Volunteers frame political talk as morally exclusionary of ordinary less-eloquent people.

Evidence

With their taken-for-granted assessment of talk, volunteers did not simply think that talking about an undo-able social problem was a waste of time, either. It was immoral, because it could undermine their bouyant sense of the rightness of the world, by excluding regular'' people who are not always eloquent, do not have equal amounts of cultural capital, as Pierre Bourdieu32 would put it, and are not always eager to talk politics. As one Parent League member put it,The way to get a volunteer is to ask,`Who has a drill bit and can drill eight holes in this board next Saturday?’ Someone will come who maybe never volunteered before, and then maybe they’ll come again.” — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”, 102

Categorization

• XREF: Bourdieu’s cultural capital frames the exclusion logic; dovetails with the reader’s material on how volunteer solidarity is built around concrete do-able tasks rather than speech. — connects to: Volunteer groups suppress politically troubling topics to protect group cheer — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 96; Volunteers and activists invert whether a problem must be political to merit care. — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 108; Volunteers suppress political talk because it would sink their feeling of empowerment (+7 more)

Related

• Volunteers suppress political talk because it would sink their feeling of empowerment (similarity 0.86)
• Volunteers silence political discussion to preserve their can-do optimism (similarity 0.85)
• Volunteers silence political problems to keep the empowering feeling alive (similarity 0.85)
• Believing public talk is powerless makes volunteers feel powerless. (similarity 0.84)
• Volunteers themselves restrict political talk to preserve their civic faith (similarity 0.84)
• Volunteer groups lack respect for open-ended discussion of unresolved issues (similarity 0.84)
• A folk theory that talk changes nothing underwrites civic apathy in volunteer groups (similarity 0.84)
• Volunteers suppress principled political talk because it seems unseemly (similarity 0.83)
• Volunteers welcomed structured political discussion despite avoiding it informally. (similarity 0.83)
• Volunteers collectively redirected each other’s political criticisms into private moods rather than public problems. (similarity 0.82)
• Volunteers acknowledge social problems only after they are already solved. (similarity 0.82)
• Volunteers deliberately shrink concerns into unpolitical tasks to sustain a message of hope (similarity 0.82)
• Volunteer groups suppress political talk even though members privately care (similarity 0.82)
• Volunteers build egalitarian togetherness by suppressing distinctive principled talking (similarity 0.82)
• Volunteers and activists invert whether a problem must be political to merit care. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Volunteers suppress political talk because it would sink their feeling of empowerment #expands (0.85)
• Volunteer groups suppress political talk even though members privately care #corroborates (0.80) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 192
• Civility discourse smuggles in exclusion of those deemed different #expands (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 208
• Essentializing a group’s being strips them of moral membership #expands (0.78) — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice, 535
• Ethnonationalism frames politics as ingroup versus outgroup needing exclusion. #corroborates (0.75) — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 11