultural systems (Fairclough in Locke, 2004, p.1). These texts will help uncover the debates, infrastructural practices, repertoires and understandings of the organisers of their geopolitical imaginations of how the world is, where they fit into it and how they would like it to change.