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Spring 2011 SMWG Workshop:
At the Edges of Global Justice
Saturday April 2 9:30-2pm.
UNC Chapel Hill Union, Room 2510
Please join us for a discussion of Janet Conway's
current book project based on her research of the World Social Social
Forum process. The book is tentatively titled The World Social Forum and
its Others: At the edges of global justice .Janet will present an
overview of the book and then present more specifically on Women,
gender and feminism: at the edges of global justice. The talk will be
followed by comments and a facilitated discussion engaging other themes
and interests of the working group participants.
Program:
10am-12noon. "Women, gender and feminism: at
the edges of global justice" Janet Conway will present on her current
book project.
12-1 Lunch (Please RSVP if you want us to reserve a lunch for you, spots limited.)
1-2pm: Discussion & future plans.
If there is time we will
also do a report Back and Discussion of : Collaborative Investigations
in Times of Crisis, a collaboration we are participating in with groups
in Puerto Rico, Lima, Peru and Chiapas, Mexico.
Please email
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to RSVP and reserve a lunch, and also to request readings.
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***Social Movement Working Group Meeting***
Friday, October 9, 3:30-5pm, Alumni, 3rd Floor. rm tba
Please join us for the first SMWG meeting of the year, and help us make it a relevant space for thinking and working together in the upcoming years. At this first meeting we hope to share information about what SMWG has done in the past, our current programs as well as begin to plan more for the next few years. In particular at this first meeting, we plan to devote time to getting to know one another, in particular our different research and activist projects.
SMWG seeks to be an inter- and even trans-disciplinary space where where students and faculty from different disciplinary and other backgrounds can develop novel and useful projects.
We are interested in **collaboratively** planning this year's calendar
and we'd love to see new (and old) faces. Please invite others who
might be interested and come with your ideas to share. We'd also love to hear current , past and future projects folks are working on, as well as proposals for collaborative work, so please jot some thoughts on paper ahead of time if you can! Everyone is
welcome!
The SMWG is a research-action project. We seek to understand and re-envision social movements. Many of us work within activist networks as well as across and beyond academic disciplines to challenge the divide between activism and the academy. We situate our work within broader struggles for change and social justice.
SMWG-sponsored projects have included:
- symposiums on rethinking engagement and activism in research
- monthly discussion groups around selected readings that range from "the politics of food" to "writing for publics" to "religion and social movements", "networks," and many others.
- guest visits from scholars and activists including Sonia Alvarez, Janet Conway, J.K. Gibson Graham, Eduardo Gudynas, Colectivo Situaciones, Movement of Unemployed Workers, and many others.
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Conocimiento en Movimiento (Knowledge in Movement):
Challenges and Practices of Activist Research in Times/Spaces of Crisis
A Workshop in Three Parts with Colectivo Situaciones
Monday, April 27, 3:00- 6:30 pm and Tuesday, April 28, 3:00-7:00
Global Education Center, Fourth Floor, UNC-CH
Part I: Monday, Apr. 27 3:00-4:30 pm
Genealogies of activist research: The experience of Colectivo Situaciones
Part II: Monday, Apr. 27 4:45-6:30 pm
Activist Research at a Crossroads
Colectivo Situaciones with El Kilombo, Uninomade, Counter Cartographies Collective, Notes from Nowhere, and others
Part III: Tuesday, Apr. 28 3:00-7:00pm
The forms of politics: Beyond the Right-Left spectrum
Colectivo Situaciones with Michael Hardt, Walter Mignolo, Eunice Sahle, Graeme Chesters, and others
For more information and to RSVP please contact:
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**Background readings are available at :
http://www.countercartographies.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=33&Itemid=32
About CS
Colectivo Situaciones (www.situaciones.org) defines itself as a militant research collective. The group emerged from Argentina’s radical student milieu in the mid 1990s and, since then, have developed a long track record of intervention in Argentine social movements. Their books are dialogues with the unemployed workers movement, explorations of the question of power and tactics of struggle, and conversations about how to think about revolution today.Their radical views pertain to practice as much as theory. They are genuinely a collective and all of their projects are collectively produced.
