ABSTRACT
New social institutions and new social relations radically reconfigure economic activities, changing the scale and scope of production, the significance of time and place, and the salience of longstanding social identities. New social movements produce communities of struggle that contest the terms of existing social identities. Contemporary movements for environmental justice in the United States represent one site where a battle is being waged for a new social warrant and for rethinking of the meaning of race. Confronted with systems of centralized power that generate seemingly endless streams of new forms of difference, social movements grounded in differential consciousness have the potential to produce a new democratic and egalitarian social warrant. Chela Sandoval identifies differential consciousness as a product of social movement struggles by contemporary women-of-color feminists. Within social movements, solidarities still stem from unified subjectivities, from the consensual illusions of sameness that social movements nurture and sustain.
