Conceptualizing 'Everyday Resistance': A Transdisciplinary Approach - Paperback

by Anna Johansson (Author), Stellan Vinthagen (Author)

Everyday resistance is about the many ways people undermine power and domination through their routine and everyday actions. Unlike open rebellions or demonstrations, it is typically hidden, not politically articulated, and often ingenious. But because of its disguised nature, it is often poorly understood as a form of politics and its potential underestimated.

Conceptualizing 'Everyday Resistance' presents an analytical framework and theoretical tools to understand the entanglements of everyday power and resistance. These are applied to diverse empirical cases including queer relationships in the context of heteronormativity, Palestinian daily life under military occupation, workplace behaviors under office surveillance, and the tactics of fat acceptance bloggers facing the war against obesity. Johansson and Vinthagen argue that everyday resistance is best understood by accounting for different repertoires of tactics, relations between actors and struggles around constructions of time and space. Through a critical dialogue with the work of James C. Scott, Michel de Certeau and Asef Bayat, they aim to reconstruct the field of resistance studies, expanding what counts as resistance and building systematic analysis.

Conceptualizing 'Everyday Resistance' offers researchers and students from different theoretical and empirical backgrounds an essential overview of the field and a creative framework that illuminates the potential of all people to transform society.

Author Biography

Anna Johansson is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioural Studies, University West, Sweden. Her areas of research are mainly resistance studies, critical fat studies and gender studies.

Stellan Vinthagen is Professor and Endowed Chair in the Study of Nonviolent Direct Action and Civil Resistance at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is also Co-Leader of the Resistance Studies Group at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and co-founder of the Resistance Studies Network, as well as Editor of the Journal of Resistance Studies. His research is focused on resistance, power, social movements, nonviolent action, conflict transformation and social change.