In a note printed on the back of many of their books, they describe their work as follows:
[We] intend to offer an internal reading of struggles, a phenomenology (a genealogy), not an “objective” description. It is only in this way that thought assumes a creative, affirmative function, and stops being a mere reproduction of the present. And only in this fidelity with the immanence of thought is it a real, dynamic contribution, which is totally contrary to a project or scheme that pigeonholes and overwhelms practice.
Introductions / Presentaciones: Monday, 3:00-6:30pm
Part I. 3:00-4:30 pm
Genealogies of activist research / Genealogías de investigación militante: La experiencia del Colectivo Situaciones
Brief description: The Colectivo Situaciones (CS) from Buenos Aires has a significant experience with militant research, including the production of autonomous spaces of knowledge production with social movements, the development of approaches to the production of knowledge for action, collaborative research strategies, and rich editing and publication experiences. This first session is indented to familiarize participants with the history, practices, theoretical influences, and political reflections of the Colectivo.
Breve descripción: El objetivo de esta parte es que los participantes se familiaricen con el trabajo del Colectivo, incluyendo su rica experiencia con la construcción de espacios autónomos de producción de conocimiento junto a movimientos sociales; relación entre producción de conocimiento y acción; espacios y estrategias colaborativas de investigación; experiencias de comunicación y publicación, influencias teóricas, posiciones políticas, etc.
Part II. 4:45 – 6:30 pm
La investigación militante en la encrucijada / Activist research at a crossroads
Brief description: The aim of this session is to share experiences on the dilemmas of activist research in the current conjuncture, largely characterized by multiple crises. What are the challenges for politically-oriented research in the context of a) the evolving social and environmental crisis; b) the apparent loss of effectiveness of the oppositional hypotheses and languages of the recent past, including in some cases their “NGOizaton” or the incorporation of militants into state apparatuses; c) the ascendancy of right wing agendas that often borrow effectively from Left practices and imaginaries (new Rights); d) the unclear trajectories of a seemingly post-neoliberal era in Latin America, the US and Europe. Does this set of conditions constitute what Raúl Zibechi has called “an offensive against autonomy” (of the movements)? If so, what are the new demands for activist research? What kinds of politically-oriented research could be imagined under these conditions? What “common knowledges” could various groups imagine creating together?
Part III: Tuesday, 3:00-7:00 pm
The forms of politics: Beyond the Right-Left spectrum / Las formas de la Politica: Mas alla del espectro derecha-izquierda
Brief description: The aim of this session is to discuss the diverse alternatives being pursued by various approaches “on the Left” in different parts of the world, as well as those tendencies that problematize the Right-Left political spectrum that has characterized the modern political experience. There is a growing realization that traditional Leftist approaches are insufficient for the contemporary political moment. That is, they are unable to make sense of the the multiple modalities, visions and aims of projects for social change. These include various movements --rural and urban, of indigenous people, farmers, women, and ecological-- that pose challenges to traditional notions and categories of the political. These movements mobilize on the basis of political forms, epistemologies and ontologies that pose challenges to traditional political categories and forms, such as the State, parties, movements, coalitions. Even the parameters of what constitutes “the political” seems to be in question.
Making sense of the shortcomings, as well as understanding tendencies that seem to move beyond them, is increasingly important today as experiences in Latin America and elsewhere have seen the opening up of novel possibilities and articulations for progressive change. What seems at stake are the possibilities for finding and elaborating modes that do not perpetuate the blindspots of, and even challenge, dominant political models—almost all of which are based on a modernist and industrial form of economy and politics. Beyond Latin America the need for understanding what forms of politics are sufficient to the moment are equally present.
Speakers will address questions concerning the location of the various forms of politics within traditions of thought; the ways in which they advance, unsettle, or transform those traditions; and the perceived social basis and relation to struggles of the forms they discuss. The main goal is to both identify significant differences and explore the possibility of building bridges among various forms of politics and notions of the political, particularly between those which can be seen –or see themselves—as functioning within (recognized) Left traditions and those which claim to depart from them.
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Social Movement Working Group’s 4th Annual Symposium
EMERGENT ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINARIES: Knowledges, Methods and Interventions.
