./english/176.txt:139: Melucci, A. (1996) Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
./english/187.txt:20:The ESC has emerged from a social movement that is challenging capitalist globalization and its neoliberal policies, and can be situated within three broad Contexts:
./english/205.txt:70:Format-wise, this edition shows the possibility of transcending the obvious limits that Fora – so far built around plenaries with the ‘big names', normally resulting in generic analyses and platitudes with no visible impact, or the two-hour seminars and workshops in which any true convergence or common action are unlikely results – so far have shown. Let's take, for instance, the experience of Life Despite Capitalism, in its many interlocked sessions that lasted for a day and a half, or the whole programme (not explicitly organized as such, but effective none the same) around the issue of the precariat, in which there was a sense of build up leading to the Assembly of the Europrecariat. To this day the organizers have asked themselves the questions of how to make Fora less diagnostic and more constructive, without challenging the basic assumptions of the format. The plenaries, for instance, are living dead left-overs from the first WSF in Brazil, which was clearly planned as a one-off talkshop rather than a political ‘process'. The London experience points to yet new ways, although these have always been explored in the ‘periphery' of the Social Forum process (in the Youth Camp in Porto Alegre, in the Argentinean Social Forum etc.), without receiving the proper attention of its key players.
./english/205.txt:72:Another lesson the sad spectacle of Alexandra Palace presents us with is the necessity to incorporate the creative potency of the movement(s), which can provide viable, effective – and politically challenging, and much more cooperative and participatory – solutions to areas such as communications, translation and catering.
./english/243.txt:25:“It is only as beings of praxis, in accepting our concrete situations as a challenging condition, that we are able to change its meaning by our action”.
./english/260.txt:1:Subject: Challenging the authority of both researcher and activist
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./english/277.txt:155:Despite both their participation in externally organised events such as demonstrations and in internally organised parties, squats, projects and so on, a number of participants made comments in interviews such as “nothing happened unless you organised it”, suggesting here a distinction between the “organic” and the artificial, and also discussed the value such events had for them in their own terms - as occasions to meet one another and exchange news, to organise other things, and so on. A second, relating to research, is that of interview transcripts, copies of which I have given back to participants as the transcripts have been completed, and papers based on them. Unlike what might be expected from movement organisers and formal groups, participants showed no interest in making changes - other than corrections of transcription - to the transcripts, of controlling the presentation of the group or of challenging the analysis in any way. What they were deeply concerned about was their own anonymity, partly in relation to the police, but also in relation to each other.
./english/281.txt:13:The first big set of doubts arose when I read the expression ‘class struggle’. My political engagement started years ago with the end of the strong working struggle movement in Italy. We found ourselves, in the second part of the 1980s, without the class (consciousness) that, in theory at least, is meant to be related somehow to struggle; the factories around us where closing and consciousness was almost non-existent. Most of the old activists had disappeared; some were in prison, others in exile, most dropped out of public life; almost all the ones still visible became completely institutionalised. So, as young activists, we moved from the class referent to a more complex set of references including the oppressed and marginalised- subjects more similar to us. For this reason I find it odd to talk about the ‘class struggle’ in the here and now even if it may be possible elsewhere. If Social Movements do not entirely consist of middle and upper class ‘activists’ then neither are they a genuine expression of the working classes in the ‘Marxist’ sense of the term3. The second set of doubts arose when I tried to think about Critical Psychology. What exactly is it? Does a critical psychology exist? Is it not better to talk about Critical Psychologies? Am I a critical psychologist? I can’t really give an answer to these questions because it seems to me that many people, influenced by different ideologies and practices, describe themselves as critical psychologists. Before writing this article I looked through the library database and came to the conclusion that the only thing these critical psychologists had in common was that they are not yet part of mainstream psychology. Burman4 writes, ‘Critical psychology is what people do in challenging the oppressive and disingenuous actions done by psychologists or in the name of psychology’. But in reality, being ‘critical’ is becoming fashionable and not all the people calling themselves critical have the ethical or political principles expressed by Erica. At the same time, I have the impression that sometimes tools and instruments used by critical psychologists acquire an unwarranted radical status. As Gordo-Lopez suggests,
./english/282.txt:67:Thus, activists' theorizing is not necessarily dominated by the theorization of activism, and is not restricted to an alternative 'social movements theory'. Rather, their specific theorizations of movements proceed from a broader theoretical context with relation to the social world as a whole, and changes in one understanding are usually reflected in changes in the other. Taking the example of Irish working-class community activism, Geoghegan and Cox (2001) note that activist theorizing starts from specific structural relationships - of class and poverty, gender and violence, ethnicity and exclusion - and attempts to change these relationships through agency (which necessarily involves an implicit or explicit theorizing element). This theorizing attempts to explain both how the structures that activists grapple with work and how 'best practice' activism can change it. The famous 'structure / agency' problematic of sociology does not operate in the same way for agents who are challenging structures.
