The Problem of Habituation and Freedom: Ritual in SNCC's Community Organizing Project

Hudson Valley Political Theory is a new collaborative project organized by Bard College and Union College. The workshop aims to bring together political theorists  working in the Hudson Valley Region in a series of workshops to share their work in progress, create new networks, and open up possibilities for new collaborative research projects that further advance humanities.

This talk explores the problem of habituation and freedom through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s community organizing project in the Deep South from 1961-1964. We begin from the premise that political organizing aims to habituate people to new norms and conceptions of the world by engaging them in repetitive, collective, embodied practices, in other words, rituals. Habituation seems to be necessary to overcome entrenched patterns of thought and behavior that are produced by and sustain oppressive social arrangements. But habituation might also seem to limit the freedom of habituated subjects by foreclosing alternatives and limiting conscious choice. Turning to a study of two rituals that animated SNCC’s community organizing project—the canvass and the mass meeting—this talk argues that SNCC organizers understood these practices as simultaneously habituating and liberating for both organizers and the communities they organized.

Sponsored by The Dean of the College, Division of Social Studies, Global and International Studies Program, Human Rights, Politics, and Union College Political Science Department and Dean of Academic Department and Programs.