Defining,Aligning,and Negotiating Futures: New Forms of Identity Work in an Urban Farming Project

Abstract

Collective identity is critical to motivating and sustaining participation in social movement groups. What organizes and sustains collective action when a group’s members do not share common identity traits such as race, class, religion, or gender? This paper argues that shared ideas about the future, or future projections, are overlooked bases of collective identity in social movement groups, and that the processes of defining, aligning with, and negotiating future projections constitute previously unrecognized forms of identity work. I support this argument with ethnographic, interview, and archival data from a nascent urban farming project. After describing how project founders defined a compelling future of “sustainable community,” I identify a process called imaginative imputation through which a diverse set of participants aligned themselves with the project. Coordination problems created critical points for negotiating new properties of the imagined future, ultimately weakening some individuals’ identification with, and commitment to, the urban farm.

Keywords

urban agriculture collective identity identity work future

Introduction

Research suggests that individuals’ sense of identification with a social movement group is critical to motivating and sustaining their participation. This “cognitive, moral and emotional connection” with a group is known as collective identity (Polletta and Jasper 2001). Often, attributes such as race, ethnicity, religion, or gender are the basis of collective identity claims. But what organizes and sustains a collective action project when a group’s members do not share these common identity traits? This paper argues that shared ideas about the future, or future projections, are overlooked bases of collective identity in social movement groups, and that the processes of defining and negotiating future projections constitute previously unrecognized forms of identity work. By interactively defining, aligning with, and negotiating the future state they hope to attain through their efforts, activists create a meaningful idea that has the power to motivate and sustain participation from a diverse set of actors. But like all identity work, definition, aligning, and negotiation of the future are ongoing processes; future projections change as activists’ projects unfold in time and space. This can weaken individual members’ sense of identification with a project over time, unexpectedly prompting committed members to drop out.

This paper explores how a diverse group of environmental activists defined, aligned with, and negotiated future projections of an urban farm, and how these negotiations subsequently impacted some activists’ commitment to the project. By examining how future projections are implicated in a group’s process of collective identity formation, the paper responds to recent calls for more careful attention to the role of the future in collective action (Mische 2009, 2014). In addition, by investigating how activists align personal with collective future projections as part of the mobilization process, and how activists negotiate disagreements about the future, I suggest new ways that activists “forge commonality” to successfully coordinate their action together (Luhtakallio and Tavory 2018; see also Tavory and Eliasoph 2013).

My data come from observations, interviews, and written records from the first three years of City Church Urban Farm (CCUF),¹ an urban farming project in a deindustrialized Midwestern city. The construction of a shared future at CCUF unfolded in three stages. In the first stage, definition, the farm’s founders described an ambitious project that would beautify a vacant inner-city lot, bring fresh produce to a neighborhood with limited food options, and act as a “model” of sustainable farming techniques in a Rust Belt city. In the second stage, the broad scope of this initial vision, combined with its relatively fuzzy clarity, attracted a wide variety of stakeholders who overlaid their own visions onto the project in a process I call imaginative imputation. In the third stage, as participants worked together to actualize the project, coordination problems—moments of disagreement about what to do, who should do it, or how—created opportunities for negotiation of as-yet-undefined properties of the collectively imagined future. The negotiation strategies that participants employed ultimately prompted the exit of two of the project’s founding members.

Collective Identity Processes in Social Movement Groups

Although scholars debate the exact nature of collective identity, there is general consensus that it has both individual and social dimensions (see reviews by Flesher Fominaya 2010; Smithey 2009). On the individual level, the term refers to a person’s “cognitive, moral and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution” (Polletta and Jasper 2001), while socially, collective identity consists of “a shared sense of . . . ‘we-ness’ anchored in real or imagined shared attributes and experiences among those who comprise the collectivity” (Snow and Corrigall-Brown 2015). Collective identity is crucial for mobilizing and sustaining activism in a wide variety of social movements, including environmental movements (Calhoun 1994; Dunlap and McCright 2008; Friedman and McAdam 1992; W. A. Gamson 1992; Nepstad 2001; Neuhouser 1998; Polletta 1998; Tindall 2002).

Extant research emphasizes that collective identity is as much a process, or set of processes, as it is a product (Flesher Fominaya 2010; Melucci 1989, 1996; Saunders 2008). This set of processes has been termed “identity work” (Einwohner, Reger, and Myers 2008). For the individual, identity work involves aligning with a group that shares one’s moral commitments in an effort to construct a “desirable self” (Teske 1997, in Polletta and Jasper 2001:290); Snow and McAdam (2000) call this process “identity correspondence” (see also Ruiz-Junco 2011). Groups sustain participants’ sense of connection and affective commitment with mechanisms like storytelling (Polletta 1998), rituals (Nepstad 2001), and boundary-setting (Taylor and Whittier 1992). At its core, identity work involves negotiation of issues of sameness and difference (Einwohner et al. 2008; J. Gamson 1995; Taylor and Whittier 1992), making the achievement of collective identity a particular challenge for diverse groups and coalitions (Diani and Bison 2004; Flesher Fominaya 2010; Jones 2011; Mayer 2009).

