Timescapes of activism: Trajectories,encounters and timings of Czech women’s NGOs

Abstract

Despite ongoing feminist debates about the past, present and future of feminism, the multidimensionality of time in activist work has largely remained under-examined. This article develops the partial timeframes of trajectories, encounters and timings to explore the practices of women organizing in Czech NGOs after 1989. Empirically the study draws on individual and group interviews conducted with NGO activists in 2003/2004 and 2009/2010 as well as organizational websites. The article argues that a timescape perspective provides a useful heuristic lens for tracing trajectories of organizing shaped by different funding mechanisms; activist encounters that open up social and political alternatives of acting and being; and the effects of timing activist engagements with the lifetimes of activists. The conclusion reflects on the implications of an investigation through time for reconfiguring pervasive deficit accounts of NGO-based activism and its futures.

Keywords

Activism citizenship work Czech Republic encounter NGOization timescapes timing trajectory women’s NGOs

Introduction

On the eve of International Women’s Day (IWD) 2008, feminist activists performed the ‘Historical foreboding of the Czech Women’s Club’ on Wenceslas Square in Prague. Wearing period costumes and holding up posters with the portraits of renowned women campaigners and professionals from the first half of the 20th century, they revived the activities of feminists who in 1903 founded and later participated in the Women’s Club to promote women’s civil and political rights; several were executed by the Nazis and in the Communist show trails. Accompanied by an open letter to the mayor, the performance also envisioned the restitution of a nearby building – constructed, owned and occupied by the Club from 1931 until its elimination in 1949 and now possessed by the Prague 1 district – to underfunded feminist successor organizations.

Campaigning for women’s rights, mobilizing online and offline publics and activist communities and seeking legal redress are part of quotidian citizenship work by those who occupy historically second-class citizenship positions (Gender and Cultural Citizenship Working Group, 2009: 4). But while extant work has drawn attention to the discursive framings of actions and political claims (Hašková et al., 2011; Lombardo et al., 2010) and the multiple spatial features of such engagements (Lorenz-Meyer, 2007; Regulska et al., 2006; Yuval-Davis, 1997), the event also points to multiple temporalities in and through which activism is enacted. Thus the campaign reclaimed feminist legacies of the First Czechoslovak Republic, as well as IWD, that had been depoliticized under state-socialism, and synchronized the global day of feminist mobilization with local actions. Activists’ life courses and means of subsistence too must be synchronized to allow for more sustained and sustainable engagements. Women’s organizing thereby partakes in an ongoing production of the pasts, presents and futures of feminism (Wiegman, 2000).

Taking the example of women’s activism in Czech non-governmental organizations (NGOs) this article begins to examine these multiple temporalities more systematically. As McAdam and Sewell (2001) have argued, such an exploration through time – or timescapes (Adam, 1998) – follows the rhythms, timings and tempos, as well as the changes and contingencies of past and present activities and interactions. In the scope of the present article I draw on the accounts of present and past actors in the voluntary sector as well as on emergent work on the times of citizenship (Scheuerman, 2005) and knowledge work (Garforth and Červinková, 2009) to develop the partial timeframes of trajectories, encounters and timings that became salient for understanding the ways activists talked about and represented their engagements. By bringing together (temporal) features that are often held apart – situated narrations of trajectories of women’s organizing in NGOs, the enactment of activist communities and incremental acts of contestation, and the timings of activism with the lifetimes of activists – I argue that a timescape perspective provides a useful heuristic lens for tracing the complex textures and tensions of NGO-based activism, its achievements and challenges.

