Theorising everyday struggle: Everyday environmentalism as creative resistance in the city

Abstract

Drawing on a multisensory ethnography of everyday environmentalism in a neoliberal neo-authoritarian city, this article theorises everyday struggle as a multifaceted phenomenon informed by ordinary creativity, sensory experiences and imagination. It is argued that everyday struggle is manifested in counter-hegemonic acts, characterised by multiplicity, multidirectionality and decentration, and that these should be situated within larger orders of power. Producing cumulative effects, such counter-hegemonic acts enable ordinary city dwellers to constitute themselves as social and political subjects, create temporary sites of counter-power and reshape the fabric of urban life. Focusing on Moscow (Russia), this study has found that creative mundane resistance intersects with everyday environmentalism, a manifestation of everyday struggle embedded in the urban life of city dwellers who share anti-authoritarian and anti-neoliberal views. Conceptualised as a moral-ethical complex of grassroots pro-environmental activities, everyday environmentalism turns the quotidian into a terrain of everyday politics, where social change happens at the micro-level, while affording less risky expression of disagreement with hegemony under structural constraints.