Some four months into my voluntary work with the collective, I found out that all staff members were to attend a series of workshops together to help us work better as a team. I was almost absurdly enthusiastic about the workshops and the possibility of getting to see all my colleagues discuss the purpose of their work together. My eagerness for attending this event was rather unusual for me, given that under any other circumstances I would have been mutinous if someone had tried to get me to attend one of these events. My colleagues were slightly sickened at my enthusiasm; at lunch the day before the event, it turned out I was the only one excited at the prospect of the afternoon. Emily was appalled she had to attend and was desperately attempting to come up with excuses not to go. Even Ava, who usually took these sorts of things seriously, expressed to me that she was apathetic about attending because she didn't see the purpose behind it. I assumed this was being driven by Jen, but when I chatted to her about it, she didn't seem to want to attend either. The impetus behind this event therefore remained a bit of a mystery.

At 11 o’clock we piled into hired vans to be taken to our destination. I climbed into the back seat with Gracie, Kimberley, and Zoey. Gracie was carrying a giant A3 notebook; an accidentally humorous contrast to my tiny ethnographer's notebook which I was holding in my hands. Gracie told me that the coordinators of these workshops had tried to charge her an extra $30 to supply one. This was not something our organization could afford, and felt like an irresponsible use of our funds. After about 20 minutes in the van joking together, watching silly pet videos on YouTube, and listening to music, we arrived at our destination. Almost immediately Anika and Tia went looking for the smokers’ area. The rest of us filed into the room marked ‘café’ and settled to an early lunch together before the workshop started. Emily and I grabbed the vegetarian option and went to sit with Jen and Riley in the sunshine outside.

Organizing is politics made durable. From co-operatives to corporations, Occupy to Facebook, states and NGOs, organizations shape our lives. They shape the possible futures of governance, policymaking and social change, and hence are central to understanding how human beings can deal with the challenges that face us, whether that be pandemics, populism, or climate change. This book series publishes work that explore how politics happens within and because of organizations and organizing. We want to explore how activism is organized and how activists change organizations. We are also interested in the forms of resistance to activism, in the ways that powerful interests contest and reframe demands for change. These are questions of huge relevance to scholars in sociology, politics, geography, management, and beyond, and are becoming ever more important as demands for impact and engagement change the way that academics imagine their work. They are also important to anyone who wants to understand more about the theory and practice of organizing, not just the abstracted ideologies of capitalism taught in business schools.

Our books will offer critical examinations of organizations as sites of or targets for activism, and we will also assume that our authors, and hopefully our readers, are themselves agents of change. Titles may focus on specific industries or fields, or they may be arranged around particular themes or challenges. Our topics might include the alternative economy; surveillance, whistleblowing, and human rights; digital politics; religious groups; social movements; NGOs; feminism and anarchist organization; action research and co-production; activism and the neoliberal university, and any other subjects that are relevant and topical.

‘Organizations and Activism’ will also be a multidisciplinary series. Contributions from all and any relevant academic fields will be welcomed. The series will be international in outlook, and proposals from outside the English-speaking global north are particularly welcome.

This book, the third in our series, confronts the question of academics as activists, as scholars who wish to use their institutional power and position to produce some sort of impact beyond the academy. The desire to make a difference, to change theory and practice, is an ambition if not an imperative for the critical scholar.

I have written of those who seek to bring justice to abused women. I have written in anger, and in grief, and in hope. I have written of the one in three women in my homeland of Aotearoa New Zealand who are subjected to violence. I have written of those whose lives and deaths are violently excluded from such statistics. I have written of those who lived and died at the margins of normative ideas of ‘victim’ and ‘woman’. I have written of those who experience layers of injustice from colonization to racism to heterosexism. I have written of the long-standing efforts of feminist anti-violence activists. I have written of those who recognize the institutional failure to protect vulnerable bodies from violence and organize to oppose such injustice. I have written of those women who dedicate their waking hours to creating deep emotional bonds between us. I have written of those women who tell stories of the abused, the dead, the discarded. I have written of those women who are the best of humanity consistently confronted by the worst. I have written of women in all of their glorious complexity.