./english/284.txt:71:Spivak’s call for a deep engagement with the subaltern leads to a strong epistemological shift. She insists on the persistence of the “epistemic violence” product of the colonial process where Europe is erected as the undetermined Subject holding the explanatory power, and the colonized are relegated to be the Others –the Objects waiting to be explained- whose voice and agency have been stolen. Through recognizing the international division of labor and power, one is able to perceive its impact on the current ‘epistemological world order’. She is offering an epistemology that takes the subaltern into account not only as a case study, but as a source of knowledge and ‘expert’ production-the subaltern must be heard. Among global resistance movements in North America and Europe there is a lot of internal discussion about this topic. Mainly due to the mass media, the ‘spearheading role of southern social movements has been obscured, portraying the ‘anti-globalization movement’ as a negligible affair of ‘white-US and European-middle class kids’. However, in much movement discourse there exists an explicit attempt to recognize the role of grassroots communities from ‘poor’ countries as referential examples of movement building –from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, to the unemployed/piqueteros in Argentina, to peasant women in India- showing a similar effort to revert the canons of expertise. In this process, civil society from Europe and the US become the ‘students’ of their southern ‘teachers’ challenging colonial patterns.
./english/284.txt:82:This positionality is key to understanding the goal of this piece which is to disarticulate discourses of misrepresentation and prejudices about the Mexican low-wage workers in the US. Against interpretations of the Mexican language as “crude”, “ordinary” and the Mexican male as “an animal whose ferocious pantomimes are designed to terrify others” (Ramos in Limón, 1994: 124) he is trying to put forward an alternative analysis. Instead of beasts’ roars, Limón find voices of resistance. He wants to rethink them as revolutionary narratives. The marginalized peoples’ jokes, plays and cooking are ways through which the participants are transforming themselves into mastering subjects challenging the norms of a dominant social order. Their activities become ideological devices, antagonistic performances against a hegemonic culture and society. Limón discerns a grammar of insurgency encoded in apparently crass sexual jokes. Similar to Mexican language, the space of the rancho is transform into a “temporary forum of non-alienation” (135), into an interim non-capitalist space.
./english/298.txt:143:TT: I don't know about 'tutelage' but I would definitely be for a greater effort to open up connections with other forms of labor on the basis of what academic labor shares with them (from the common plague of managerial command and its attack on the time of life to the common implication in the diffuse social factory). On the other hand, there is also a specific contribution that academic labor can provide. This specificity is part of its role as a key site in the production and reproduction of knowledges and forms of control (from policy-oriented social research to scientific patents and new technologies); in its contribution to the production of specific forms of labor directly implicated in the reproduction of the social (from doctors to computer scientists, from managers to artists and social workers); but also in its relation to a wider abstract social labour power (informated, affective and communicational), which exceeds the disciplinary power of the work/wage relation. As you said, a big part of the university's work is still institutional: reproducing hierarchical differences and producing docile subjects, so hacking the machine of social reproduction in Higher Ed is bound to be complicated work. I doubt whether a successful engagement with this process would produce another 1968 - the latter was still a revolt against the institutions, while we know now that power operates in and through networks. But it will definitely be a challenging process to be part of - requiring commitment and imagination.
./english/300.txt:57:Possibly the most important development in geography during this period being playfully called the ‘Long March’ with regards to challenging the degrees of separation between academic knowledge and other sources of knowledge comes from the development of feminist geography. The influence of the women’s movement and the challenges it posed to many pre-held notion in society was brought to geography during this time as the gains made by the movement facilitated the entrance of more women into the discipline that had been previously feasible. Those same destabilizing challenges were brought to research in order for feminist geographer to be able to do research on women as women.
