Authors

Piotr Goldstein ¹ ZOiS Berlin, Germany

Discussion

When talking about activism, we tend to think of the work of charities and NGOs on the one hand, and protest movements on the other. This paper instead focuses on "everyday activism" - on the work of informal groups and initiatives and on what are often individual and ephemeral activisms. It shows a broad repertoire of social engagements ranging from ad hoc groups tutoring the elderly in online tools during the pandemic - to gorilla gardening - to stealing animals to protect them from nasty owners. It aims to highlight the diversity of the undertaken acts and actions, and to understand the motivations for engaging in such, rather than in more formal, endeavours.

The paper brings together findings from the international MOBILISE Project based on two waves of interviews in Warsaw, Lublin and Gdańsk, with insights from ethnography and visual ethnography conducted mostly in Lodz within the “Beyond NGOs and Protest Movements” project based at ZOiS.