Recent scholarship has critiqued the concept of collective identity on two grounds, proposing that we need to move beyond conventional notions of “identity” when examining the ways that activists coordinate their action for social change. The first critique is that much voluntary action is no longer rooted in a definable collective, but rather sustained by individual feelings of belonging that stem from “shared interests.” “Identity,” this argument says, is fluid, dependent on “daily feelings of solidarity that are based on individual perceptions of sameness or shared life experiences” (Hustinx and Lammertyn 2003, drawing on Voyé 1995). Identity is situationally dependent and must be constantly negotiated and renegotiated; it cannot be assumed in the presence of people sharing common characteristics. Similarly, Dorothy Holland, Gretchen Fox, and Vinci Daro (2008) call for “a decentered approach . . . [with] ethnographic study of place-based-or situated-movement actors and the cultural identities, discourses and practices they promote.” They argue that collective identity develops within a

figured world . . . a realm of interpretation and action generated by the participants of a movement through their shared activities and commitments that imagines the terrain of struggle, the powers of opponents, and the possibilities of a changed world. (P. 97; see also Holland et al. 1998)

A second critique is that by equating collective identity with “I” and “we” narratives, scholars overlook other forms of engagement that produce meaningful connections to movements. Eeva Luhtakallio and Iddo Tavory (2018) argue for a shift away from identity and toward a focus on “patterns of engagement,” or “the processes through which commonality is enacted” (p. 152). In their research, activists forged commonality in different ways, including by aligning their personal identities with “movement’s goals based in the common good.”

These critiques suggest that to advance our understanding of collective identity to match the realities of contemporary activism, we must turn our attention to the ways in which identity is interactively produced. We must also think creatively beyond typical identity categories to understand how activists create and sustain feelings of belonging in social movements rooted in “lifestyle” concerns such as environmental reform (Pichardo 1997). Below, I explain how an emerging literature on future projections in collective action creates opportunities for new theorizing about collective identity work.

Future Projections in Collective Action

Future projections are representations of the future that orient action. Alfred Schutz (1967) provides grounding for this term, arguing that purposive action, or projectivity, “consists in an anticipation of future conduct by way of phantasying” (p. 68). The starting point of an activity is our imagination of the act as “having been accomplished,” in the Future Perfect tense. Only once we have imagined how we want things to be can we plan the steps that will make this future a reality. As Schutz wrote, we “have to have some idea of the structure to be erected before we can draft the blueprints” (p. 68). David R. Gibson (2011, 2012) illustrates this masterfully in his analysis of how top officials used storytelling about the future to formulate a response to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Future projections are a missing link between cognition and action, useful in part because the concept’s roots in pragmatism and phenomenology bridge two longstanding dichotomies (see Mische 2009, 2014). As cognitive constructs, they are inherently cultural. Yet, they are also situated in place and time, and as such may be constrained by participants’ assessments not just of what is desirable, but of what is actually possible. The degree of such constraint varies beyond that predicted by rational-choice explanations of action (see Frye 2012), making future projections amenable to empirical study to better understand the conditions that shape particular orientations.

Imagination, a process inherent to the study of future projections, is already embedded in extant work on culture, collective action, and collective identity. Paul Lichterman (1996), for example, argues that grassroots activist groups’ ways of imagining community influenced how they advocated for environmental reform (see also Anderson 1983; Baiocchi et al. 2014; Lichterman 2005). Scholarship on future projections extends current use of the concept of imagination in two ways. First, it supplies a robust vocabulary for the empirical properties of imaginative content (see below). Second, it more explicitly links imagination with temporality and materiality. Lichterman and others implicitly seem to assume that people’s actions align smoothly with their mental maps; however, I show that the process of collectively translating an imagined state into a real one is fraught with disruptions. The empirical study of how future projections are constructed and modified over time allows us to examine how activists negotiate the inevitable gap between present conditions and idealized future states.

Studying Future Projections in Urban Agriculture

Urban agriculture is “the act of growing crops and raising livestock in cities and their peripheries” (Reynolds and Cohen 2016:3), and according to multiple accounts, it is part of a movement with ambitious and diverse aims. Jennifer Blecha and Helga Leitner (2014), for example, analyze urban chicken-keeping as “a way to promote and enact alternative urban imaginaries” (p. 86). The chicken-keepers in their study had impressive goals: to “establish sustainable backyard agro-ecosystems, build sociability, resist consumerism, and work simultaneously to improve the life and health of animals, humans, and the urban environment” (p. 86). Many of the urban farmers and gardeners interviewed by Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen (2016) characterized their efforts as resistance to political and economic oppression. Urban agriculture is part of a larger movement toward “civic agriculture,” which encompasses similar broad goals; Thomas Lyson (2004:81) connects civic agriculture not only to the production of “fresh, safe and [local]” food but also to job creation, entrepreneurship, and stronger communities.

Clearly, activists have high hopes for urban agriculture. This makes urban agriculture a useful case for examining how activists construct and negotiate projections of the future. The multiplicity of movement goals implies that participants in any given urban agriculture project may hold multiple and, at times, conflicting views of the future that require negotiation. In addition, the temporal distance between far-off, idealized future states and present realities suggests that activists will have to shift and refine their visions over time as they confront unexpected contingencies.

The multiplicity of futures in urban agriculture is further complicated by the fact that the civic agriculture movement has been accused of race and class biases. “The food movement is largely created by, and resonates most deeply, with white and middle-class individuals,” argue Alison H. Alkon and Julian Agyeman (2011:3). Farm-fresh food, and the labor associated with producing it, cost precious time and money that low-income people may be unable to spare. Other scholars point out that the movement overlooks the histories of oppression that have contributed to nonwhites’ perceptions of food and farm; whereas activists often romanticize connection to the land, persons who identify with historically enslaved populations may feel very differently about the idea of tilling the soil (Guthman 2008). This suggests that urban agriculture projects may face particular challenges when they bring together people from different race and class backgrounds. Not only do such groups lack obvious bases on which to build collective identity, they may also struggle to reconcile competing visions of the future to successfully build a sense of commonality among members (e.g., Aptekar 2015).