Offered up as a necessarily partial account I hope that an examination through time may renew interest in and collaboration with the voluntary sector that arguably remains a persistent location of feminist citizenship work¹ but also relatively marginal in current feminist theorizing. For a start, there is no index of exactly how many Czech women’s NGOs currently exist.² Furthermore, there are longstanding doubts about the vitality and impact of women’s organizations. The about 35 women’s groups that were documented in the mid-1990s (including professional, religious and political associations) were for the most part not explicitly feminist in orientation and often characterized as small, fragmented and having little impact (see e.g. Hauser, 1995; Saxonberg, 2001; Wolchik, 1994). Since some academic gender research initially emerged out of feminist organizations it did not take these activist formations as ‘objects’ of enquiry (also Kapusta-Pofahl, 2002). With few exceptions (e.g. Vodrážka, 1996) research into Czech women’s NGOs peaked in the context of EU eastern enlargement and was often funded by research grants from abroad (e.g. Hašková and Křížková, 2006; Heitlinger, 2004). As in East-Central Europe more generally, the assessment of women’s NGOs remained critical, alleging that they modelled themselves after western organizations and agendas (Kašić, 2004; McMahon, 2002), were fragmented, state-oriented and lacked political vision and efficiency (Charkiewicz, 2004; Graff, 2009) – itself a temporal narrative where western hegemony interrupts the generation of indigenous feminisms. Aside from unpublished case studies (e.g. Bosáková, 2008) there is to my knowledge only one study that has examined what kinds of feminisms and feminist theories are currently enacted in Czech women’s NGOs (Nyklová, 2012).

The research presented here emerges out of the project ‘Constructing Supranational Political Spaces’ (2002–2005), a follow-up focus group with members of seven prominent feminist organizations carried out in 2009 and six individual interviews with participants who had been active in those organizations as well as research on organizational websites, conducted in 2010.³ While including participants from organizations that no longer exist, compared with the 60 existing Czech organizations listed on feminismus.cz, the sample is biased towards larger feminist NGOs and foundations that do not merely provide social services but see themselves as working towards changing structures and institutions. Thus, activities in the field of women’s health (maternity, HIV/AIDS, sex work, cancer, child abuse) and occupational development are underrepresented while advocacy in gender equality, social inclusion of minoritized ethnic groups, environment, LGBT rights and political participation are more prominent. Similarly to the organizations listed on the database, participants came overwhelmingly from NGOs that are based or have their headquarters in Prague, even though their activities were spatially more diverse.

From this particular vantage point, the article tracks activist practices and interactions through three temporal frames that emerged from the data. The first section focuses on the trajectories of Czech women’s organizing after 1989. I explore how turning points and the phases of activist engagements they delineate were prospected and retrospected at two historical moments (Brown and Michael, 2003). This analysis draws attention to the vicissitudes of NGO funding and its implicit and explicit effects that are insufficiently captured by the label NGOization (Lang, 1997). The second section focuses on acts and encounters in everyday time. I investigate what kind of activist socialities (Pink, 2008) are enacted in specific encounters and what, if any, transformative practices and imaginations can emerge in fixed timeframes of projects and funded actions. The third section investigates the timings of activist engagements with the lifetimes of activists. Here I examine how practitioners manage complex processes of synchronization and who and what is timed out in the process. The conclusion reflects on the implications of a timescape perspective for assessing the potentials and challenges for NGO-based activism and its futures.

Trajectories of women’s organizing in NGOs

Since the NGO practitioners interviewed in 2003/2004 and 2009/2010 had experienced intense restructuring of NGOs in relation to different funding opportunities, it may not be surprising that they distinguished distinct phases of activism accordingly. As one participant active since 2000 surmised, ‘it really was activism, then it was this kind of business, and now we have returned to this activism – when it came again to the point “now we don’t know if we will close down in half a year, now we’ll do it for free” [many people left]’ (focus group, 2009). Such periodization appears to resonate with the much-claimed transition of feminist activism from women’s mass mobilization with more contentious tactics (‘street politics’) to a rise of activism institutionalized in NGOs and transnational advocacy networks (Alvarez, 1999; Keck and Sikking, 1999). This shift has been condensed in the notion of the ‘NGOization of feminism’ (Lang, 1997) where activists have become middle-class educated ‘knowledge experts’ and feminist actions are designed in the form of fundable projects that are concerned with changing institutional processes (Hašková and Křížková, 2006; Jad, 2007); some have recently identified a ‘return to movement activism’ within feminist movements (Conway, 2007; Grabowska, 2012).

