Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop! – Maintaining Momentum for Gaza Amidst Grief and Fear

Lesley Wood - York University
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop! – Maintaining Momentum  for Gaza Amidst Grief and Fear

Abstract
How do activists keep moving amidst grief, fear and repression? This paper analyzes an event catalogue of over 600 pro-Palestine protests in Toronto between October 8 2023 and October 7 2024, alongside fieldnotes to understand how Palestine solidarity organizersworked to maintain momentum, commitment and engagement in public protest. During a year of intense and fluctuating levels of mobilization, activists deployed numerous micro-level and meso-level strategies despite criminalization, increasing police repression,counter-mobilization, movement fracturing and limited success. This paper is part of a larger book project that seeks to understand how temporal conceptions shape the strategic capacity of movements.