Dissertation Spotlight - Sam Hobson

Sam Hobson
​University of Michigan

My dissertation is about the ways in which structural power and oppression are replicated through acts of social justice and what that means for our attempts at social change. My work is with the food justice movement in NYC. Practices of food justice include urban agriculture, food education, and farmers’ markets. Although food justice is grounded in a structural analysis of race, class, and food, and incorporates an antiracist framework, my ethnographic research unveiled instances of structural oppression being created through food justice practices. These instances were the result of movement action of both white activists and non-white activists of high SES. So, my dissertation asks, how are the intentionally anti-racist movement practices of structurally powerful food justice activists reproducing structural oppression? ​

I argue that, despite our best intentions, social justice has the ability to operate as a mechanism of structural domination. This is because, in its current formulation, it tends to be a social practice that allows structurally powerful people to replicate not only their relationship to structural power but also that of the marginalized population they’re impacting by allowing the former to affect the choices, experiences, and life chances of the latter (Einspahr 2010; Young 1990). My dissertation is a deconstruction of this phenomenon through a multi-level analysis of the relationship between the structural, behavioral, and schematic processes behind it. I am currently triangulating the ethnographic observation I’ve conducted with interviews of activists in my study, developing a comparative analysis that examines how this relationship between the structural, behavioral, and schematic varies by the intersectional identities of movement activists. Scholarship that asks how social movements backfire tend to offer organizational explanations. However, I argue that our theoretical focus needs to be towards activists’ social positions and cultural frameworks, requiring an incorporation of intersectionality and critical race theory into social movement scholarship. Such a marriage will illuminate the overlooked the heterogeneity that is implicated in seemingly homogenous movement actions. It will also unveil the complexity with which structural power operates through social movement action and affects the formation, dynamics, and outcomes of social movements. 

I use structural domination scholarship and Black Feminist Thought to explicate this. This project will contribute an intersectional analytic of power to social movement scholarship and a focus towards social movements as a site of knowledge production to critical scholarship. My ultimate goal for this project is to develop a power analysis that can be applied to myriad situations of justice, reform, and anti-racism. I believe that such an analysis is essential for public policy, nonprofits, DEI initiatives, social movement activism, and social justice so that justice and reform work isn’t just another way to obfuscate the perpetuation of oppression. 
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Citations:
Einspahr, Jennifer. 2010. “Structural Domination and Structural Freedom: A Feminist Perspective.” Feminist Review 94(1):1–19.
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sam Hobson is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan who lives in New Haven, Connecticut. My areas of research interests include race, power, intersectionality, and social change. I expect to graduate Fall 2023.