APRIL 3-4, 2009
UNC-Chapel Hill
Fed-Ex Global Education Center, 4th Floor, Corner of McCauley and Pittsboro Streets
GUEST SPEAKERS
Annete Desmarais, Professor of Justice Studies, University of Regina, was a farmer in Saskatchewan, Canada, for many years. She has done extensive research on Via Campesina and Food Sovereignty.
Hope Shand, former Research Director for the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group), has written extensively on agricultural biodiversity, and on the social and economic impacts of new biotechnologies.
Chaia Heller, is an anthropologist, writer, educator and activist working in the anti-biotechnology, anti-globalization and feminist movements. She is currently a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Mount Holyoke College.
FREE--Register Now by March 31:
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Please register if you are planning to attend. Note that you may register for either Friday or Saturday, or for the entire conference. Lunch and Breakfast will be provided for those who register.
For background information, complete schedule, and conference papers, see:
www.ibiblio.org/smwg
**Sponsored by the Robertson Collaborative Grant and the Center for Global Initiatives.
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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS WORKING GROUP
4th Annual Symposium
Emergent Environmental Imaginaries: Knowledges, Methods and Interventions
April 3-4, 2009
University of NC-Chapel Hill
Fed-Ex Global Education Center, 4th Floor
Background:
Small-scale agriculture has proven stubbornly resilient, despite confident projections of demise. Over the past 20 years, as scholars and politicians around the world alternately celebrated and bemoaned the so-called death of the peasantry and the seeming irrelevance of small farm production, people from Mexico to Brazil to Kenya, the United States and the Philippines were organizing very different celebrations. Movements of landless people, indigenous activists, rural trade unionists, small farmers, urban consumers and others mobilized in increasingly wide circles, and increasingly interconnected with one another. They argued against the injustices of a global food system that favored the wealthy, bolstered industrialized food production, eviscerated local communities, and bankrupted farming majorities in countries around the world. These movements have sought to create alternative food production and distribution systems––ones with values other than the gross maximization of shareholder profit. Moreover, these alternative food systems are themselves often part and parcel of broader efforts at developing visions of different futures that are more energy efficient and socially nourishing. However, and despite their successes at the local level, food activists are often rebuffed by state institutions that have long promoted large-scale agro-industries.
The SMWG, in conjunction with international partners, seeks to develop a research project that is able to challenge technocratic common-sense and help develop the alternative approaches and worldviews currently under experimentation in a broad diversity of social and environmental movements. We propose to focus on four intersecting axes of engagement around the problematics of industrial agriculture: biofuels, genetic modification, fair trade, and transnational peasant/small-scale farmer networks. How do differing theoretical and cultural frameworks give rise to different methods, and how do these methods highlight alternative knowledges?
Problematic and Objectives:
The Social Movements Working Group has high ambitions for our 4th annual Symposium. We hope to use the two days to continue to develop a multi-year research project on Emergent Environmental Imaginaries, with a specific focus on methods, knowledges, and interventions.
This means recognizing that social movements (and others) that have been working against dominant regimes of food, energy and development—and towards other models and imaginaries of environment—are key generators of creative and critical knowledges; and that, as such, they must be taken seriously as knowledge producers, meaning-makers, and sources of new direction in their own right.
While certainly two days is insufficient to produce the entire research proposal, our goal for the symposium is to work to both better articulate and address the methodological and epistemological challenges constructing such a project in a way that is truly transnational and trans-disciplinary poses.
Proposal for Work:
We build explicitly on the problematics we addressed in previous SMWG Symposiums—including: “knowledge, autonomy and alternatives” (2006), “Alternative Cartographies of Social Movements,” (2007) and “Re-thinking Engagement and Activism in Research” (2008). In other words, this symposium builds on our efforts to develop truly interdisciplinary, engaged, and reflective approaches to the study of, with and for social movements. Last year we had a the very special opportunity to be joined by graduate students returned, or visiting, from the field. Having participated in discussions of the SMWG prior to fieldwork, they presented on the challenges, difficulties and insights of trying to conduct engaged research, with a complicated notion of both politics and social movements. This April, we want to continue the tradition of reflecting on research people have already done, but this time with an eye to more concretely discussing preparation and visioning of upcoming individual and collective research projects.
