Resist or protest your way

I am born with resistance in my blood. I am a child of the 1960s, the daughter of a regular army officer who did three tours of Vietnam (the unwanted war to many of the Australian public). I grew up in Papua New Guinea, have lived in an Aboriginal community on Cape York Peninsula, have a leaning toward Marxist practice, and am feminist in philosophy. I also had three younger brothers! I didn't want to be near them - resisted their boy germs all I could. I now live on Norfolk Island, South Pacific, where the Pitcairn Island descendants resent and resist Australia taking over governance of the Island from 2016. I just watch, and reflect. 

Unlike the status quo who prefers compliance to their chosen culture, my philosophy is that resistance is useful because it creates change. Yet, based on my work as a therapist and coach, personal change within a domestic sphere appears to be difficult for many people. They believe themselves unable to effect larger change when they cannot even change their own life. A desire to create social change, however, is common in my confidential personal communications and evident by the number of keyboard activists on social media.

Part of organising individual actions into a collective movement of social change is first identifying that you are trying to enact social change through those isolated change activities. Based on the research of Social Work Professor, Dr Brene Brown (2008), individual change activities (ways to resist) can be linked into six different P classifications:

• Personal: Monitoring content in your home, self education, upskilling, practicing values and beliefs.
• Pens: letters, blogs, keyboard responding, articles, books, graffiti.
• Participation: Joining organisations that you support.
• Polls: Vote according to your values and beliefs.
• Purchases: Don't buy from companies that don't suit your values .
• Protest: Show up and say something to support your view.

Brown posits that believing we have the power to resist the status quo that keeps us stuck, is the first needed step toward change. It is the most empowering step to developing resilience. Not everyone is in a position to create large scale political change but each of us can affect a method of change that moves and inspires us.

To test whether my social media contacts fit into Brown's 6 Ps of change I engaged in a social media research question and then classified answers into Brown's six P's of change. Please note that this has not gone through an ethics committee as structured research. My repost to my personal page does state: "I'm particularly interested in how you resist the status quo when you don't agree with it. I'd love your ideas to help me build an argument for a conference presentation I'm preparing." Further, I have kept the deidentified data as ethical verification toward my paper (if accepted) at an International AASW conference.

This is the post on my business page, that I also shared to my personal profile. The business page attracted only 1 response whereas the share to my personal profile attracted 20 people responding, some with multiple comments.

These are the collated responses to date: 

• Personal 11
• Pens 3
• Participation 4
• Purchases1
• Protests 2
• Polls 0

It is interesting that nobody stated they use Polls (voting Federal, State, Local, Professional body or in any other organisation) as a way to resist. Yet, because these people are my known contacts, I know these are all individuals most likely to vote. Similarly, it is interesting that my belief, based on personal and confidential communications, is that personal change is hard for some individuals yet resisting via personal means was the most popular category. 

This exercise has given me much to think about, particularly around the ethics of using this in my PhD research, secondary data sets, how to ask the right questions and being clear on categorisation of data. The exercise has also given me a starting point to write my paper: Resistance is Useful.

To leave your comment, scroll to the bottom. There's a Facebook commenter there (you have to be logged in to facebook to leave the comment) just waiting to receive your P's of resistance.

👵🏼 Megan Bayliss, Social Work supervisor

👩🏼‍🎓 PhD candidate: social and cultural resistance to the status quo.

References

Brown, B (2008). I thought it was just me (but it isn't). Avery: New York