Future projections have numerous properties that can be empirically delineated (Mische 2009, 2014). In this study, four such properties emerged. Scope relates to the reach and depth of the imagined future. Is it located in the short term, middle term, or long term? How transformative is the change imagined—will it transform individuals, groups, or upend entire political and economic power structures? Socio-geographic boundaries define the people and territories whom activists believe is included in their project, as fellow participants or as beneficiaries. Social bonds define how participants will relate to each other in the imagined future community. Finally, clarity concerns a future projection’s level of detail.

Ann Mische (2009, 2014) proposes that we can study future projections through activists’ talk, writing, and visual representations of the future, as well as through the performative dynamics of the settings in which projection occurs. Performative dynamics include talk that shifts between interactional settings, conversational pauses and turns, and body language (see Eliasoph 1996, 1998; Gibson 2012; McDonnell 2014). I argue that coordination problems are another performative dynamic of settings that make future projections explicit and readable. Coordination problems are moments of disagreement about what to do, who should do it, or how. Unlike disagreements about the “best” way to do something, coordination problems have to do with the “right” way to do something. They bring to light aspects of the imagined future that previously went unspoken or were taken for granted by some participants. Studying the conditions under which these problems emerge, and the strategies that participants use to manage them, illuminates how participants refine and reconcile the visions of the future that orient their action. It can also help us understand the process through which participants’ commitments to a project strengthen or weaken.

In the sections below, I first introduce my case and methods. I then describe how founding participants of CCUF constructed an imagined future with a broad scope, citywide boundaries, and collaborative social bonds. With these properties established, but not elaborated, new people self-recruited into the project through a process I called imaginative imputation; that is, they creatively filled out the project’s potential in their own minds to imagine something that specifically aligned with their own beliefs about how things should be. Over time, as participants endeavored to enact what they each imagined, unexpected coordination problems surfaced. I examine the conditions under which these problems emerged and identify four strategies used to manage this problem: dismissing, refocusing, reframing, and avoiding, and explain how these strategies impacted members’ commitment to the project.

Method

My data come from observations, interviews, and document analysis of an urban farming project that I call CCUF. The farm is located in the heart of a Midwestern city that was hit hard by the downturn in industrial manufacturing and “white flight” from urban centers in the 1970s and 1980s. Steel City now has about 80,000 residents (100,000 fewer than its peak in 1960); more than 75 percent identify as black. The median household income in 2010 was $28,000, with more than a third of residents living in a household under the poverty line.

I completed interviews and ethnographic fieldwork over two growing seasons in 2013 and 2014 as part of a larger comparative project on civic responses to food insecurity in urban neighborhoods. I observed at board meetings and participated in informal gatherings and twice-monthly workdays at the farm during each growing season. I took detailed field notes after each observation session; by the completion of my project, my notes on this case comprised 235 single-spaced pages. I also coded approximately 75 pages of documents pertaining to the founding of the farm in 2011 to 2012, which included news articles, meeting minutes, and public e-mails. Finally, I conducted semistructured interviews with four women who were heavily involved in founding the project. These interviews ranged from 40 to 90 minutes, and were recorded and transcribed.

These field notes, founding documents, and interview transcripts became the basis of my analysis; the use of multiple data sources is argued to improve both the validity and reliability (or consistency) of qualitative research (Lincoln and Guba 1985; Merriam 1995). Analysis consisted of open coding and focused coding (Charmaz 2006; Corbin and Strauss 1990). During open coding, a number of codes related to imagining, aligning with, and disagreeing about the future emerged across all document types. During focused coding, I developed the properties and dimensions of “future projections,” and comparatively analyzed cases of disagreement between participants to identify the contexts, management strategies, and consequences of such disagreements (Corbin and Strauss 1990).

Defining, Aligning, and Negotiating a Sustainable Future at CCUF

Defining: “The Vision Is More than Just a Community Garden”

As mentioned previously, activists’ construction of a future projection involves merging ideas about a “desirable” future with their assessment of what is possible given current capacities and constraints. The founders of CCUF initially defined a vision of “sustainable community” by combining salient cultural templates with available material resources. The cultural templates consisted of plans enacted by other urban farms that inspired the founders, whereas the most salient material resource that informed the initial vision was a vacant corner lot in an African American neighborhood in Steel City.

Alice Bauman is a white environmental activist who described “nature” as “one of [her] first passions.” A native to the Midwest, she moved to Steel City with a preexisting interest in getting involved in environmental issues. While participating in a short-lived community group with a sustainability focus, she decided to start a farmers’ market in her neighborhood, which was known as either the “bohemian” or “white” section of Steel City, depending on who was talking about it. With the help of a local church, Alice’s farmers’ market became a reality in 2008.

As Alice’s farmers’ market project unfolded, Pastor Jo Harris, a black minister, was dealing with a pressing problem nearby. Her aging congregation owned a vacant lot in central Steel City, several miles from its own building. The lot was the site of a long-demolished settlement house that once provided social services to black steel workers. As Pastor Jo recounted in an interview, the church acquired the property in a merger with another congregation. In the late 2000s, the church was notified that it would have to start paying taxes on the property unless it were utilized for nonprofit purposes. The financial incentive to utilize the property was clear, but exactly how to do so was not.

