| dc.description.abstract | Antiracism is a burgeoning field of research in Norway, yet so far, few studies have focused on the antiracist activists themselves. In this thesis, I explore the cultural toolkits of young antiracist activists by analysing and comparing their conceptions of antiracism and the antiracist social movement, as well as their ideas, solidarities, wishes, and strategies.
Building on participatory fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 15 antiracist activists, I discuss the following four research objectives: Firstly, I explore the activists’ conceptions of antiracism and antiracist activism. Secondly, I explore the degree to which the activists communicate with each other. Thirdly, I conduct a comparative analysis of the social imaginaries that inform activists’ understanding of society, therein themselves and their activism. Fourthly, I theorise a framework for analysing hope in social movements along spatial and temporal dimensions. Theoretically, the first three research objectives focus on the antiracist activists and their perceptions and interpretations of social interactions. This approach is a build-up to the fourth research objective, in which I aim to fill a lacuna in the research literature on hope and social movements.
The analysis features two informal antiracist networks, one consisting of racialised activists and the other of predominantly white, radical left activists. While they have similar conceptions of antiracism and of being antiracist – antiracism as an anticapitalistic struggle and being antiracist as requiring not only thought but also action – the two networks’ communication with each other is limited. Furthermore, the stance of the networks towards other antiracist actors is one of distrust and suspicion, leading to a disconnect from the general antiracist social movement. In terms of social imaginaries, the two networks differ in all regards: They centre themselves in terms of group identity and exclude each other, they draw on different sources of inspiration, and, not least, they contrast in the change they attempt to engender and their methods of doing so. The networks and their activists also differ in hope. In theorising hope, I first use analytical concepts from the discussion of social imaginaries and then draw on post-World War II literature of hope rather than on contemporary literature. In the framework I then develop, hope is affected by both the concrete utilisation of place and time, and the way in which social movement actors figuratively situate themselves in spatial and temporal dimensions. The spatial dynamics of hope are delineated into the analytical levels of transnational, national, and movement-level space. Temporal dynamics concern visions of the future, their desirability or undesirability, their specificity, and the perceived trajectory towards them. To exemplify and empirically ground this theoretisation, I analyse the differing experiences of hope amongst the two antiracist networks. This theoretisation of hope along spatial and temporal dimensions contributes to filling a vacant space in social movement studies. By emphasising the perspectives of antiracist activists, this thesis also adds to the growing field of research on Norwegian antiracism. | eng |