Ideas, thinkers, and social networks: The process of grievance construction in the anti-genetic engineering movement |
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Authors: | Rachel Schurman William Munro |
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Affiliation: | (1) University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minnesota;(2) Illinois Wesleyan University, Illinois |
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Abstract: | Popular commentaries suggest that the movement against genetic engineering in agriculture (anti-GE movement) was born in Europe,
rooted in European cultural approaches to food, and sparked by recent food-safety scares such as “mad cow” disease. Yet few
realize that the anti-GE movement's origins date back thirty years, that opposition to agricultural biotechnology emerged
with the technology itself, and that the movement originated in the United States rather than Europe. We argue here that neither
the explosion of the GE food issue in the late 1990s nor the concomitant expansion of the movement can be understood without
recognizing the importance of the intellectual work carried out by a “critical community” of activists during the two-decade-long
period prior to the 1990s. We show how these early critics forged an oppositional ideology and concrete set of grievances
upon which a movement could later be built. Our analysis advances social movement theory by establishing the importance of
the intellectual work that activists engage in during the “proto-mobilizational” phase of collective action, and by identifying
the cognitive and social processes by which activists develop a critical, analytical framework. Our elaboration of four specific
dimensions of idea/ideology formation pushes the literature toward a more complete understanding of the role of ideas and
idea-makers in social movements, and suggests a process of grievance construction that is more “organic” than strategic (pace the framing literature).
Rachel Schurman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests lie in the
areas of international political economy of food and agriculture, environmental sociology, and social movements. She is co-editor
of Engineering Trouble: Biotechnology and Its Discontents (University of California Press, 2003) and several articles and book chapters on the anti-genetic engineering movement. Her
current book project, with William Munro, explores how organized social resistance to GMOs has shaped the trajectory of agricultural
biotechnology.
William Munro is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director, International Studies Program, at Illinois Wesleyan University.
His research and writing focuses on the politics of agrarian change and state formation in Africa, as well as post-conflict
development. He is the author of The Moral Economy of the State: Conservation, Community Development and State-Making in Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press,1998). He is currently collaborating with Rachel Schurman on a book about social resistance to agricultural
biotechnology. |
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