Meetings

1. September 2003
"First Call for a Working Group on Social Movements at UNC-CH"

2. November 2003
"TRANSDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO SOCIAL MOVEMENTS"
Anthropology, Geography, and Sociology

3. December 2003
"ACTIVIST KNOWLEDGES"
Social movements from objects of study to sources of authority

4. January 2004
"ACTIVIST/ACADEMIC/INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES"
Bridges, Collaborations and other hybrids

5. February 2004
"NETWORKS"
Theories and ethnographies of social movement networks

6. March 2004
WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS IN LATIN AMERICA

7. October 2004
RELIGIOUS SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

CALL FOR OCTOBER 5, 2004

The next social movements reading topic will be the first of two sessions to focus on the diversity of religious social movements across the globe. This meeting will begin our exploration of how religion plays a role in globalization, activism, and identity politics. Questions regarding the readings will be emailed out before the meeting.

READINGS

John Burdick, Looking for God in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 1-16, 221-230.

Vine Deloria, Jr., For This Land: Writings on Religion in America (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 31-43.

Harvey A. Feit, "James Bay Crees' Life Projects and Politics," in Mario Blaser et al., eds., In the Way of Development (London: Zed; Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2004), pp. 92-110.

Carie L. Hersh, excerpts from Dialogism and Hegemony in Pat Robertson's Media Empire," unpublished paper, 2004.

Charles Kurzman, "Bin Laden and Other Thoroughly Modern Muslims," Contexts (American Sociological Association), Vol. 1, No. 4, Fall-Winter 2002, pp. 13-20.

Joel Robbins, "The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity," forthcoming in The Annual Review of Anthropology.

Richard L. Wood, Faith in Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing in America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 161-194.

8. October 2004
Meeting with Terre Satterfield

Call for October 26, 2004

For our upcoming meeting of the Social Movements Working Group on October 26, we will be joined by Terre Satterfield from the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Anatomy of a Conflict: Identity, Knowledge, and Emotion in Old-Growth Forests (2002), an ethnography of two intersecting social movements — environmentalists and loggers — playing out in the old-growth forests of Oregon. Debates and clashes in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest have centered on the fate of the northern spotted owl, an endangered species whose forest habitat, environmentalists claim, is threatened by logging practices. In her ethnographic exploration of these movements, Satterfield uses a dialogic approach to understand the creation of "activist" identities, and of conflict between environmentalists and small-scale loggers in Oregon. Using discourses of knowledge, emotion, science and history, participants in this conflict struggle to establish themselves as legitimate custodians of the forest, and at the same time, to discredit their opponents. Above all, Satterfield claims, this conflict is one of cultural politics and identity.

Anatomy of a Conflict raises a number of issues and questions that are undoubtedly relevant to our own work on social movements. Some questions and themes to keep in mind as you read include:

• Throughout the book, Satterfield employs a reflexive ethnography to situate herself in contentious movements in the struggle for control over Oregon's old-growth forests. What might be the strengths and challenges of this type of reflexive approach to engaging with social movements as an academic/activist?
  
  
• Chapter 2 presents a history of the environmental movement and of logging in the United States. In this case, the history was evidently not in dispute, but it presumably could have been. As we engage with social movements, how can we deal with/incorporate the history of movements into ethnography and claims-making — even if the history of the movement far precedes the particular conflict or struggle we're focused on?
  
  
• According to Satterfield, discourses are appropriated as powerful resources for making claims (and making identities) in social movements. For instance, the activists in the old growth forest conflict draw on discourses of science, emotion, and "the ecological nobility of aboriginal peoples" to make claims about themselves, their opponents, and the fate of the forest. How do we "get at" movement discourses ethnographically — or otherwise? What is the significance of the use of these discourses?
  
  
• What are the benefits of the dialogic approach? The drawbacks? Would you consider using it in your project? Why or why not?
  
  
• Satterfield pays attention to the future-making goes on in the dialogic encounter of the two movements. In Chapter 6, she aims to show that there are both contesting-resistant and imagined-productive practices. Is this future-making an anomaly for social movements? What differences do we see for future-making?
  