./english/300.txt:59:With regards to breaking down the walls between academy and the ‘outside’ and challenging the researcher/researched divide feminist geographers have made some impressive contributions. Ideas on these issues come out very clearly in the symposium on feminist geographic research called ‘women in the field’ from 1994 in the Professional Geographer. The contributors pointed out that the political “objectives [of research] ideally work toward critical and liberatory ends, which are not formulated in terms of altruistically saving an exoticized ‘other,’” (Nast 1994; p. 57, italics original). Katz in the same symposium discusses how to establish a “mutual learning” process amongst participants in a research project particularly with reference on how each related to structures of power (Katz in Nast 1994). Nast and Kobayashi also discuss “…forging bonds between the academy (itself a ‘field’) and the world-at-large,” (Nast 1994; p. 57). Koboyashi explains “’[t]he political is not only personal, it is a commitment to deconstruct the barrier between the academy and the lives of the people it professes to represent,’” (Koboyashi in Nast 1994; p. 57).
./english/303.txt:83:Graeber, David. 2004. The Twilight of Vanguardism. Challenging Empires, edited by Jai Sen et al. New Delhi: The Viveka Foundation.
./english/306.txt:23:In a democracy defined by free choice, when free choice is defined by consumption, our sexualities and our bodies--with all their critical potency for challenging the institutions which administer affections and resources-- have become tidy packages on the shelves of the global boutique.
./english/312.txt:40:The London Social Forum represents a challenging opportunity for a first exchange of experiences and contacts, from which a future meeting (in December or January) might arise in the form of a European Forum specially dedicated to the issues of research and knowledge. We thus propose to set up a web mailing-list to debate and prepare this forum. We strongly believe, however, that the building of a post-national space of mobilisation and debate is a goal that has to be pursued now, hic et nunc, without waiting for the ‘great event’ and starting instead from the day-to-day relationships that have been already established amongst individuals and groups at the European level. For this reason, we ask everybody to make these pages circulate freely amongst all those that are or might be interested in the accomplishment of such a project.
./english/315.txt:9:After a navigationally-challenging half-hour suburban walk from the main Social Forum spaces of Bobigny, north-east Paris, we eventually found our allocated space for the somewhat grandly titled ‘Radical Theory Workshop’. We – Steffen Böhm (co-editor ephemera: critical dialogues on organisation, University of Essex), Jeremy Gilbert (Signs of the Times, University of East London), Jo Littler (Signs of the Times, Middlesex University), Oscar Reyes (Independent Student Media Project, University of Essex), myself (University of Warwick), Tiziana Terranova (University of East London) – registered the workshop as a response to our shared sense that the ESF in Florence last year, while electric, eclectic and inspiring, was rather low on theoretical content and reflection with regard to contemporary supranational socio-political ‘movement(s)’. Our blurb for the workshop registration process went something like this:
./english/316.txt:15:As for the ‘Global Justice and Solidarity Movement’ (GJ&SM), this is actually a name proposed by the Call, for the general wave of protest against corporate-dominated globalisation, against US-sponsored neo-liberalism/neo-conservatism and war, one name for the new wave of radical-democratic protest and counter-proposition. This ‘movement of movements’ is marked by its network form and communicational activity, a matter recognised by friends and enemies alike (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, Cleaver 1998, Escobar 2003, Klein 2001). Morever, ‘it’ seems to change size, shape, reach, scale, target and aims according to events. So, at one moment it might be focussed against neo-liberal economic globalisation, at another against the US-led war on Iraq. This makes it even more challenging to analyse than to name.
./english/323.txt:199:heteronormativity and whiteness means not only challenging some of the basic categories
./english/331.txt:87:Every week high profile left-wing writers (George Monbiot, Noam Chomsky, Mark Thomas, John Pilger to name a few) comment on the activities of corporate bullies and their partners in crime, corrupt politicians. Landmark publications have fuelled the anti-capitalist fire: Naomi Klein's No Logo was the book that united frustrated protestors into a global movement. Websites such as CorpWatch, Globalise Resistance and IndyMedia disseminate information and propaganda, and mobilise support - not just from rich kids in rich countries, but increasingly diverse groups from developing countries too. Each and every recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, WTO, IMF, World Bank, G8, in Davos, Seattle, Prague, Genoa, New York; environmental summits in Rio and Johannesburg, has had a contingent of protestors challenging the neo-liberal status quo. The left is still there, and it rejects both the conservative and the Third Way’s claim to the moral high ground. To the secular left, morality is compassion and justice on a global, humanitarian scale that transcends religious, ethnic or geo-political boundaries:
./english/332.txt:20:But the bureaucrats and petit-bourgeois NGOs could not have succeeded so easily, it they were not backed by important sectors for the “radical” left – like the USFI so-called “Trotskyist” USFI (LCR in France) and the IST (SWP in Britain). Rather than challenging the reformist and petit-bourgeois leaderships, they make excuses for it.