Here I want to examine how NGO practitioners themselves constructed trajectories of organizing at two historical moments in relation to particular funding structures. As will become clear in the sections that follow, I do not want to suggest that these trajectories by themselves allow inferences about the efficacy of activist practices. They are partial reconstructions that bring material conditions to the fore that have been less attended to in theorizing of western movements (Heitlinger, 2004; Lohmann, 2009). Trajectories are constantly evolving. They are projected, anticipated, (re)defined and (re)constructed, which helps marshal resources, coordinate activities and deal with uncertainty (Corbin and Strauss, 1991). Following McAdam and Sewell (2001), I explore particular transformative events that were identified as changing movement trajectories.

Activism

As indicated in the previous section, from the vantage point of the late 2000s senior NGO practitioners described the 1990s as a period of activism. Those active at that time identified the availability of start-up costs and infrastructural funding from North American and Western European foundations, governments and individuals after 1989 as catalytic for building independent women’s organizations that were banned under state-socialism (also Heitlinger, 2004; Kapusta-Pofahl et al., 2005). The websites of three larger organizations and foundations that date back to the early 1990s document a plethora of activities during this period, ranging from the organization of exhibitions and workshops to publishing and roundtables in the areas of women’s health, violence, lesbianism, eco-feminism and Roma women. The intense hopefulness of generating feminist futures is evident in how former activists spoke about funding opportunities in the everyday.

E.g. we had the Ford Foundation that you could approach at any time of the year with an idea, and then they would probably say ‘OK, wait until November when we will have a council meeting about Eastern Europeans, but before then let’s talk’. Nobody pays this kind of attention today. There were people even in those positions in foundations here and abroad who were part of the movement as well … And then there were rich people [émigrés] who wanted to support [gender equality] at that time, so it was coming together and planning together, and then at the end one would say, ‘Oh this is an idea that I would like to see happening, so why don’t you write something down and I give you the money’ (laughs). Yes, this is how it worked! (Interview, 2010)

While explicitly set against the bureaucratic funding procedure in the present this account defines women’s activism in NGOs in terms of a bottom-up collective development of ideas and actions that involved funders and activists as part of a larger transnational feminist movement. Voluntary participation and project and operational funding enabled these practices. At the same time the participant also acknowledged uncertainties of funding from foreign foundations linked to left-leaning political parties that depended on the re-election of those parties abroad. As another activist remembers, ‘there were always problems with the finances’ (focus group, 2009). So were there tensions and hierarchies between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ feminisms that have been amply documented (e.g. Šiklová, 1998; Wöhrer, 2004).

Following the UN World Conference on women in 1995, a few practitioners started organizing at regional and transnational levels (Lorenz-Meyer, 2007). They recall that engagements with the UN gave rise to hopes of using the Czech Republic’s accession negotiations with the EU as a means to accelerate the implementation of a gender equality infrastructure and social transformation (see also Heitlinger, 2004).

Projects

When interviewed in 2003 shortly before the country’s accession to the EU, NGO practitioners identified this hope as illusionary and misguided. Eligibility of NGOs for EU pre-accession funds had propelled a successive withdrawal of funding by western donors, while state funding remained limited. This turning point had ushered in a ‘project era’ (Hašková and Křížková, 2006) where organizations were exclusively financed through projects. This meant that they had to design project proposals in response to pre-defined ‘calls for projects’ on a competitive basis and fulfil formal eligibility criteria, particularly a financial and organizational capability to pre-finance and administer large projects (for EU funding projects would usually have to be related to employment issues). Activists acknowledged that they ‘had come too late’ to shape the gender equality agenda in the accession period and were critical of the technocratic nature of state and EU funding. After initial experiences, some entered strategic partnerships or avoided EU funding, for ‘then I do nothing else than applying for grants, managing grants, and there is no time for me to do the real work’ (focus group, 2004).

By 2003 the total volume of NGO funding had shrunk. Only one-third of the women’s groups founded in the early 1990s were still in existence of the overall 59 that had been documented (Hašková and Křížková, 2006). Many practitioners were concerned that post-accession funding through the European Social Funds (ESF) ‘will be out of reach for women’s NGOs because they won’t have administrative capacity to obtain and administer it’ (focus group, 2004).

