Compromise in Trans Rights and Animal Advocacy Movements – A talk by Sara Barbo

Sara Barbo is a Junior Research Fellow and PhD researcher, whose research interests include social movement studies, political theory, critical phenomenology, trans studies, and animal politics. She combines philosophical and theoretical methods with qualitative research, community engagement, archival work, and autoethnography. 

The event was jointly organized by WEIRD and projects as part of RESET City Campus meeting, which gathers students and researchers from different disciplines. The talk was followed by a rich and exciting discussion between Sara and the audience, opening up to promising and possible future collaborations. 

Sara Barbo, Tallinn University, Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Compromise in Trans Rights and Animal Advocacy Movements 

Compromise is ubiquitous in social movements and social change. Activists and advocates rarely get what they want and often settle for or demand something less than desirable or just.  

In this seminar, Sara Barbo presents her PhD research-in-progress into this morally ambiguous and politically contested practice. Drawing from autoethnography and qualitative interviews with trans rights and animal advocacy movement participants in Finland and Estonia, she explores how compromise is experienced, enacted, and lived in struggles for social justice.  

In particular, the seminar attends to three different critical-phenomenological insights into the situated experience of compromise-making: compromise as an engagement with a (typically more powerful) other, an experience of being-between-worlds, and a movement toward a more just and inclusive social order through loss. Sara approaches the research from a scholar-activist position and through the theoretical and methodological framework of critical phenomenology, coupled with abductive analysis and field approaches to social movements. 

This article was written by the postdoctoral researcher of the WEIRD project Ely/iott Mermans.