Moving Culture: Transnational Social Movement Organizations as Translators in a Diffusion Cycle

Abstract

The central question of this chapter is how social movement actors produce and promote cultural change across national and local settings. We define culture as a set of practices that have shared meanings. Cultural change is thus a change in practices and/or in meanings attached to them. In an increasingly interconnected world, one way for social movements to induce cultural change is to borrow ideas and practices from other settings and install them in their own cultural environment, or to modify existing practices by incorporating borrowed cultural elements or new meanings into them. Social movements can also borrow cultural elements from international law and global discourses, such as environmental sustainability, labour rights, social justice, and human rights, and localize them in a specific cultural setting. In the social movement literature, this process of ideas and practices travelling across borders is referred to as diffusion.