Business

Contrary to these expectations, the eligibility for ESF and the possibility to tender for a grant on gender equality from the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs in 2004 combined with strategic skills in obtaining funds catalysed a new expansion of Czech women’s NGOs. In hindsight, the period from 2004 to 2007 was considered a ‘golden era’ (focus group, 2009) of women’s organizing with about 70 groups registered on feminismus.cz. The ESF became the largest source of funding, and organizations that managed to obtain it were able to expand the number of salaried positions tied to fixed-term projects on an unprecedented scale and accommodate student volunteers in partnership with local universities. New foci of activism included media reporting and political participation. Organizations also formed a national umbrella network to augment their policy impact. Even though commercial activities such as (paid) gender training seminars remained marginal, practitioners used the anglicized neologism byznys (focus group, 2009) to describe this period. The impact of foreign grant organizations was also evident on the women’s groups’ websites where staff were listed under the positions of fundraiserka and projektová manažerka that did not previously exist. Organizations also had advisory boards and since financial auditing had become mandatory, worked with external auditors.

At the same time, NGO documents issued at the time point to a continuing sense of precariousness. One report noted that gender equality concerns were still not recognized as a legitimate issue for funding at the national level and that financial support by cities, regions and the state as well as corporate philanthropy had remained negligible (Králíková and Sokačová, 2006). Reflecting on the dependency of women’s NGOs on the ESF, practitioners cautioned that at the end of the 2004–2006 funding period ‘another period of their existence is uncertain again’ (Králíková and Sokačová, 2006: 31).

Precarity

The delay in issuing new grant tenders in 2007 by Czech agencies that distributed the ESF ushered in a period of retrenchment and precariousness. In a public letter NGOs voiced their protest about ‘a gradual liquidation of NGOs’ (Forum pro integrací, 2008) and lobbied for accountable funding mechanisms. When interviewed in 2009, research participants expressed dismay that some of the ‘most qualified and engaged people [were] leaving’ (focus group, 2009) the voluntary sector and several organizations had closed down.⁴ While follow-up interviews indicated that larger organizations had been successful in securing new (often short-term) projects through the ESF and a small number of remaining international donors and state ministries, the eligibility criteria were narrow, bureaucratic and exclusionary.⁵ With a continuing emphasis on visible and quantifiable results, many activities appeared again to be no longer fundable. This seemed the case with the largest feminist library in Central Europe, which had been run by an NGO for nearly two decades. Despite the importance of the library as a knowledge resource and public meeting place, project funding did not cover rent and maintenance since ‘you can’t put [a] library as an activity’ (interview, 2010). By 2012 further positions had been lost.

At the same time Czech women activists had for the first time after 1989 secured executive positions in European and global women’s networks. However, some felt that a lack of funding at home reconstituted inequalities between ‘East’ and ‘West’. In the EU context women’s organizations in Western European countries were seen to:

… have more influence because they have more money. Because their national coordinations have their own secretariat, they can comment on everything, and really put in the effort. But … we do not have any secretariat or anything like that, so of course then it’s harder to somehow influence European policy. (Interview, 2010)

In the absence of alternative funding schemes and of a revival of volunteering in most Prague-based organizations, many practitioners articulated intense worries about ‘what will be [the situation] when the ESF money ends in 2013’ (interview, 2010).

These constructions of the trajectories of Czech women’s organizing in NGOs begin to suggest that the notion of NGOization with its connotation of bureaucratic stabilization and selling out is inadequate for describing the emergence, continuities and changes of NGO-based activism after 1989. Rather than progressive institutionalization that replaces activism, the narratives of NGO practitioners from the outset point to ‘a loose and fluctuating network of thirty or so women’s groups … that cooperate on all kinds of issues, and increasingly form a vibrant but highly vulnerable women’s movement’ (Heitlinger, 2004: 190–191). Yet, different funding opportunities shaped the scope, scale and lifetimes of organizations, often in unanticipated ways. Projects and existential uncertainties appear to be crucial components of all phases of women’s organizing, where a lack of funding is not simply offset by an increase of unpaid voluntary work. Questions about the transformative potentials of NGO-based activism therefore need to be temporally situated in these material trajectories of organizing. And they must attend to what kind of activist encounters they enable in everyday time, as I argue in the next section.