./english/356.txt:54:alternatives without challenging them but there is the risk of being
./english/362.txt:27:The antecedents of the World Social Forum (WSF) can be traced to January 2000 when a small group of about 50 activists, representing trade unions, intellectuals, peasant organisations and other social groups, gathered in Davos. Samir Amin, an intellectual who is regarded as one of the foremost thinkers on the changing dynamics of capitalism, was among those assembled at the "Anti-Davos in Davos". Since then he has been actively associated with not only the WSF but also the regional forums that have evolved as a challenge to imperialist globalisation. He is director, Third World Forum (TWF), located in Dakar (Senegal) and Cairo and in Belgium, a network of social scientists and intellectuals from developing countries. Amin has also played a key role in the formation of the World Forum for Alternatives, which was launched in 1997. The WFA aims to service the needs of social movements that are engaged in challenging the dominant discourse on globalisation. It is also involved in the search for alternatives by developing the tools for "the globalisation of resistance and struggles".
./english/375.txt:90:But we see many movements today that are very properly challenging this. The best examples for me being the Zapatistas, the Sin Tierra and the piqueteros, which are not only objecting to that tradition, the political division, but also demonstrating the utility of organising across that division, of ignoring that division in a way of expanding the notion. The notion of the multitude is an attempt to reconceive for today the concept of the proletariat rather than that of the working class. Because the working class has become an exclusionary concept, whereas proletariat means, at least in its original formulation, all of those whose labour is employed by capital, those who are waged and those who are unwaged, those who work in the fields and those who work in the factories. So this expansion of the notion of the proletariat is what we try to capture with the notion of the multitude.
./english/379.txt:256:______. (2001) åSleepless in Seattle: challenging the WTO in a globalizing worldπ, International Studies Association, Chicago (February).
./english/380.txt:169: Globalization is thus necessarily complex and challenging to both critical theories and radical democratic politics. But many people these days operate with binary concepts of the global and the local, and promote one or the other side of the equation as the solution to the world's problems. For globalists, globalization is the solution and underdevelopment, backwardness, and provincialism are the problem. For localists, globalization is the problem and localization is the solution. But, less simplistically, it is the mix that matters and whether global or local solutions are most fitting depends on the conditions in the distinctive context that one is addressing and the specific solutions and policies being proposed.
./english/386.txt:141:This new politics is not an "end state" but the affirmation of the State as an instrument of peoples' power, peoples' democracy and peoples' empowerment. It also means reaffirming the States' obligation of justice for the people from where it supposedly derives its legitimacy and power according to the democratic traditions and challenging and altering the development paradigm that argues for the market as the only provider and the new answer to the problems of economic development.
./english/387.txt:86:Winning the cities is not an open road. There are obstacles: the urban middle class and even the trade unions still have a patronizing view of the peasantry. Today it is the rural workers who are challenging the traditional belief that the urban working class leaders are the designated vanguard of historical change. Today’s peasant leaders are looking for an alliance with urban workers, as well as the urban poor in the giant slums, but only on terms of a common program in which agrarian issues share center stage. The old style internationalism tied to a socialist fatherland has been replaced by a new voluntary, decentralized, consultative internationalism in which diverse cultures flourish and common struggles are being forged not by charismatic leaders but by the steady organizing and everyday heroism of peasant women and men traveling all day and all night to the villages of Guatemala, the highlands of Ecuador, the wide expanses of Brazil, teaching, learning and creating a new revolutionary politics of social liberation and spiritual fulfillment. Z
./english/394.txt:287:World Social Forum : Challenging Empires. New Delhi : Viveka.