At first, Pastor Jo had few ideas. But, she said,

by 2010, I had been exposed to urban gardens in other cities . . . a friend of mine was very involved with a community urban garden in Atlanta, Georgia, and it was very impressive to me. And I liked the idea of growing things, fresh fruits and vegetables. I’d experienced here, in Steel City, a limited supply of fresh fruits and vegetables.

A mutual friend introduced Pastor Jo to Alice, and the two began brainstorming how they might grow food on the land. In her interview, Alice reported that she and Pastor Jo visited several other urban agriculture projects during this brainstorming phase to get more ideas for the land on Maple Street. They were inspired by a “healthy food hub” in an African American neighborhood in a nearby city, as well as by Growing Power, former National Basketball Association (NBA) star Will Allen’s successful enterprise in Milwaukee, WI (see Allen 2012). Additional support came from a consultant from Chicago who had worked with several urban agriculture projects.

Together, Pastor Jo and Alice dreamed up the idea of a “job-creating, revenue-generating organization” that would demonstrate sustainable farming practices to Steel City residents. As Pastor Jo reiterated in an interview,

the vision is not just to—the vision is more than just a community garden. The vision includes teaching and sharing knowledge in the areas and various ways of feeding oneself through gardens, aquaponics—you know, the whole nine yards.

This vision made the best of the cultural and material resources available to Alice and Jo—it emulated plans that had made Growing Power a success, while making use of land that would otherwise be a financial burden. Below, I elaborate on what the projected future of CCUF looked like during this initial phase.

Scope

In late 2011, a local landscape architect created a hand-drawn rendering that portrayed what the farm might look like in its future state. In the drawing, the farm is surrounded by a low brick wall, tall enough to mark the space off from its environment, but not tall enough to make the farm appear shut off from passersby. The entrance is framed by a wrought-iron archway. Raised beds and row crops occupy the majority of the space inside the farm. Dark-skinned adults and children stroll the grounds; some socialize, some tend the earth. The rendering also includes numerous environmental features that go beyond the scope of a typical community garden: three white wind turbines generate power, native prairie gardens filter storm water, and hoop houses extend the growing season.

The landscape artist’s rendering was clearly aspirational, given the vacant lot’s appearance at the end of 2011. The lot occupied the northern third of a large city block populated by abandoned buildings, overgrown shrubbery, and trash. Two blocks west ran a major boulevard; the car wash and gas station in between kept the lot out of sight of most commuters. A dollar store across the street attracted a moderate amount of foot traffic from residents in the row homes and single-family homes in the blocks to the east. Standing on the lot and looking northeast, one could see metal gleam off the lifeguard stand at a city pool; however, the pool stayed closed during the summers of my observation.

Other documents from this time period elaborate a multiphase timeline of action, suggesting the founders thought it would take several years or longer to align the reality of CCUF with their imagination. A memorandum of understanding between the church and the farm project, drafted in 2012, elaborated a twofold plan to achieve sustainable community. The first phase would consist of demonstration gardens that would “beautify a blighted section of the city . . . demonstrate, practice and model sustainable land use, gardening and farming practices in the community” and “encourage backyard garden and small farms on vacant land to help ease hunger and improve nutrition.” The memorandum continues,

As the ministry grows and the nonprofit organization finds the funding it needs . . . it is envisioned that the next phase of the project will include construction of a Learning Center to provide educational programming and training to children and adults to learn skills related to urban farming and food production.

Socio-geographic boundaries

“The CCUF Gardens & Learning Center will serve the entire region, embracing the rich cultural and ecological biodiversity found here while honoring the history of the settlement house,” read the memorandum of understanding between City Protestant and CCUF (emphasis added). The farm’s founders wanted to model sustainable farming practices for the city, while also doing what they could to remedy the short supply of fruits and vegetables in the area. As a “demonstration” project, it was implied that growth at CCUF would happen by imitation, as like-minded residents gained the skills and inspiration to begin similar projects in their own neighborhoods.

Steel City, as previously mentioned, was a majority black, high-poverty city in a predominantly white region and state. While the landscape rendering, mentioned above, featured dark-skinned individuals, neither race nor class were often mentioned in talk about the project’s socio-geographic boundaries. Only Betty, an African American woman, explicitly drew racial boundaries around the project, describing it as “a historical site” directly connected to its majority black neighborhood:

I: What do you find yourself telling newcomers about what’s going on? Like if someone said, “What is this urban farming and gardening? What do you do?”

Betty: Okay. Uh, the best I could do is talk about, you know—tell them that it is a historical site and it’s related to African-Americans coming into the area. And I can identify with that because of my ethnic background, you know, and the fact that I at one time lived on that side of the city. . . . And um, what is going on now is really relating to what they—what was done when the project—when uh, the [settlement house] was first developed and what it was all about.

I: Mm-hmm.

Betty: And that is an area where there’s a need for help over there. It’s a food desert. Um, and it’s—it’s really something that’s the carryover that can help the community.

In Betty’s mind, CCUF was a racial project, a way to acknowledge the history of the neighborhood and address needs specific to its African American residents. However, other public documents associated with the farm, at this time, such as flyers and press releases, do not comment on the racial dynamics of the project.