Activist encounters

When telling me about activist work NGO activists often referred to concrete encounters in everyday life, face-to-face meetings with others that involved surprise and conflict in the absence of knowledge that would have allowed for controlling the situation or predicting its outcome (see also Ahmed, 2002: 6–8; Conway, 2007). This temporal focus on activist encounters chimes with the call in citizenship studies to examine ‘those moments through which identities, allegiances, and associations are formed, and what takes place when we encounter, engage with and attach ourselves to others’ (Stephens, 2010: 32) and to examine communities not in terms of what they share but in terms of their ‘modes of assemblage’ and community-making events (Meyer and Molyneux-Hodgson, 2010).

Below I start to explore such encounters first in relation to activist communities and the challenges that arise in different funding periods and second with respect to specific collective actions. I argue that these encounters draw attention to small acts of innovation and contestation that challenge the blanket criticism that women’s NGOs merely imitate western practices and fail to promote social change (Graff, 2009; Guenther, 2011).

Enacting community

In relation to the funding periods described in the previous section, NGO practitioners talked differently about how they came together around certain concerns. A former activist recalls the following event in the period constructed as activism where activists were literally ‘on the move’:

I remember one trip, we all got on a train and went all the way to Slovakia for a talk, for a roundtable about – everything, and what was happening in the train was just amazing: we were talking and at the same creating the future, we were doing the department that exists now there by talking, by planning, by saying this is how it works, and this guy can support this, doing everything, all of us, even those who had no influence had a part … It was a space of cooking [the] future. (Interview, 2010)

This narrative suggests that feminist futures – here the establishment of a gender studies department – were generated when activists spontaneously drew together ideas, contacts and experiences. Institutional affiliation and differences in status and experience were declared inconsequential for encounters that made things move. In contrast to this (real or imagined) focus on communality, accounts of activists in the period of precarity foregrounded differences in concerns, outlooks and levels of engagements between NGOs. Taking the example of getting together with over 20 NGOs that formed a national umbrella network to draw up a petition on public childcare, for example, a member active in the same organization as the woman cited above described in much detail how ‘each of the organizations has really different ideas on what should be done’ (interview, 2010). She concluded that ‘we need to more know each other and the positions, we were trying it but I think it needs to be done again’ and added that there was a significant lack of funding for networking activities, where paradoxically funding bids for the network competed with tenders by membership organizations. As another NGO practitioner put it:

I think that what we need to strengthen is the effectiveness and lobbying activities of the gender sector as a group – despite all our differences, despite all our conflicts. (Interview, 2010)

Developing viable coalition strategies and acting as a ‘community without unity’ (Stephens, 2010) are now described as challenges for creating a feminist future. This does not mean that activists necessarily work in isolation from one another, however. In everyday practice coming together, shared reflection and planning are often relocated within the organization where ‘we brainstorm in a bigger group, and discuss “Did this work, or not?” [and] what sort of feelings we get from the people’ (interview, 2010).

Acting with others

While reflexive encounters with activists from other organizations were often difficult to maintain in project time, encounters with other experts, professionals and publics were enabled and fundable in the timeframe of a project. Here I examine public roundtables, individual discussions with collaborators and blogs.

Public roundtable discussions constitute a deliberative and participatory technique that has been deployed by women’s NGOs since the early 1990s and typically focuses on ‘issue[s] that remain invisible [or are] surrounded by many myths and stereotypes’ (interview, 2010). In what ways can roundtable encounters have mobilizing or transformative effects? Reflecting on a recent roundtable on migrant labour, a feminist activist considered it successful because it brought together practitioners from different fields and sectors and generated new knowledge.

A week ago we had a roundtable where we invited people from the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, we had people from the municipal Employment Office and from the Inspectorate of Labour, another state office and some people from NGOs and we had a discussion about what the problems in employing migrant workers are in [city], what are the risks. And we found that the Ministry of Labour and the Employment Office have completely different interpretations of the same law – which affected … whether migrant workers can get support from the Employment Office. … So we target different offices, sort of get them together, get them talking and try to show these problems and speak about them publicly. (Interview 2010)

While it is uncertain how the identification of this legal ambiguity will change practices on the ground, a sense of accomplishment was indicated by being reported on in the media, so that this issue could be more widely reflected upon.

