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Making Sense of Social

Justice and Social

Mobilization in Latin

America: A Discourse

Analysis

Victor Armony

This chapter examines the responses given by thinking and knowing (Billig, 1993). In this
forty activists in El Salvador and Honduras to perspective, we follow McAdam, Tarrow,
five questions on social justice and social and Tilly in ‘betting that particular cultural
mobilization. We are interested in collecting understandings and practices can produce
and analyzing data on the social representa- quite general effects’ (2001: 346).
tions that frame the mobilized actors’ identi- As Melucci and Lyyra (1998: 210) have
ties, perceptions, and normative orientations. 1 underscored, ‘A concrete social movement is
Rather than seeking to obtain short and pre- always a complex and heterogeneous process
cise answers on specific issues, we aimed at that unfolds within a field of opportunities
eliciting a more complex narrative. The and constraints and contains a magma of
respondents’ discourse was analyzed by empirical components’. The growing use of
means of a computer-assisted procedure. Our qualitative approaches to study social mobi-
approach is based on the assumption that lization stems in part from the rising interest
social representations reflect a commonsense in culturalist explanations among sociologists
understanding of the social world, thus pro- and political scientists. Even when culture is
viding the actors with a meaningful organiza- not considered the main explicative factor,
tion of reality (Moscovici, 1984). This is not researchers will now often take into account
an overly deterministic approach, but it refers the actors’ discourse and perceptions, some-
to the social and historical dimension of times resorting to very detailed ethnological