Social bonds

Defining their project as a citywide one, the founders of CCUF focused on the collaborative relationships they wished to forge with established community institutions. An early 2012 e-mail from Alice included the following information under the heading “EXCITING PARTNERSHIPS”:

Vivian Bradshaw of Regional University has invited us to participate in a 5-year USDA grant application in which we’ll demonstrate growing greens in hoop houses for local schools. We’re working with Lakeside CityGreen on a grant application to explore the feasibility of a bio-diesel food truck for distributing produce and selling at local markets. We’re partnering with Steel City Power [a community organizing project] to conduct community health surveys and Kidz Kitchen and Steel City Freedom School to teach youth the importance of growing food, proper nutrition and entrepreneurship for selling at Market. Board Member Cheryl Robinson of Healthy Kids is ready to help us forge partnerships with healthcare organizations to create grants and programs that link the benefits of edible gardening to healthy eating and exercise to low-income mothers and children.

These “exciting” potential connections illustrate the founders’ interest in collaborating with established organizations, and the mention of a wide range of potential partners speaks back to the project’s broad scope.

As mentioned previously, CCUF brought together stakeholders of different races from the start, against the backdrop of a city suffering from the effects of years of racialized disinvestment. Yet, talk about social bonds did not center on the project’s multiracial character. In a 2011 e-mail, Alice wrote of the organizers’ desire to honor the vacant lot’s legacy as a settlement house that promoted racial “good will.”

We feel it is quite poignant that one of the reasons the city of Steel City is in its present condition is because of racism. We hope to erase the legacy of ill will and plant the seeds of good will among all who visit City Church Urban Farm.

In her interview, Janet, a white woman, mentioned that she thought the group’s diversity yielded greater acceptance from the immediate neighborhood. “I mean if we had been just . . . a whole bunch of white people I think it would have been more difficult.” But Janet did not name cross-racial relationships as an explicit goal of the project, and aside from Alice’s comment on building “good will” among races, neither did anyone else.

Clarity

One could argue that several properties of the imagined future at CCUF were clear: for example, it was a project that would “beautify the land” and “demonstrate . . . sustainable land use, gardening and farming techniques.” Even these words could be subject to interpretation, though. What would make the land “beautiful?” What would “sustainability” look like? The landscape architect’s rendering offered some clues, but its hand-drawn, impressionistic style suggested possibilities, not certainties. Similarly, the stated commitment to “serving the whole region,” and the list of potential partnerships, spoke to widespread collaboration but left a lot unsaid.

Aligning: Participants Create Identity Correspondence through Imaginative Imputation

As I interviewed and worked alongside CCUF participants during the farm’s first full season, I heard people filling in the blanks above in different ways. I call this process imaginative imputation, and it has both mental and discursive components. When participants engaged in imaginative imputation, they talked about a definition of sustainable community more specific than what was codified in the group’s public documents. This talk suggested that individuals held more specific and varied definitions of sustainable community in their minds, informing different motivations for their participation.

For example, Janet, one of the project’s founders, told me she saw the farm as an opportunity to practice permaculture, a specific and intricate method of sustainable farming (Mollison 1988). Alice talked about cultivating native plants, installing solar panels, and a long-term goal of growing specialty crops to provide jobs and support the farm’s educational efforts.

Betty, an African American woman in her 80s, saw things differently. As mentioned above, in her interview, she drew on the vacant lot’s history as a settlement house to justify its conversion into an urban farm. She explained that historical maps showed that the settlement house had had an extensive food garden. Later, she linked this history to an account of how she would explain the project to a newcomer. For Betty, farming the vacant lot was a way to carry on the settlement house’s legacy of growing food and helping an explicitly African American community. Other participants also spoke of CCUF as a vehicle for reaching certain populations in “the community.” Cheryl, a black woman, was a social worker for a program that worked with young mothers. She had joined the project hoping that she could get some of her clients involved. Nick, a black man, also worked with young adults through a mentoring program for men that he had helped start. He believed “working the land” was “therapeutic,” and he had been hoping to get some of the young men and their mentors involved in this project.

The definitions of sustainable community held by Alice and Janet, and Betty, Cheryl, and Nick, were not opposites of each other; it is logically possible to imagine an educational, entrepreneurial farm that would involve low-income young adults in a rigorous form of sustainable farming. That is, in fact, exactly what projects like Growing Power have accomplished with some success (Allen 2012). However, these different projections signaled divergent priorities, and masked some more significant disagreements that only surfaced in action, as group members confronted problems and attempted to coordinate responses that aligned with their (supposedly) shared vision.

Negotiating: Coordination Problems Sharpen and Shift Sustainable Community

Below, I examine the conditions under which coordination problems surfaced, the substance of those problems, and the interactional strategies that participants used to manage them. I group these strategies into four categories—dismissing, refocusing, reframing, and avoiding.

Dismissing

The most direct strategy for dealing with a coordination problem was dismissal, when a person or subgroup rejected another’s suggestion of a particular course of action outright. Most of the time, dismissal was used only during discussions about logistics. For example, when participants discussed which tasks a church mission group might be able to complete at the vacant lot over the space of a weekend, Janet ruled out the possibility that the volunteers would be able to pitch the roof of the recently installed shipping container, stating that the task would simply take too long. However, other examples stand out of someone dismissing a suggestion not because it was impractical, but because it did not line up with the (supposedly) shared imagined future that was in play.