One-to-one discussions with administrators, decision-makers and other collaborators constitute less visible encounters. One activist recounted the debates she had with a town official on the findings of a gender budget analysis that indicated how public expenditure on sport and culture was gender biased:

[He said] ‘how can you say that when we put 30 million crowns into an ice hockey hall this goes only to men? Women can play hockey, so why don’t they? If we had a women ice hockey team they could use the hall too!’ We do not stick to the simple argument that ice hockey means men of course but still some people do not want to understand the arguments. … [Other] people are very open, even to the extent that they want to start doing gender budgeting in their own cities. (Interview, 2010)

Interactional dynamics such as these appear often too mundane to describe. But they imply that activists creatively laid out how particular investments have gendered meaning and can perpetuate inequalities of gender (and other axes of inequality). Ideationally and practically they can generate new possibilities such as future commitments to more gender-equitable spending. Yet, like with roundtable discussions, potentially transformative arguments and interactions in such encounters largely remained undocumented and thereby lost as a public knowledge base on how gender equality can be translated and made meaningful in political-economic practice.

This also goes for encounters in the production of activist materials like comic strips, petitions or websites. A project that organized regional discussions on homophobia with high school students, for example, included cooperating with local film students to produce four short films to facilitate classroom discussions. One project leader recalled the complex negotiations about the film script with her student collaborator:

The first script he sent us was really pornographic, it started with gay sex (laughs) and he said ‘but the message is that gay sex is not different from straight sex!’ and I told him ‘well, but there are soo many stereotypes, you know’. So it was really difficult … I asked him to address the issue of parenthood … I asked him to think about it. … Then he sent me a script on HIV/AIDS, again very problematic, and then he did this one – it’s actually my favourite [film]. (Interview, 2010)

It is in face-to-face negotiations among collaborators – not merely in the uses of the final product – that participants are encouraged to rethink their own stereotypes and develop the ability to see oneself in another and to see from within this world.

Activists’ use of blogs and other social media such as Facebook and YouTube generated new virtual encounters. Blogs in particular invite audience responses in a process of co-creation of content and tone. They are also known to invoke hostile and derogatory responses (Baumer et al., 2011), as the deployment of sarcasm and personal insult and threat suggest in the following encounter on a website that focused on sexual violence:

It’s difficult, especially the blogs. This is a crazy thing, and I know that I shouldn’t read the discussion below [the posts], and I always read it, and it always says something like, ‘well, you should be raped, and what’s your problem? How do you get money from us, the “normal” citizens?’ (laughs). But at least it gets some attention I guess, plus I think that we were quite successful in getting interest from the media. (Interview, 2010)

Such incidences underscore the degree to which NGO-based activism as well as creating new engagements remains highly charged and contentious. Practitioners’ acting with others in a range of online and offline encounters that are often surprising and impossible to predict thereby complicates assertions that women’s NGOs have uncritically adopted a western ‘gender mainstreaming’ agenda (Kašić, 2004) and abandoned a ‘bold vision of justice’ (Graff, 2009: 34) as they ‘become engaged in their institutional survival’. While the accounts do suggest that as a community without unity in conditions of existential precariousness, women’s organizations have been less able to create effective coalitions, activist encounters draw attention to a multitude of (often undocumented) micro-practices that are infused with a desire to effect social change, creatively translate gender equality into social and political practice and help imagine and enact other ways of belonging together. A timescape analysis traces ‘the kind of encounters that are likely to favour the increase of active becomings’ (Braidotti, 2006: 217) in relation to the trajectories of organizing. It further includes a focus on how activist practices are synchronized with the life courses of practitioners.

Timing activism with lifetimes

In the research encounters NGO practitioners talked at length about continuous challenges to coordinate and fit diverse tasks into the limited timeframes of a project or a working day; to synchronize project applications with periods of co-financing or pre-financing other projects to keep the organization viable and avoid or minimize periods without contracts; to time particular actions with political processes (e.g. the Beijing +10 process) and with other life pursuits.

Such struggles to have the right amount of time at the right time have been discussed in relation to time wealth and poverty and their gendered and classed relations (e.g. Warren, 2003), in which the dimension of timing or synchronizing activities at various speeds and intensity is highly relevant (Adam, 1998).

