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Chapter 4 examines the second micro-level factor influencing social movement participation: identity. Of the small proportion of local citizens who are involved in the coalfield environmental justice movement, an even smaller proportion are men. This chapter presents an interview study conducted with local environmental justice activists to examine the reasons for local men’s low levels of involvement in the movement relative to women. The analysis of the data suggests that the differing rates of environmental justice activism among women and men may be related to how readily their gendered identities are able to align with the collective identity of the coalfield movement. The findings suggest that, despite the tremendous declines in coal employment in Central Appalachia over the past sixty years, the hegemonic masculinity of the region is still closely tied with coal production. This coal-related masculine identity creates a barrier to local men’s ability to achieve what Snow and McAdam (2000) call “identity correspondence” with the collective identity of the environmental justice movement, in effect removing a major segment of potential social-movement participants from the pool of potential recruits.

Chapter 2 places the problem of movement non-participation within the existing sociological literature on the micro-level processes that contribute to an individual’s decision to participate–or not participate–in a social movement. The chapter provides an overview of the social movements literature on the four “central problematics” of micromobilization–solidarity, identity correspondence, consciousness transformation (also called “cognitive liberation”), and the creation of micromobilization contexts. In studies of social movements, these four processes continually arise as important micro-level issues shaping activist participation. This chapter synthesizes the theoretical and empirical work on these four factors and suggests that the low level of local participation in the coalfield justice movement is the result of problems with all four of these processes. The next four chapters present a series of studies that examine potential barriers to the four central problematics of micromobilization outlined in this chapter.

There were five non-activist Photovoice participants who, during the course of the Photovoice project, became involved with the environmental justice movement. Chapter 10 reveals the events and interactions that led to these women’s participation in the movement, and, in the cases of three of the five women, how their personal networks, coupled with the changing collective identity of the movement, eventually caused their disassociation from the environmental justice organizations with which they had aligned themselves during the project. This chapter reveals how the influx of non-locals into the movement, the involvement of celebrities, and the high-profile protest tactics they used prompted these women and others in their community to feel a disconnect between their own personal identities and the collective identity of the social movement (i.e. a lack of “identity correspondence”). This chapter reveals how, despite the local origins of the movement and the fact that local residents are still at the center of the struggle, there is a perception among many in the coalfields that the environmental justice movement is a movement of outsiders. This chapter argues that this perception may have damaging consequences for environmental justice groups’ ability to recruit new local participants into the movement.