At CCUF, a significant coordination problem that emerged early in the project had to do with its social bonds, particularly how the group would relate to city authorities. Although Pastor Jo and Alice had partnered in dreaming up CCUF, Alice volunteered more hours at the beginning of the project. “At first I was so busy,” Pastor Jo remembered. “I was working on—on my own doctorate so I really didn’t have much time, uh, while this whole, you know, vision was . . . taking root” (Interview, 2013). The 2012 pilot season at CCUF kicked off with great energy and enthusiasm. “We just kicked butt,” Janet remembered. With the help of a grant from a local utility company, participants invested thousands of dollars in the first stage of digging a well on the vacant lot, to serve as a water source for agriculture. But when they found out that the city would not permit a private well within the city limits, Alice and Pastor Jo disagreed about how to respond. While Alice wanted to continue drilling the well without the city’s permission, Pastor Jo refused:

I was [initially] supporting that, that we have a, um, a well system. I still agree with that. I would still like to see that happen but at the same time, uh, I had to take responsibility that this would be a project that will work with the city and not against the city because it was the city ordinances that restricted us from digging a well. [To go ahead with the well,] I would’ve been going against the city. And I just didn’t think that was a very fruitful move to make. So um, that’s when I decided to step in and be more involve and to make sure that decisions like that are not made.

Pastor Jo knew at the start that the well may not be permitted, but was hoping that the group’s efforts might invite an exemption or instigate a policy change. However, when it became clear that the city would not permit a well, Pastor Jo stepped in to assert that the group must respect the city’s directive. This response solidified an understanding of the project’s relationship with the city—that is, one aspect of the project’s social bonds. Was Steel City a partner in the project, a powerful actor to keep on the group’s good side? Or was it an antagonist, one whose limiting and sometimes even corrupt operations project participants would be protesting through their actions? Pastor Jo’s decisive assertion made it clear that the former, not the latter, relationship was the one that participants would pursue.

The response marked a shift in the project leadership, according to several participants. As Pastor Jo indicates in the quote above, this was an event that prompted her to “step in and . . . be more involved.” Janet agreed with this in her interview. She described this time period of the project as “a bumpy start”; one in which

there was no focus so a lot of people lost interest. So we had a whole bunch of people on board and then they started dwindling away as, uh, no real progress was made . . . Uh, I think lack of leadership for lack of a better word, um, and uh, it just sorta floundered. And then finally Pastor stepped up and things started getting done. (Interview, 2013; emphasis added)

Alice, however, felt pushed to the periphery by this dismissal as well as another one that occurred early the next year. In January 2013, Alice proposed that the group plant a meditation garden to demonstrate anti-war sentiments, and “transition the project to a fully functioning ministry of peace.” However, as Alice recounted in an interview, Betty rejected the idea. “[She] felt that was getting too far away from what our mission was.” Alice described these moments as pivotal ones for her role at CCUF:

It was negative in the beginning when a couple of my ideas weren’t—weren’t, you know, weren’t really endorsed. That kind of set me back ’cause I put so much energy and um, thought into how to make things work, you know, and I had come up with [the] idea and uh, and that was kind of also a little turning point for me.

Alice decided it was important to “[step] back,” and she reframed the experience as a positive one for the group: “it has turned out in really a great way because um, that just, um, sort of allowed Pastor to take more leadership of the project” (Interview, 2013).

Dismissal was the most authoritative response to a coordination problem that I observed. Someone’s ability to reject a suggestion without getting challenged by other participants signaled a certain level of authority in the matter being discussed. For example, Janet, a master gardener, was seen as an authority on matters of gardening; her judgment about when it was seasonally appropriate to plant certain crops, or how long certain gardening tasks would take, usually went unquestioned.

Refocusing

Refocusing entailed shifting a topic of conversation away from potential disagreements about the imagined future that was guiding the group. At one planning meeting on a weekday evening, Alice, Betty, and Pastor Jo engaged in a fast-paced and somewhat meandering discussion about the layout of the vacant lot. As conversation roamed from the subjects of security, to picnic tables, to solar panels, to finding a viable water source, Betty, sitting to my right, shot me a look. “We’re all over the place,” she whispered.

Alice had gone up to the chalkboard in the Sunday school room in which we were meeting to better sketch out everyone’s suggestions. Now, she used her chalk to tap out a scenario in which the group might want to wheel jugs of tap water from the water spigot to a gazebo that would be set up for volunteers.

“People rarely drink water from the tap anymore,” said Betty. “They drink bottled water.”

“But that’s not sustainable,” Alice protested. There was a beat of silence. “We have clean water available here”—at this, she tapped at where the water spigot was on her chalkboard diagram—“from [the water company].”

There was another beat of silence. It was broken by Pastor Jo, who suggested that “we review what needs to be done between now and next week.” Alice sat back down, and the topic of conversation shifted in accordance with Pastor Jo’s suggestion.

Alice and Betty’s disagreement about water, though mild in tone, suggested that they imagined sustainable community differently—specifically, what the scope of sustainable community entailed. For Betty, it was preferable to provide the bottled water that the volunteers, in her mind’s eye, would prefer. Alice, however, was not willing to privilege volunteer preferences over the more earth-friendly option of tap water. Pastor Jo’s suggestion to focus on even shorter-term tasks, “between now and next week,” did not resolve this conflict, but rather refocused everyone’s attention on a problem that was easier to solve.

Reframing

Reframing involved a shift from describing aspects of the future as a group preference (“we”) to describing the future that an individual would prefer. One sunny, mild Saturday, a small group of people gathered at the vacant lot on Maple Street in preparation for that morning’s workday. Alice, that day’s leader, had planned for us to lay down layers of newspaper and mulch around the raised garden beds, to make it easier to walk between them. But the grass had gotten too tall, and no one had brought clippers, so Alice suggested we paper and mulch the trail instead. Built by volunteers from a local sports team the previous season, the “trail” was a pathway that extended diagonally from the northwest corner of the lot into its center. It was lined by logs and, for the time being, ended at nothing in particular.