Here I examine how practitioners managed to time activism with other engagements both in the day-to-day and over the life course and how stratifications of age, class and ethnicity are (re)produced in these processes. The work on time poverty has suggested including a focus on what is timed out in processes of synchronization (also Garforth and Červinková, 2009). While Scheuerman (2005), for example, has argued that more time-intensive activities of citizenship work such that the slow-paced time of debate and deliberation may be excluded as everyday life speeds up, Graff has argued that that temporarily more limited forms of voluntary work are timed out, as if, she claims, ‘there is not a single [Polish] feminist organisation of which one might simply become a member, and participate … without applying for a full-time job’ (2009: 36).

Fusing activism and life?

The project descriptions on organizations’ websites and the stories that NGO practitioners tell do not allow straightforward conclusions as to whether or not the coordination of work and personal activities intensified in different funding periods. They do suggest, however, that in the period constructed as precarious planning horizons shrank, and (paid) activists are more likely to be funded from and hence have to synchronize and manage several (often short-term) projects. Whether they were active in the present or the past, many NGO practitioners told me that they ‘loved’ their work and worked beyond the hours they were paid for. Here is an example of activist vocation relating to the period of activism:

I worked day and night, weekends through … It was a mission, really, for many of us: We are doing something here! We cannot just leave to have fun! (laughs) We have fun inside of what we are doing. (Interview, 2010)

Activist practices in this account are not so much synchronized with other activities: activism is life and vocation. As with most other research participants, NGO-based activism for this woman coincided with young adulthood, a period in the life course where many combined it with, or had just finished, university studies. Other practitioners relied on income provided by a well-earning partner or by the state (e.g. parental allowance, study grant) for their livelihood, so that ‘you do this part-time because you like it and there is no pressure on how much you earn or how many hours you work and you don’t care if you don’t have money for three months’ (interview, 2010).

The fact that the majority of research participants were higher-educated women in their mid-twenties to thirties underlines that privileges of class, age and family status mitigated synchronizations of activism with other employment or caring responsibilities, as has been highlighted for other types of work in the literature on time poverty. The research participant cited above said that she felt burned out and quit the organization after a period of nearly 10 years. Profound changes in personnel between 2003 and 2010 amply illustrated that NGO activism was rarely a lifetime pursuit; various NGO representatives had moved out of the voluntary sector to take up positions in other organizations, higher education or, more rarely, the for-profit sector. Few activists have remained in the same organization for more than 10 years.

Fissions and exclusions

Women’s citizenship work in NGOs is further moulded by ethnicity and citizenship status. This was indicated by the absence of Roma activists, who while being part of the umbrella network tended not to participate in jointly organized public events or happenings (or in the 2009 focus group to which they accepted the invitation), as well as by unsuccessful attempts to recruit ‘migrant women’ into political lobbying work around social integration and anti-racism. As one activist recalled,

What we wanted to do is provide a space and let them [migrant women] come up with their ideas. But for some this is not interesting. They are glad that they do not have to deal with these political issues and problems anymore because they now have long-term residence and their motivation to meet other women was to share experiences, and maybe do some cultural activities together. … [For other migrant women], the existential issues are taking so much [of] their capacity that I think it’s basically impossible for them to do anything else. … It’s really difficult for someone who knows that she can stay here for half a year, and then she doesn’t know [how to talk to state officials about] what’s wrong with these concepts of integration. (Interview, 2010)

This account suggests that while activist work can be timed into the lives of younger, higher-educated Czech women, migrant (and working-class) women are timed out of political advocacy work and NGOs. While the practitioner reflected that ‘it’s really problematic that most of the women in our organization are girls my age, white, non-migrant background and we write articles about what these migrant women need’, the narrative still locates the problem chiefly with the circumstances of migrant women. More generally there seemed to be few ideas among the research participants located in Prague of how women’s organizations could change to remunerate women in less secure positions or recruit more privileged women into unpaid lobbying work.

A focus on synchronizing activism in everyday and lifetime therefore accentuates the precariousness of voluntary work and its effects. The implicit and explicit refusals of migrant women to participate in NGO-based advocacy work offer perhaps the most far-reaching challenges for reconfiguring the present and futures of women’s citizenship work and belonging with each other.

