“A Not-so-silent Form of Activism”: Intentional Community as Collective Action Reservoir

Abstract

Recent scholarship on social movement groups has increasingly focused on the relationships between lifestyle and politics. As walls of classical social movement theories holding up the false dichotomy of personal and political spheres continue to crumble, I seek in this article to fill some of the space connecting personal and political work by expanding on the concept of collective action reservoirs. Based on an ethnographic case study of an intentional community named Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, I demonstrate how participation in a shared lifestyle can be the basis for a politicized account of everyday life. The members of this village have developed a unique lifestyle that they consider to be a form of political engagement, in which I show that they have different orientations to the definition of activism and to being in a “reserve guard” for direct action. They have developed and adopted an approach where lifestyle is the primary means of seeking change while direct action is held in reserve. I conclude by theorizing that the collective action reservoir represents a long-term stable base for social movement mobilizations.

“We Do This at Dancing Rabbit”: Recruitment and Collective Identity Processes in the Ecovillage

“…Existing research has established that ICs have much in common with social movements, and though they are not the same, there are processes that overlap these social forms (Brown 2002; Ergas 2010; Lockyer 2017; Rubin 2020). Like social movements, many ICs must balance a desire to grow with a desire to be effective in their aims to push change.…”

Determining the Proportions of the Ecovillage Based on the Resident's Preferences in Relation to the Geographical Location in France

“…As a result, we may conclude that, just as there are multiple definitions of ecovillages, there are also diverse dimensions of ecovillages. However, ecovillages and the essential features that should be included in an ecovillage can be grouped into five primary dimensions, according to recent studies (GEN, 2022, Szabó et al, 2021Rubin, 2021). We divided these five dimensions into eight dimensions to better examine the dimensions of ecovillages in this study: ecological dimension, cultural dimension, economic dimension, agricultural dimension, social dimension, individual dimension, architectural dimension, and transportation-access dimension.…”