advocacy lacunae-minks
What it is like to be excluded from your own social movement, in ten mink.
This mink thought it might be nice to see what people who share its key demographic characteristics have to say about it. It is surprised by the high levels of lateral aggression.
This mink encountered another piece of pop journalism/commentary that was meant to be helpful, but which didn’t mention it at all--except for one throwaway line minimizing the importance of its identified sub-group.
This mink went in search of the source data that is used to support arguments that delegitimize its viability as a locus of advocacy, but which has never been subjected to proper statistical analysis regarding this issue.
This mink wonders how much issues of measurement, concept-specification, and sampling have under-reported its issues and risk-level in such large-N data as exists about its community.
This mink found a study which addressed the above issues, and came to different conclusions than the prevailing wisdom.
This mink knows too much about social movement dynamics to take the notion that its issues are minimal at face value, despite the momentum of this perception.
This mink found an online space where people were friendlier, and it could discuss matters in a less over-heated manner.
This mink just heard a celebrity figurehead that justify the lack of emphasis on its issues, based on their own anecdotal experience, and a smattering of de-contextualized statistics. It wonders why they didn’t do more research.
This mink understands, intellectually, that people like it are the casualties of an effort to shut down troubling theoretical arguments from people outside the broader community. But it believes that such theory as is applied to the larger group that it is a part of must eventually make room for all sub-groups, even if that is hard.
This mink has decided this problem is a temporary issue, but wishes it was easier to access and construct good critique, without activating the fervid blame and shame mechanisms that are often associated with the practice of advocacy in this area.







