Humanist Movement’s Environmental Activism in Europe. Insights from the Analysis of Online and Offline Campaigns

This presentation will draw on the early results of RE-Green project, a research study funded by a STARS (Supporting Talents in Research Programme of the University of Padua) grant. The research focuses on an under-researched social movement – the international secular Humanists movement – and its pro-environmental activism. Overall, RE-Green considers the contemporary debate about secularization and the Humanist Movement in Western societies and seeks to contribute to it by providing a novel perspective on Humanists’ activism. The project analyses the work of Humanist activist in the public sphere and in the private sphere by combining different theoretical debates and methods within the framework of Institutional Ethnography. The research fieldwork is in three countries (Norway, the UK, and Italy). The project considers the humanist system of meaning, different from that of religions, and humanist ethics, as emergent perspectives useful to reframe citizens’ environmental responsibilities. The project investigates respectively three areas of Humanists’ activism - in the public sphere (the social relations with different institutions), by considering the Humanists’ standpoints concerning the disjunctures between environmental public policies and their everyday needs and their campaigns; - in the private sphere of their families (the social relations with the next generation/s), by analyzing Humanist parents’ everyday practices of socialization of their children to green responsibilities; - toward the future (social relations with the future of the Earth), by collecting the Humanist Parents’ possible definitions of environmental citizenship and responsibilities. RE-Green conducts content analysis of campaigns, qualitative interviews, and diaries with Humanists who are activists, parents and adult children, and participatory action research to collect policy recommendations from Humanist parents and experts. The project aims to advance knowledge useful to designing policy measures attentive to intersectional and intergenerational aspects in pluralistic societies. Research outputs are a database of international and comparative case studies, a series of thematic templates of models of negotiation, and yield training tools for environmental professionals, educators, and communicators. This paper focuses on the early results of RE-Green project by taking into consideration the first sub-project, which focuses on Humanist activism in the public sphere. This sub-project intersects the academic debate concerning the need to strengthen the ties between social movements’ studies and the sociology of social problems, to re-situate social movements in a wider range of collective civic claims-making, and to develop new theoretical perspectives and methods of studying activism. Institutional Ethnography (IE) has still not received the attention it space in this debate even if it responds, theoretically and methodologically, to this need. Institutional Ethnography facilitates the analysis of Humanists environmental activism in the public sphere by deepening discourses and social practices. The IE approach furnishes an understanding of Humanists’ discourses and practices in advocating for environmental citizenship and how institutions (outside and within the Humanist movement itself) shape them. The study is focused on how the interface between the Humanist as individuals, the Humanist Movement as an organization, the family as an institution in contact with other institutions (e.g., the education system) gets organized in terms of the everyday social relations, negotiations and resistances between Humanists, other non-Humanist parents and other people involved in the process of children education. We are interested in advancing understandings of this interface in terms of ‘work’, that is how the ‘work’ of these parents is framed and impacted by institutional discourses and how they actively negotiate and/or resist these discourses. The concept of ‘work’ in Institutional Ethnography does concern everything that do that takes time, effort, and intent. IE adopts this conception of work in exploring the actualities of institutions. It orients the researcher to what people are doing as they participate, in whatever way, in institutional processes. Therefore, this presentation discusses the first draft of the maps that we elaborated on from the fieldwork, which relates to the first sub-project, and it aims to stress the IE notion of work to study environmental activism in this specific social situation. Results are based on a content analysis of texts available online regarding environmental policies related to Humanists’ mobilization (through social media, websites, blogs) and a short fieldwork in each country to participate in one of the environmentalist campaigns promoted by the Humanists movement. The texts of these environmental policies were retrieved online with the support of the Humanist local organizations in each country. Then, we contacted each local organization to join their public campaigns and observe their public activism during a short field trip. We observed how policies as texts rule Humanists public campaigns and how the Humanist movement as organization rules such activism.