I am undone by those women.

Core to this book has been my experience working alongside my colleagues in a feminist anti-violence collective. My colleagues were dedicated to supporting those subjected to gendered violence and changing the social conditions which underpin that violence. Although my colleagues had variable relationships with the idea of activism (as I discuss in Parts II and IV), they were, nevertheless, proud bearers of four ongoing commitments to collectivism, feminism, decolonization, and LGBT+ pride. These commitments were foundational to their effort to identify and dismantle harmful social and institutional practices and to foster new, more equitable, ones. My colleagues’ efforts can be understood in reference to Black feminist Audre Lorde's famous sentiment: ‘the Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's House. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change’ (Lorde, 1983). My colleagues were creating new tools. My colleagues were building a new house. This book has been an account of those tools.

Academics who venture into ‘the field’ and engage with activists are frequently unsettled by the complexity of negotiating the lines of their academic and activist identities. As Reedy and King (2019) elucidate, those lines cross multiple other lines of identity such as insider and outsider or participant and friend. These lines of identity are further complicated by simultaneous, and sometimes divergent, institutional commitments to research and political commitments to the social justice cause of the movement. Consequently, academic activists often have a tangled sense of self and are unable to neatly distinguish one line from another. Other activist ethnographers have underscored, however, that examining the tangled lines of identity is essential to understanding the messy, multifaceted process of social change (Naples, 2003). As Behar (1996: 6) puts it, ‘what happens within the observer must be made known … if the nature of what has been observed is to be understood’. In other words, we can better understand social change if we come to terms with how we were changed.

It is unsurprising, then, that when I started volunteering with the collective, I quickly became unsettled. I was concurrently a volunteer, a colleague, a researcher, an insider, an outsider, an activist, an academic, and, in the end, a friend. For the first few weeks, I continued to carry my initial assumptions about academics and activists. But these lines became increasingly tangled as I repeatedly crossed the cityscape. My fieldnotes show a marked evolution from my ‘academic’ stiff and formal observations of my participants, to a vulnerable exploration of how my ideas and identities were unsettled as I learnt more from my colleagues. It was not that I had lost my sense of self as a researcher, academic, or activist. On the contrary, the more tangled I became, the more I was able to understand the margins I had drawn around my identities and the more I was able to understand the value of disrupting those lines. Inspired by my colleagues, I started to draw and redraw those lines. I allowed my sense of self to become undone, so I could see what emerged from the middle.

Recognition and celebration of lesbian identities had been part of the collective since its inception; a trend similar to other long running anti-violence organizations around the world (Arnold and Ake, 2013). The salience of lesbian identities in anti-violence activism, Tia explained to me, was partly due to the positioning of anti-violence activists as “tree-hugging, bra-burning, man-hating lesbians” by hostile communities in the 1970s. The public backlash, however, resulted in the creation of a political space in which the collective was determined to break down discriminatory social norms which limited the full participation of lesbian women in Aotearoa New Zealand. Jen, who had been part of the organization for nearly 30 years, felt liberated by the attention to lesbian identities. Before she became involved in the collective, she told me she knew that she was:

Many years later, Jen was exposed to the possibilities of being a lesbian like she wanted when she joined the collective as a volunteer. She described it as extremely emancipatory, telling me: “I came out as a lesbian about the same time [as I started volunteering]. That was really quite cool because being a lesbian in [the organization] in those days was a very … recognized and celebrated thing.”

Like Jen, I experienced that emancipatory feeling when I joined an organization that openly and actively attempted to celebrate and include LGBT+ identities. Not only was my identity as a queer woman recognized by my colleagues, but was celebrated as bringing a unique perspective to how we could best support LGBT+ women in our anti-violence activism. The contrast to the compulsive sexual and gender ‘neutralization’ of the business school environment (Rumens, 2016) in which I was spending the other half of my time was stark.