After the group dispersed to begin its tasks, Betty walked toward Alice and me with a green bottle attached to a spraying hose. It resembled a pesticide bottle, though it had a label I could not make out. Betty told us she “found this” in her garage and was going to try it on the stubborn burdock weeds. We had been doing our best for a few weeks now to dig up the burdock, to no avail; with their deep roots, the plants only seemed to grow back larger. Alice made a noncommittal response; I suspected she was not thrilled with the idea.

As Betty sprayed around the flower beds, Alice suggested that she and I pull the weeds that were coming up from the mulched pathway through the center of the lot. Randall watched us. He asked Alice, “Isn’t there fiber underneath the mulch?” Alice said yes, but weeds were coming up through it regardless. Randall suggested that we just add another layer of mulch to the pathway, and then spray [with pesticide] any weeds that were still visible.

This time, Alice responded more definitively, telling Randall that “we” were trying not to use fungicides and pesticides. Randall paused for a beat, and then said, “OK.” His tone contained a note of doubt, but he did not push the issue.

Later that morning, Cheryl, Alice, and I were looking at the section of the path that Rick, Randall, and another volunteer had been filling in with mulch. Cheryl asked if we could spray the tall weeds and grasses that were still sticking out along the path’s edge.

“Well, so my personal thing is to try not to use chemicals,” Alice responded slowly.

Cheryl negotiated: What about using pesticides on the weeds coming up on the path, away from the vegetable beds? This time, Alice conceded. “I’ve heard Roundup works pretty well,” she said.

At first evaluation, this series of interactions looks like a compromise: After repeatedly being challenged on the issue of pesticide usage, Alice conceded to Cheryl’s, Randall’s, and Betty’s point of view. However, the exchange made clear that Alice did not change her personal view of pesticide usage, only the way she framed its relevance for the group. When responding to Randall, Alice framed the rule about not using pesticides as one shared by the whole group; her use of the term “we” suggests as such. But Cheryl’s question marked the third time that this rule had been challenged in the course of a single morning. This time, Alice framed the choice not to use pesticides as a personal one. She subsumed her personal preference under what seemed to be the preference of the majority—at least, the majority who were present that morning. For the time being, this reframing preserved the stability of the interaction and allowed the workday to move forward in peace. But it did not solve the underlying conflict.

Avoiding

Avoiding meant not voicing one’s disagreement with a course of action, even when a participant found it to be in conflict with their vision of sustainable community. A clear example of this took place when Janet conceded the issue of pesticide use, not long after Alice. One workday, she and I set to work weeding the perennial beds, which were forever under threat of being overrun by invasive morning glory. As we worked, Janet rolled a clump of dirt between her fingers and showed it to me, pointing out the mycorrhizae in the soil. She explained that the fungi had a symbiotic relationship with the plants in the bed, nourishing the plants’ roots while also feeding off of them. This is something that organic growers value, she explained. Pesticides, however, would kill everything in the soil and deplete it, leading to topsoil erosion. Janet clearly did not believe the use of pesticides to be appropriate, even in flower beds, which were not producing food for human consumption. Yet, when Betty told Janet about the plan to spray the burdock weed, Janet’s response was, “Alright.” She did not sound thrilled, but neither did she press the issue. This exchange happened two weeks after Betty’s similar exchange with Alice.

Changing Participation Alters Project Scope

The coordination problems described above revealed some underlying differences in how participants envisioned sustainable community. For Alice, sustainable community meant investing in pesticide-free farming practices, a peace garden, and civil disobedience to state power. Janet shared Alice’s commitment to pesticide-free farming and native plant cultivation. For Pastor Jo, Betty, Cheryl, and Randall, sustainable community would be achieved by cultivating good will with city officials, prioritizing volunteers’ preference for bottled water over the environmental friendliness of tap water, and beautifying the vacant lot with pesticides if necessary. When these differences surfaced as coordination problems, the strategies of dismissal, refocusing, reframing, and avoiding led to the latter vision prevailing over the former.

Both Janet and Alice had stopped attending CCUF meetings and workdays by the end of 2013. Both stated that they had become too busy to participate, but the data above suggest a more nuanced story—that their commitment to the project dwindled when it started to take on a shape different from what they had imagined. Janet’s job was demanding every summer, but this previously had not posed a problem; during CCUF’s pilot season, she told me, she had volunteered the entirety of her days off—“eight hours a weekend”—to the garden beds’ cultivation. Alice, similarly, invested enormous amounts of time into the project at the beginning, but her enthusiasm began to wane after the rejection of her big-picture ideas for a peace garden and a rebellious well-drilling initiative. My argument is not that coordination problems singlehandedly caused participants’ commitment to evaporate; rather, they weakened commitments that were already challenged by tight schedules and competing demands.

The absence of Alice and Janet altered the discursive resources in place during deliberations and workdays the following year. Largely gone were the discussions about organic farming techniques. Gone, too, was discussion about solar panels and other forms of alternative energy. At an early 2014 meeting, Pastor Jo mentioned the idea to put solar panels on the lot, but said it had been “Alice’s idea . . . So, we would need more expertise for that.” The implication was that without Alice present, that line of action could no longer be pursued.

