Community Mobilization for Environmental Problems: How a Grassro ...

(activists, political and corporate representatives) and forms of knowledge (local discourse, media, government, and science).

These aspects of mobilization change over the life span of the community movement. The story of how that change occurs is manifest in the ways agents gain information from different sources and frame the issues that lead to various aspects of mobilization. This study focuses on the happenings in the Hickory Woods community and on the ways individuals came to know the realities of environmental contamination in their neighborhood.

This book is organized in three main parts. Part I, Researching Mobilization, includes a detailed discussion of Hickory Woods and comparative communities, as well as a conceptual development of my argument, focusing on framing and social movement research. Part II, the Emergence of a Community Social Movement, is developed in five chapters. Each chapter follows one aspect of the mobilization process: citizen response and the sociology of knowledge, leadership and contestation, grassroots organization, strategy development, and the formulation of goals. Specific events from the community’s history illustrate shifting notions of the mobilization process. In each chapter, I locate the meanings of frames in terms of citizen interaction with media, government, science, and collective group information. Part III, Making Sense of Grassroots Mobilization, discusses overall themes in the findings of the analysis, and it provides a pathway for future research in this area of scholarship.

Community actors draw on knowledge to frame, shift, and interpret the meanings of mobilization. Tracing mobilization activities allowed me to follow the different constructions of mobilization and to explore frame analysis as a tool for understanding these factors. Because mobilization is a difficult process to illustrate, I specify the process according to components put forth in the classic mobilization schema outlined by foremost social movement scholar Charles Tilly (1978) and further developed by contemporary social movement scholars della Porta and Diani (1999).