Keywords
small-town activism
Poland
How to Cite
Abstract
How it is to be an activist in a small or provincial town? Are the structural challenges the activists face the same as their counterparts from big cities, that are usually studied and described in academic literature? If the environment is different, do small town activists adopt other practices to cope with the challenges that stem from the different milieu they operate in? In this paper we try to answer some of those questions by looking at the organizers of Black Protests in provincial Polish cities in 2016 and afterwards. The protests organized to oppose the intended changes in the already repressive anti-abortion law not only surprised everybody with their scale and intensity, but also with their distribution, as majority of the protest events took place in small and provincial towns in Poland. This article aims at filling the gap within the social movement studies literature between analysis of activism in big cities (upon which majority of theories are constructed) and of rural activism.
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