Discussion

The founders of CCUF fashioned a vision of sustainable community through creative combination of the material resources and cultural templates they had available. The vision of a “job-creating, revenue-generating” farm that would “demonstrate sustainable gardening and farming practices” made use of a vacant lot, a material resource that would otherwise become a financial burden. Ideologically, the farm would embrace techniques first modeled by organizations that Alice and Pastor Jo found inspiring. On one hand, this bricolage appears to support arguments for the cultural nature of social movement strategy (Meyer and Staggenborg 2012; Polletta and Jasper 2001). But, on the other hand, to reduce this vision to a “strategy” would be to miss empirically rich information about the “ends” around which action at CCUF was oriented. It was more than just a plan for how to accomplish instrumental goals; it was a meaning-laden projection of what participants’ intensive efforts would accomplish.

This future projection rallied a diverse array of participants, but my data reveal that they did not all describe sustainable community in the same way. Each participant engaged in a process of imaginative imputation to “see” a future that aligned with their own ideals. It was only in action that participants’ differences surfaced, forcing negotiation about the project’s collective identity.

Conceptualizing the processes of defining, aligning with, and negotiating the future as “identity work” addresses a current theoretical problem with the study of collective identity: In the contemporary context of activism, when volunteers organize around “lifestyle” concerns and treat identity as fluid, how do they forge commonality without relying on traditional identity categories such as race, nationality, religion, or gender? It also answers an empirical puzzle that emerged during the course of my research—why did initially committed participants ultimately drop out of an effort to enact ambitious environmental change? Explanations of burnout did not seem to apply, as there was no evidence that the participants were emotionally drained. A decline in affective commitment seemed to be the answer; however, this affective commitment came not from the alignment of personal and project identities, but rather from participants’ sense that the project’s imagined future aligned with their own vision of sustainable community.

Alice and Janet’s departures ultimately did affect the group’s ability to realize a certain vision of environmental change. The two women were the most knowledgeable of the group when it came to alternative energy and permaculture techniques. Hence, their departure changed the scope of the project by altering the discursive resources that the group had on hand during planning meetings, and limiting talk about what was possible (see Blee 2013). However, this also created opportunities for new forms of knowledge to come to the fore—other participants, like Randall, knew plenty about more conventional forms of gardening. In the season after Alice and Janet departed, the scope of the project shifted to a community gardening effort that would beautify the land and celebrate its history.

Conclusion

This paper advances the sociological literature on collective identity by connecting it with a small but burgeoning literature on the sociology of the future, conceptualizing the definition, alignment, and negotiation of future projects as forms of identity work that motivate and sustain—or weaken—activists’ commitment to social change projects. First, I identify imaginative imputation as a process that facilitates solidarity in a diverse group. Second, I identify coordination problems as performative dynamics of settings that illuminate where people’s implicit ideas about the future diverge (see Tavory and Eliasoph 2013). Finally, I describe several strategies that participants used to manage coordination problems, adding to our understanding of how activists negotiate their ideas of the future, and how these negotiation strategies impact commitment.

Considering how ideas about the future figure into identity work advances our understanding of collective identity processes, particularly in movements whose goals do not center on identity claims. Based on my reading of recent work in and outside of sociology, future projections may be particularly salient in contemporary environmental and peace movements. While some environmental movements certainly use elements of members’ racial, ethnic, or gender identities to construct solidarity (Adams and Shriver 2011; Moore 1998; Pulido 1996), many environmentalists organize around, and find solidarity in, compelling visions of the future. Marco Giugni and Maria T. Grasso (2015) summarize contemporary political ecology as a movement that

goes beyond specific environmental issues to convey a holistic view of a decentralized, democratic, and egalitarian society that develops in harmony with nature . . . In this way, environmental protection becomes intimately linked to a more comprehensive view of social change. (P. 340)

Ann Mische (2014) brings additional insight into how activists constructed—and debated—such views during the People’s Summit and the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012. In the field of peace and conflict studies, the concept of justpeace (Lederach 1999) goes beyond the abolition of conflict to encompass “values and principles of how we want to live together” (Sawatsky 2009: ix). Social scientists are well positioned to contribute to theories of justpeace by examining how activists collectively define and negotiate such visions. While environmental and peace movements are two of the most obvious settings for examining futures, many additional civic and social movement settings may lend themselves to the study of the future, such as animal rights’ groups, labor movements, and prison abolition movements.

These findings are limited to a single case. Research on new cases, in and beyond environmental movements, could enrich our knowledge of the kinds of visions that animate different social change efforts, and when and how these visions diverge across lines of class, race, or other social differences. At CCUF, there was some clustering of differences in future projections along racial lines; in general, white participants’ visions of sustainable community privileged organic and sustainable farming techniques, while African American participants’ visions incorporated more ideas about the social bonds they hoped to create at the farm. Comparative cases could shed more light on the durability of these racial differences across different kinds of movements. Moreover, further research is needed to determine whether the properties of future projections identified here—scope, socio-geographic boundaries, social bonds, and clarity—are salient in other groups’ action and discourse. These properties may be part of a common “grammar” in social movements in general (see Mische 2014) or environmental movement groups, in particular, or they may be specific to the particular historical context of this case. Finally, while I detail negotiation processes that ultimately prompted the exit of some activists from a social movement group, the question remains whether different kinds of responses to coordination problems could actually preserve and sustain activists’ commitment. For example, more explicit dialogue about the relationship between particular practices and future outcomes could enable strategic compromises that preserve activists’ faith that they are collectively working toward a common good.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this paper.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported in part by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame.

Notes

Author Biography

Amy Jonason is an assistant professor of sociology at Furman University.

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