About Us

Scope

The central goal of the Social Movements Working Group (SMWG) is to provide a forum for scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and professional schools to engage with critical debates about the role of contemporary social movements in the transformation of public life, broadly speaking. By "public life" in this context we understand the ensemble of cultural, social, economic, and political processes that define worldviews and practices of world-making. Our group seeks to contribute to interdisciplinary dialogue around, and arising from, social movements of various kinds. It can be said that the group's focus lies at the intersection of critical conversations in academic fields on globalization, social movements, and the character of public life, on the one hand, and intellectual-political conversations in movements about alternative economic, social, and natural orders, on the other. In this sense, "social movements" are both an object of study and a privileged interlocutor in their own right. In this lies the novelty of our group.

Rationale and Description of the Concern

There is widespread agreement about the existence of a generalized social, economic, and ecological crisis in today's world. There is also a growing realization that the existing disciplines are not well equipped to account for this crisis, let alone furnish workable solutions; a broad consensus exists on the need for new models of thought, including more constructive engagement among the natural, social, and humanistic perspectives, and articulations among these and the professional fields in which public policy is conceptualized and discussed. At the same time, the proliferation of social movements that articulate their knowledge claims in terms of cultural, socio-economic, and ecological alternatives has become an undeniable social fact. This is most clearly the case with the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement (also known as anti-globalization, alternative globalization, or globalization from below movement), but it equally applies to a multitude of ecological, ethnic, religious, feminist, and novel peasant and workers' movements in many parts of the world, from the Zapatista and Brazil's Landless Movement (MST) to place-based women's and ecological struggles worldwide. These are extremely pertinent issues for international studies fields, with the potential of transforming some of the practices of these fields themselves.

Why the focus on social movements?

It is argued that the seeming consolidation of neo-liberal capitalism as the main mode of globalization after 1990 has been accompanied by a concomitant change in the mode of operation of social movements. While some see in the ascendancy of globalization and the disappearance of "real socialism" the demise of social movements, others perceive in the incipient yet growing forms of global protest the beginning of a new round of resistance that is qualitatively different from those of the most recent past. If the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s failed to generate an autonomous critical imaginary of possible futures, will the movements that started to gain visibility in the mid-1990s run the same fate or, on the contrary, will they result in meaningful opportunities for the sustained construction of imaginaries for alternative worldviews, practices of world-making, and modes of analysis and social life? The answer to this question will depend in great part on the characteristics these social movements develop, and on the extent to which they generate their own "sustainable" structures for the production of knowledge. Both requirements demand new ways of thinking about activism on our part as analysts, academics, or intellectual-activists.

That the social movements of today operate under different rules means that even theories of the most recent past are not necessarily applicable to contemporary collective action. In other words, we do not have good models to describe, let alone understand, how social movements -particularly those explicitly self-defined as social movements against globalization- mobilize, construct their strategies, and articulate their claims. For instance, if there is any degree of consensus on how many of today's movements operate is that they:

1. Operate at various scales (from the local to the global)
2. Do not have a centralized structure, command center, or even a shared set of demands even if at some level they can be said to have a "common cause" (transforming the dominant patterns of neo-liberal globalization)
3. Are tremendously pluralistic
4. Operate in terms of networks rather than as discrete and bounded social entities. Even this cursory list of new features and practices calls for new theoretical and methodological approaches to social movements.

Traditionally the province of sociology and, to a lesser extent, political science the study of contemporary social movements has extended into a host of fields in recent years, including anthropology, history, communications studies, and geography; it is also an important item of research in interdisciplinary fields such as women's, ethnic, environmental, religious, and cultural studies. Not infrequently, those aiming to understand the new movement draw in unprecedented ways from fields such as music, philosophy (witness the popularity among social movement scholars and activists of the largely philosophical works Empire and Multitude by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), and even the natural sciences (in applications of theories of complexity to social movements). Studies of social movements, in turn, have influenced entire theoretical frameworks, such as those of "the network society" (Manuel Castells), derived in part through the observation of the new modes of operation of social movements.

The new trends emerge in part out of dissatisfaction with established perspectives in sociology and political science. First, in most of these frameworks social movements continue to be considered as a discrete object of study "out there" that can be studied through conventional empirical methodologies. The "messiness" as well as the networked and dispersed character of most movements today make this assumption problematic in the best of cases. Second, the epistemology of these studies continues to be for the most part realist-positivist; even in the cases in which some attention is given to questions of meaning and interpretation this is done in order to fit the said meanings into a neat, empirically verifiable model of collective action. Third, researchers in these traditions rarely make use of the powerful methods developed in recent years in cultural studies, anthropology, geography, and the like; these methods tend to be more interpretive and ethnographic. Fourth, and very importantly for our group, conventional studies rarely take actors/activists as subjects of their own understanding; given that the scholar/expert is the knowledge producer par excellence, researchers within the mainstream traditions rarely acknowledge the dynamics of knowledge production that goes on within movements and which, if our contention is correct, largely inform movement practice and harbor great potential for alternative worldviews and practices of world-making.

This does not mean that these studies are wrong or even unnecessary; it means they are insufficient to capture the complexity of contemporary collective action. From the perspective of our working group, it also means that many of today's theories fail to understand movements in terms of what Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls "sociology of emergence," namely, the fact that the knowledges produced by these movements (including spaces such as the World Social Forum process) point in the directions of emergent realities and possible worlds that are less marked by the current patterns of domination.

Bearing these considerations in mind, the goals of our group are:

1. To investigate and assess critically the array of theories and methodologies associated with the study of social movements at present from interdisciplinary perspectives.
2. To develop theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of social movements in terms of autonomous knowledge production — albeit networked and within genealogies of popular and scholarly knowledges.
3. To investigate the role as well as the political and practical effectiveness of social movements in the articulation of alternative worldviews and practices of local, regional, and global world-making -that is, their role in globalization and the transformation of public life.

A challenge that the group welcomes is the incorporation of faculty and students from the professional schools. Given our emphases on the mapping of alternatives and the potential transformation of public life, the participation of scholars from these fields is a sine qua non for meeting our goals. Law, education, social work, public health, social medicine are all spaces in which patterns of dominance, resistance, and new proposals are being articulated and often transformed into practices that shape the "real world." It is thus crucial for our group to work in this direction, and we are committed to it.

Finally, the group articulates well with other interdisciplinary efforts on campus, particularly the "Cultures of Economics Research Group", the new research concentrations recently identified by the UPCS (University Program in Cultural Studies), and initiatives currently under development, such as the Center for Integrating Knowledge and Action (Department of Anthropology). In addition, the group looks forward to networking with emerging projects that focus on similar research issues in other universities such as the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Texas-Austin, Binghamton University-State University of New York, and Lancaster University.