Free spaces

Free spaces are small-scale settings within a community or movement that are removed from the direct control of dominant groups, are voluntarily participated in, and generate the cultural challenge that precedes or accompanies political mobilization. Since the term became popular in studies of movements in the 1980s, scholars have sought to better identify the features of particular institutional sites that equip them to spur political challenges. They have also probed the role of free spaces in authoritarian regimes, in right-wing movements, and in relation to new digital technologies. Historians Sara Evans and Harry Boyte used the term “free spaces” in their 1986 book of that title (both Evans and Boyte had separately used the term in earlier work): “Free spaces are settings between private lives and large scale institutions where ordinary citizens can act with dignity, independence and vision” (1986: 17). In the dense interactive networks of community-based institutions like churches, fraternal organizations, and cultural groups, people envision alternative futures and plot strategies for realizing them. Free spaces supply the activist networks, skills, and solidarity that assist in launching a movement. They also provide the conceptual space in which dominated groups are able to penetrate the prevailing common sense that keeps most people passive in the face of injustice. In that sense, they are crucial to the very formation of the identities and interests that precede mobilization. Thus the Southern black church, removed from white control and central to the life of black communities, provided the emerging civil rights movement meeting places to develop strategy and commitment, a network of charismatic movement leaders, and an idiom that persuasively joined constitutional ideals with Christian ones.