To this end we will ask how one designs research projects based on the more complicated and nuanced understandings of what constitutes “knowledge” and “activism” and, perhaps, “research” itself.
Pertinent questions for us to reflect on include:
• How does recognizing the political nature of knowledge and the knowledge-generating work of movements transform research practices, either by activists or academics?
• How and to what specific ends should/can collaborations between more “traditional” (i.e., university-based) researchers and “movements” be oriented? Does such a distinction— and do such collaborations—make sense? To whom and to what ends are these collaborations useful?
• Does the fact that may of the problematics and imaginaries implied in “Emergent Environmental Imaginaries” span from consumers to producers in “North” and South” change the possibilities and potentials for collaboration?
• What kinds of practices, methods and forms of organization can contribute to productive collaborations between researchers and activists/practitioners? How might inverting the presumptions of expertise be incorporated into research design?
We will be doing this with a specific focus on myriad movements and initiatives aimed at developing what we call “Emergent Environmental Imaginaries.” These are movements that in their practice (re)-imagine alternatives to the pressing ecological and social crises of our times.
Reflection Papers:
To make our conversation richer and more focused, we continue our symposium tradition of suggesting that participants prepare a short written reflection (1-2 pages) in advance. Reflecting on your own research and activist experiences, please prepare a response to some or all of the following questions:
• What are some obstacles to transnational and/or transdisciplinary projects? Do these obstacles differ when academics try to collaborate with social movements?
• Why is (or isn’t?) transdisciplinarity important?
• Can you think of examples of transdisciplinary, transnational, or other types of research collaborations that have been particularly successful? What made them work?
• Conversely can you think of a case or cases where things have been particularly problematic? What made it so?
• To the extent that you are familiar with the four issues outlined in the opening prompt -- biofuels, genetic modification, fair trade, transnational peasant/small-scale farmer networks -- what concerns, knowledges, expertise, and research encounters can you share?
*Please feel free to address other questions and topics addressed in this prompt, as well as raise any other questions, concerns, or other areas of interest.
**Please bring your Reflection Paper with you on Friday (or Saturday, if you are only attending on Saturday), OR email it in advance to
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Program
Speakers
We are honored to be joined this year by three guest speakers:
Annete Desmarais, Professor of Justice Studies, University of Regina, research on Via Campesina and Food Sovereignty.
Hope Shand, former Research Director for the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group), who has written extensively on agricultural biodiversity, and on the social and economic impacts of new biotechnologies.
Chaia Heller, is an anthropologist, writer, educator and activist working in the anti-biotechnology, anti-globalization and feminist movements. She is currently a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Mount Holyoke College.
Schedule of Events:
Friday, April 3, 12:00-5:00pm
12-1:30pm Lunch & Introductions: SMWG and our Project.
*Time to read prompt and reflection questions.
2-3pm Annette Desmarais, "What are Peasants Saying About Development? La Vía Campesina and the Production of Knowledge"
* This talk will be in Peabody 104.
3-5pm Hope Shand, Reflections on Transnational Coalitions, Some Things that Worked.
6:30pm Social Dinner at Pacifica Commons (all are welcome, please bring significant others, just let us know how many to expect!)
Saturday, April 4, 9:00am-4:00pm
9-9:30 Introductions, Breakfast, reflections
9:30- 12noon Interrogating the Intersecting Axes: Imaginaries/Knowledges and Movements against Industrial Agriculture.
Chaia Heller
Go Around: Sharing Individual Research and reflections
1-3pm Break Out Groups: Work-shopping the Proposal
3-4pm Wrap Up and Next Steps
All activities will be on the 4th Floor of the Fedex Global Education Center.
Lunch and Breakfast will be provided for those who register.
More info on programming and scheduling available soon at: www.ibiblio.org/smwg. Or email
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This event is sponsored by the Robertson Collaborative Grant and the Center for Global Initiatives.
Please register/rsvp no later than Monday March 30, so that we can order the correct food, and send you preparatory materials!
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February 13, 2008
Writing for Public(s)
Tom Philpott, freelance analyst, regular writer for Grist! as well as co-founder of Maverick Farms
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Read more...
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