The sheer multiplicity of positions, tensions, debates, concerns, and complexities of my colleagues’ accounts of their feminist activist identities underscores the absence of a singular ‘feminist activism’. As well as offering a multiplicity of feminisms, my colleagues’ narratives illustrate the complexity of establishing and maintaining their activist identity in the context of the community sector. Not only were my colleagues grappling with constraints on their activist identities deriving from their intersection with the government, other funders, and institutions (such as the police) but they were also negotiating constraints on their feminist activist identities as part of their interactions with their colleagues. From their accounts, it is evident that the almost utopian ideal of feminist activism grappling predominantly with external constraints (Reinelt, 1994; Nichols, 2011; D’Enbeau and Buzzanell, 2013) overlooks the complexity of organizing through a multiplicity of feminisms within feminist organizations. The micro-politics, the small negotiations within these discussions I had with my colleagues are therefore important to how we can effectively practice solidarity in social movements, particularly when these movements have become increasingly formalized.

In the following sections, I draw together some of the elements of my colleagues’ accounts of their feminist activist identities to explore the constraints and possibilities of engaging in activism through difference. The remainder of Part IV is structured like a spiral: starting at the widest point of intersection with external stakeholders, narrowing the focus to within the collective, and finally looking at the stories of my colleagues specifically. I first attend to the context of the community sector to unpack how feminist activist identities shift and change at various intersections between the collective and stakeholders. As I noted in Part I, the increased formalization of community sector activism has led to a concern among scholars and community sector members that activism ‘has lost its bite’. Second, I look at the negotiation of ‘shared politics’ within the collective and explore how my colleagues maintained some organizational norms but challenged others. In particular, my colleagues’ narratives frequently asked the listener to direct their attention within emancipatory projects. Third, I look specifically at the cultural practices of telling stories about personal and political identities from the perspective of ‘giving an account of oneself’.

If I were to turn left when I exited my apartment in the morning, I would meander my way down the hill, through the central business district, past parliament and the high court, and end up at the business school building of my university where my office was located, the primary site of my academic work. If I were to turn right when I exited my apartment in the morning, I would wander down the other side of the hill, through the main shopping precinct, past the bars and restaurants, and almost leave the central city by the time I reached my other office, the site of my activist work as part of a feminist anti-violence collective. Sometimes I would travel between the two halfway through the day, dragging my tired body from one end of the city to the other. During this period, I was both ‘academic’ and ‘activist’. I was undertaking a research project about social change in anti-violence activism. As part of this research, I was a ‘voluntary ethnographer’; a researcher embedded in the community organization I was studying, contributing to the social justice cause alongside my colleagues at the same time as conducting my research. My life was a state of constant transition between these worlds.

I had plenty of time to reflect during my regular transitions. I would think about anti-violence activism and the stories of violence I heard throughout the day. I would think about different theoretical approaches to domestic violence, flicking through pages of books or scrolling through journal articles in my mind. Sometimes these thoughts would bleed into one another. Sometimes they would refuse to blend. I tried (and failed) many times to capture that liminal period in my fieldnotes, or poetry, or journal during my ethnography. I couldn't quite capture that feeling that my ideas and identities were spilling over the lines I tracked through the city. I also couldn't quite capture that eventual sense that my academic self and activist self ceased being separate somewhere on that winding trail during my regular transitions. No matter whether I turned left or right, no matter where I started or ended the day, I carried something with me.

In a still more profound way than we may think, we are in a period of crisis. Every aspect of the human condition and the social institutions we have made together are today in doubt. In the popular imagination, a crisis is a marker of something vexing that is to be overcome. It enjoys a temporal dimension, seeming to diagnose a present problem at the same time as it already imagines a future moment when the crisis will cease to be, when things will ‘return to normal’. Writing this book together during the the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020, that desire for a return to normal life is especially acute, currently providing the basis for a new and common hope all around the world.

