The purpose of this scoping review is to gain insight into the empirical research conducted regarding young children's resistance and opposition to teacher norms and rules in the pedagogical context of early childhood education and care. A total of 52 publications in English, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian published between 1989 and 2023 was analysed. The studies used a variety of data collection methods and were conducted in 13 countries. They were published in 29 academic journals as well as in books and doctoral theses. A qualitative content analysis of the publications investigated the children's strategies/tactics of resistance, dividing them into the categories of open and hidden resistance. The results indicate that the publications, to a large degree, focus on open and visible forms of resistance, identifying a gap in the research regarding more discreet and silent types of resistance. The analysis also showed the potential for widening theoretical approaches and drawing inspiration from the field of resistance studies.

When people feel they have to run faster and faster just to keep up, it is a personal experience of the acceleration that characterises late modern society. In reaction, some people attempt to escape "the rat race" by aiming to live self-sufficiently in the countryside. This article presents a text analysis of 35 letters from the magazine Ater, where people share their experiences of moving. The analysis focuses on the authors' motivations for the move, their criticism of mainstream society and their experiences of time, temporality and competing time norms in their new life. Rosa's concepts of acceleration, alienation and resonance, and Adam's concept of abstract and standardised clock time, provide the theoretical framework for the analysis. The study concludes that the authors of letters search for resonance and to a large degree they have also found it, especially since the authors experience their work as meaningful and live according to their ideological values. Self-sufficiency is an individual form of coping, but simultaneously choosing to live differently is a practice of constructive resistance to mainstream consumption and work norms.

The logics of capitalist temporality dominate western society today. Drawing on Barbara Adam’s work, we explore two important dimensions of this dominant temporality. Standardised and abstract clock time involves a detachment from seasons and the life-world, closely related to the commodification of time exemplified by expressions like ”time is money”. Many initiatives attempt to challenge the dominance of capitalist temporality, amongst which we present: (1) worker cooperatives that organize work and its temporality as alternatives to capitalism; and (2) timebanks where people exchange services with each other based on time rather than money. We investigate how these illustrative examples differ from the dominant capitalist temporality, and in what ways they depend on the same logic that they resist. The analysis shows that the initiatives divert from the dominant temporality in important aspects, but also reproduce it in other ways. Thereby, this article contributes to theorizing resistance in connection to time and temporality, and gives insights in the potential and elusiveness of constructive resistance to dominant temporality.

Groups working for change are met with many types of responses. Most attention has been given to reactions of overt repression or support for movements and campaigns. However, there exist a range of other pacifying responses, such as ignoring, placating, devaluing, disrupting and misinforming. These subtler forms of obstructions pose a different type of challenge and require different types of counter-strategies than violent repression. 

This article introduces a framework focusing on four different types of responses – 1. Validating, 2. Discrediting and attacking, 3. Manipulative and 4. Non-interfering. This model can be applied to analyse responses to all types of nonviolent campaigns from opponents and so-called third parties. The Freedom Flotilla to Gaza in 2011 serves as a case study to present the model and to analyse how the Israeli government and its supporters successfully disrupted and contained this flotilla with much more subtle means than the 2010 flotilla where nine activists were killed.

Time, power and resistance arc all central sociological concepts, but only rarely have the intertwi- ning between all three been explored. Here the guest editors of the special issue of Sociologisk Forskning called "Time, power and resistance" introduce five empirical research articles. The articles all investigate time and temporality in relation to forms of power, ranging from discursive power to dominant norms and state power. The resistances vary from organised, collective resistance to subtle and discreet forms of everyday and constructive resistance. Additionally, the guest editors point towards future avenues of research in the area and show sociologically interesting links between the three concepts.

Civil resistance requires significant forms of emotion management by activists. In this paper, we distinguish between the different foci of emotion management carried out frontstage and backstage – the frontstage focus is typically oriented to influencing the emotions of onlookers, opponents and other targets, the backstage focus is typically concerned with managing the emotions of the activists themselves in preparation for their frontstage performances. Of course, in any particular resistance activity the two dimensions of emotion management interact more or less continuously. Activists need to continually engage in impression-management to ensure they are maintaining their display of the appropriate emotions intended to evoke the desired emotional response in the targets of their performance.

Strategic nonviolent action has developed enormously over the past century: there is a burgeoning body of research, widespread use in social movements, and regular training of activists. Even so, understanding of nonviolent action has been constrained by the methods used to investigate it, for example case studies and practical experience. Te experimental method, as widely used in scientifc research, has yet to be applied to the study of nonviolent action in systematic ways. In this article, two possible experiments with nonviolent action are presented to highlight some of the possibilities. Experiments with nonviolent action have the usual rationale of acquiring knowledge and two additional rationales: participant practical understanding and participant willingness to learn from experimentation. Tere are a number of obstacles to nonviolence experimentation, including lack of funding, ethical challenges, and opposition from various parties. Yet until experimental testing becomes routine, the full potential of nonviolent action will not be realized.

Activists in both dictatorships and democracies use humor as a method of nonviolent resistance, and its special way of appealing to emotions and imagination through ambiguity frequently sets it apart from other forms of nonviolent action. This study analyzes three examples from twentieth‐century Sweden of the political uses of humor according to the ability of each to facilitate dialogue, break power, serve as an utopian enactment, and be a normative regulation. In these cases, humor is found to have a particular ability to break the power of dominant discourses, because their ambiguity makes them ideal as “guerrilla attacks” in the ongoing discursive guerrilla war the activists are waging.

People living in systems of domination and exploitation resist in many different ways. Some modes of resistance build and experiment with alternatives to the present in various forms, from the small to the large, the hidden to the open. An overall term for these efforts is “constructive resistance,” which covers initiatives in which people start to build the society they desire independently of the dominant structures already in place. This is initiatives which not only criticise, protest, object, and undermine what is considered undesirable and wrong, but simultaneously acquire, create, built, cultivate and experiment with what people need in the present moment, or what they would like to see replacing dominant structures or power relations. Within peace and conflict studies, this has been approached through Gandhi’s concept of the constructive programme. In the anarchist and Marxists traditions and social movement literature, a related notion is prefigurative politics.