With austerity’s disproportionately heavy impact on women now apparent, this engaging book considers activism against it from a feminist perspective. Emma Craddock goes deep inside activist culture to explore the many cultural and emotional dimensions of political participation. She questions what motivates and sustains protest, considering the enabling aspects of solidarity and empathy, as well as the constraining factors of negative emotions and gendered barriers associated with activism, examining the role of gender and emotion within protest. This is a lived-in study that gets to the heart ... More

With austerity’s disproportionately heavy impact on women now apparent, this engaging book considers activism against it from a feminist perspective. Emma Craddock goes deep inside activist culture to explore the many cultural and emotional dimensions of political participation. She questions what motivates and sustains protest, considering the enabling aspects of solidarity and empathy, as well as the constraining factors of negative emotions and gendered barriers associated with activism, examining the role of gender and emotion within protest. This is a lived-in study that gets to the heart of what it means to be an anti-austerity activist and an important addition to social justice debate. The book is organised into four parts. The first part establishes the theoretical and empirical context; the second part explores the enabling and constraining factors of political participation (‘doing activism’); the third part discusses the two main activist identity constructions in the local anti-austerity activist culture and the ‘dark side’ of activist culture that these feed (‘being activist’); the fourth and final part provides concluding remarks about the ambivalence of anti-austerity activist culture and the difficulty of resisting such a pervasive force as neoliberal capitalism.