  

9. November 2004
AUTONOMIA & ARGENTINA

Call for November 16, 2004

Special guests: Neka Jara (MTD Solano) and Soledad Bordegaray (MTD La Matanza) MTD stands for Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados, Movement of Unemployed Workers.

These are the readings for the SMWG discussion on AUTONOMIA & ARGENTINA on Tuesday November 16th.

"From Trotsky to Puppets" By Graciela Monteagudo. She is one of the speakers and we will have the opportunity to see her puppet show as well.

Que se Vayan Todos - Argentina's Popular Uprising [PDF]

Colectivo Situaciones
This is a group of militant-researchers with several publications. We will read the Intro of a theoretical piece CONTRAPODER and the Prologue of a co-authored work with the Unemployed Workers of Solano HIPOTESIS 89. (Probably, one of the speakers at our event will be from this unemployed workers' group)

Article on Autonomy from book WE ARE EVERYWHERE

Document with information on US-Argentinean campaign against Seaboard Corporation that this tour is promoting (so maybe it would be nice to know something about it in advance)

**Suggested EXTRA reading about elections & social movements:

Causes and Happenstance by Situaciones

Suggested Questions:

1. The readings for this weeks meeting are somewhat varied — in style, format and intent — however they all have at their core an attempt to describe or make sense of new social movements — even "new" politics — that have become known throughout the world since the collapse of the Argentinean economy in 2001. In addition to the specific Argentinean context, however, we can also locate these "new" "autonomist" politics as examples/articulations — both in terms of how they are being elaborated as well as how they are being narrated — of the "alternative globalization movement" (AGM) or Global Justice movement — or that set of movements associated with Chiapas, Seattle, Genoa, and Porto Alegre. While the topic of the AGM has come up several times as a point of reference and discussion with respect to "other" social movements of both the past and the present, we have never addressed it head on.
   
   As such, we thought it would make sense to begin by addressing these claims of "newness" at the outset. However rather than argue over whether they are or are not "really" new, it might be more useful to think through:
   
   
   1. In what ways do they claim to be new?
   2. What do these claims of newness do for them?
   3. Considering the other social movements studied by this group, how are they different — or not?
   
   
   
2. Some of these pieces — specifically those by the Situaciones Collective — simultaneously engage and challenge researchers of social movements to "think" and "practice" their research differently. They point to the notion of the "militant investigator" — distinct from both the academic researcher AND the political militant.
   
   
   1. Can we articulate what they mean by the militant researcher and whether we find the concept useful?
   2. Is this concept appropriate for studying all "social movements" or does it have shortcomings/limitations?
   3. How does it relate — if at all — to Terre Satterfield's "dialogical approach"?
   4. They seem as weary of the certainties and orthodoxies found within the "movement" (political militants) as one would find in traditional social sciences. What are the implications of this critique for our group?
   
   
   
3. In addition to a critique of typical academic approaches to social movement studies, these pieces — and the Argentinean experience in general — also engage with and challenge another "dominant" framework for studying and pursuing social change — that of Marxism. While not as dominant in the United States, and perhaps even seen as completely distinct from empirical social movements studies, Marxism - or the Marxist framework — continues to be central to understanding and practicing of social movements in Latin America, Europe and many other places.
   
   
   1. What aspects of Marxism are these Argentinean politics critical of? What do they want to hold on to?
   2. What categories and tools does Marxism (and its critique) give us that might be lacking in the social movements studies we are more accustomed to?
   
   
   
4. Hypothesis 891 addresses the issue of authoring. What does the removal of the author do to a body of work? Does it affect the location of the researcher as well? Does this have implications for our conceptions of ethnography?
   
   
5. Throughout this semester, and repeatedly throughout our readings, the idea of utopia has come up — generally conceived of as part of a positive process of future-making or re-activating utopian imaginations. However, the descriptions of the autonomist project, at least as articulated by Situaciones, seems to do something else with the concept or category of utopia.
   
   
   1. Considering claims like: "the ideal amputates reality from life" (Hypothesis 891, 5) and "The future has stopped being the key to the present" (About Counterpower, 1), what does that do to our concept of utopia?
   2. Is envisioning utopia useful tool, or does it just "distract" us from reality? What are the benefits and problems of constructing utopia — and does this differ between movements?