And yet, the extent to which we should want to ‘return’ to what we previously understood as ‘normal’ is immediately problematic. The 21st century has already seen an unprecedented cadence of social, environmental, political and economic emergencies that have called into question the belief systems that have hitherto underpinned that normality. These emergencies have resulted in a steady decline in our trust in the value of our democratic political systems, which is seldom attributed to a globalized financial system that is too often responsible for driving these outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic is providing humanity with an opportunity for a ‘great reset’ with the chance to ‘build back better’, but some are asking if we really want a swift return to the way things were. Instead, should we be choosing something better, a new way of organizing social life such that we can respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow, not yesterday? After all, we learn from Janet Roitman that if everything is in ‘crisis’ then perhaps nothing is. Is our state of perpetual crisis itself just the ‘new normal’? Suddenly emptied of its popular meaning then, how can we be in a period of crisis?

Reflecting on the events of 2008, when the world was first hit by those shockwaves of the global crash that still reverberate today, Sylvia Walby argues that ‘[f] inance caused the crisis.

In order to reveal how crowdfunding is different from mainstream finance, we first need to say something about the typical ways in which people understand and use their money. Since most people believe they cannot be trusted with money and so lack confidence when it comes to finance – a convenient story to tell people if you are running the financial system – it's important to begin our journey in familiar territory. After all, it is still the case that the average school leaver in the UK will have spent longer studying the mechanics of sexual reproduction than they will the workings of financial services products. Many young adults leave full-time education in the mistaken belief that a ‘credit’ card is somehow preferable to a ‘debit’ card – and who can blame them, when ‘credit’ is something that school teaches them to pursue, and ‘debit’ looks rather too much like the word ‘debt’ to be immediately reassuring. This confusion of a means of immediate payment with the idea of personal debt (actually acquired through using a credit card) does little to instil confidence.

This point is exaggerated along gender lines too. As we saw in Chapter One, women have been frequently positioned by mainstream finance as too emotional or irrational to be eligible for access to mainstream products like current and savings accounts. In a 2015 study by Abundance Investment, however, when investors were asked a question about the effects of inflation, or the risk of loss to housing equity from a drop in house prices, it was male respondents who were frequently mistaken in their calculations. Female respondents were far more likely to admit they didn't know the answer, and so only to select responses that they were relatively certain about. What this small study shows is that despite the assumptions of mainstream financial institutions, men are more likely to be ‘confidently wrong’ and women to be ‘cautiously right’, which perhaps hints that one of the main problems we face is who currently runs finance and who typically invests their money.

For the purposes of understanding where crowdfunding and P2P finance fits into our story, next we define some of the basic building blocks of the modern ‘consumer’ experience of money and finance.

Do you know where your money is? If you read ‘money’ and immediately think of cash, then there's a very fair chance that you’ve just pictured notes and coins in a purse or a wallet, or perhaps imagined a big steel vault in a heavily secured basement room in a bank. Either way, you’ve likely sought to reassure yourself that your money is safe. But if you read ‘money’ and instead thought of digital numbers on a smartphone screen, or more imaginatively still, considered your pension, savings and investments, then there's an equally good chance that you don't know exactly where your money is at all. And this suggests a far more fundamental question. If you don't know where your money is, then how do you know what your money is doing?

While most people feel supremely confident that they know precisely what money is, and what they would choose to do should they suddenly have more of it, they are equally uncertain and anxious when it comes to the seemingly more complex matters of finance. At least a part of the problem here is that we tend to use these two terms interchangeably and in different contexts, often misunderstanding their meaning because of it. This is not just a problem for everyday conversations – it creates problems for those of us who study it and who seek to make sense of the way that we think about and use money, and the ways in which financial systems are developed around money.

Throughout this book, our study investigates the stories and myths about money that have led to the creation of different systems of finance, from the eranos loans of ancient Greece to the FinTech and Crypto revolutions of the early 21st century. In so doing, we suggest that finance has not always been the preserve of the elite professional, but is rather something that develops in different ways, bound by time and cultures, and often alters as a response to crisis. The shape of finance at any given moment in history and across cultures, then, depends upon the social relations and moral values that hold those societies together