./english/394.txt:291:10 In the course of preparing the forthcoming book The World Social Forum : Challenging Empires, edited
./english/394.txt:313:Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman, eds, 2004 – The World Social Forum : Challenging Empires. New
./english/394.txt:325:Waterman, eds, 2004 – The World Social Forum : Challenging Empires. New Delhi : Viveka.
./english/394.txt:338:Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman, eds, 2004 – The World Social Forum : Challenging
./english/395.txt:106:challenging neoliberal globalisation alone.9 And in terms of numbers, the Forum has grown
./english/401.txt:97:· Reproducing the center-periphery (empire-colony, dependency) relationship within the labor movement by assuming that internationalism is represented (or most advanced) at one of these poles, rather than recognizing the differences and challenging the inequalities within the labor movement itself.
./english/401.txt:193: L&W establish the credentials of SIGTUR by reference to the classical socialist values of international labor solidarity and social emancipation, to its chequered history, and to recent social theorizing on globalization, the discontents it creates and the movements it provokes. It is the last of these sources – or discussions - that is most challenging since it leads them to criticize a common 'infatuation with new information systems' in such theorizing, and to argue for the necessity of the new networked, global and social movement to be based on, or grow within, the historical union institutions. L&W also favor a 'grounded' approach to globalization and opposition to such, which seems to mean a focus on 'globalization from below', as it expresses itself where people live and work. They see this as both justifying their approach and expressed by SIGTUR itself.
./english/481.txt:1:Challenging Empires: Reading the World Social Forum
./english/513.txt:24:Among what realities does the Forum move in? It does it in hundreds of contexts, which are facing a key moment: that of challenging neo-liberal, mercantile, patriarchal, predatory, and homogenising globalisation shaped by the so-called owners of the world and led by a handful of multinational corporations, financial capital, and old and new elites, all of whom have redoubled their attacks in order to control and possess it with ever growing greed.
./english/571.txt:109:Whitaker, Chico (2004a) ‘The WSF as an Open Space’, in Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar and Peter Waterman (eds.) World Social Forum. Challenging Empires, New Delhi, Viveka Foundation, pp. 111-121.
./english/579.txt:34:In its absence, Prime Minister Vajpayee at the BJP party conclave in Goa at the end of May 2002 made the speech that in retrospect can be seen as marking the point at which the Indian polity took another qualitative lurch rightwards. In his decisive agenda-setting speech Vajpayee openly rationalized the pogrom as an unavoidable reaction to the Godhra incident. He categorically rejected the demand from his NDA allies to remove Narendra Modi as chief minister of Gujarat, effectively challenging them to make their choice – either to pull down his government and precipitate early elections or to fall quietly into line. He also made a pitch internationally to the US ideological right by declaring Islamic fundamentalism/terrorism as the world’s principal danger.
./english/579.txt:79:10. A start has been made through the publication of Challenging Empires: An Anthology of Essays on the Theory and Practice of the WSF edited by Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar and Peter Waterman and carrying a thoughtful foreword by Hilary Wainwright; published by Viveka foundation and released at the WSF 2004.
./english/626.txt:10:WSF 04 was not easy. It was challenging. Mumbai, a teeming city of almost 20 million, has some of the worlds worst inequality and urban poverty. The inhumanness of Mumbais poor hits you, hard. All the time. On the streets. On the sidewalks. Right outside the Forum venue. Participants saw the poorest of the poor, everyday, and winced. For many, poverty was no longer a word in development literature. It was breathing right in front of you. The feeling of horror reverberated amongst many who had never seen suffering of this magnitude before. You couldnt talk any more in workshops about the abstract poor. No, they had faces, and bony bodies. They were living reminders of the need for this "other world" we were fighting for. In some way, along with so many others, they made the Forum seem more real, more urgent, more critical.
./english/626.txt:12:WSF 04 was not an isolated event. It was challenged. By Mumbai Resistance - a separate event held by those who felt the WSF was exclusionary and compromised. Across the highway, several organizations and people often referred to as the "extreme left" rallied to discuss many of the same issues but under a different banner. Other parallel but not challenging events were the Land First Mela - an event devoted to the creation of a stronger land rights movement, and the conference of Via Campesina - an international network of peasant organizations, agricultural workers, and indigenous communities. Events attended by many who also participated in the WSF. Events that chose separate spaces for logistic and other conveniences. Events that were all spokes in the wheel of the alternative vehicle were engaged in building.