Conclusions

This article has argued that a heretofore neglected timescape perspective that explores trajectories, encounters and timings of women’s organizing is a productive heuristic lens for tracing the ambivalent potentials of NGO-based activism in Central Europe. The focus on trajectories draws attention to the changing materialities of women’s organizing (Lohman, 2009). From the vantage point of the early and late 2000s, NGO practitioners did not identify people, ideas or political events but changes in the technologies of funding as transformative moments that delineated different formations of activism, projects, business and precarity. Funding mechanisms shaped the scope and lifetimes of organizations and contributed to materially remaking distinctions between East and West, silence and voice and citizen and denizen in activism. At the same time, the ongoing precariousness of these trajectories challenges a tale of progressive NGOization according to which activism has simply been lost or needs to be returned to (Graff, 2009; Kašić, 2004).

The instability and precariousness of institutionalization was further corroborated by a focus on how NGO practitioners synchronized activist work with other pursuits. The dimension of timing draws attention to temporal fusions of activism and life that were, however, often confined to the period of young adulthood. Insofar as privileges of class, age and citizenship status worked to ease the tensions of synchronizing activism with other engagements, timing also highlighted how women in less secure positions were timed out of activist work; horizontal ‘side-streaming’ (Alvarez, 1999) of feminist activism into underprivileged communities remained limited, at least among organizations located in Prague.

But lest this is taken as evidence that NGO-based activism is dead or ineffective, a focus on activist encounters pointed to a multitude of micro-practices in project time that opened up social and political alternatives of acting and being. While women’s organizing in NGOs emerges in interactions with particular funding mechanisms, it is not exhausted by them. Instead the unpredictability of these encounters suggests that rather than simply reproducing practices developed elsewhere, activist practices were localized and transformed in specific interactions. Yet, the undocumented character of such interactional dynamics, the difficulties of building coalitions between NGOs and auditing logics that only count measurable actions make it difficult to harness the experiential knowledge and visions that emerge from these forms of practical theorizing. In the absence of more sustainable funding strategies the futures of NGO activism remain uncertain.

While each of these frames can be elaborated on and refined through further research, a timescape analysis opens up new challenges and questions. Why, we may ask, is NGO-based activism typically negatively measured against an autonomous mass women’s movement often associated with a particular historical period (the 1970s) in the ‘West’ (Gabrowska, 2012)⁶ – particularly when analysts have shown that this movement too grew out of specific policy networks, was partly concerned with institutional change, and only occasionally came together in mass protests (Nash, 2002)? More significantly, we could interrogate the nostalgia or yearning for robustness, solidity and authenticity of women’s mobilizations (Adkins, 2004) – even unified vision – and how this may foster oversights, ignorance, or depreciation of the small dispersed, incremental acts of contestations (and occasionally bolder attempts to articulate ‘incomplete visionary non-utopian’ worlds [Lugones, 1987] such as the economic justice projects of the regional Karat Coalition).

Acknowledging incremental acts does not mean that women’s organizations need not engage more fully with the state-socialist past, build more diverse coalitions in diverse communities and broaden a feminist agenda beyond gender equality (Kašić, 2004). The Czech study suggests that to some extent such efforts are currently underway. This is indicated by a longstanding oral history project on women’s memories, a recent cooperation with a Roma organization on women’s political participation and an emerging collaboration between women’s NGOs and environmental organizations. Rather than discounting the scale and fragmentation of such efforts, we should focus on how viable partial connections between different initiatives, groups and sectors may be built, amplified and sustained. While this includes taking actual and potential ‘donors to task’ (Alvarez, 1999: 201) and highlighting conflicts between technocratic accounting procedures and democratic ends, it also calls on the participation of feminists located in the academy and other social arenas. A timescape perspective reminds us that building such connections not only takes time but also makes time and that an ongoing impetus for sustainable transformations is unlikely to emerge from permanently precarious organizational formations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the time and thoughtfulness of the research participants, to the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft, and to Blanka Nyklova for inspiring discussions in the final stages of this research.

Funding

The project on which this article is based was funded by the National Science Foundation, USA (BCS-0137954) and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (ME-594).

Notes

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