Doing is Believing: Prefiguration as Strategic Practice in the Alterglobalization Movement

Maeckelbergh, Marianne

doi:10.1080/14742837.2011.545223

Cited by 312 publications

(242 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Boggs (1977), for example, traces the prefigurative tradition from nineteenth century anarchism to the workers' councils of the early twentieth century and beyond, while Breines (1980) focuses in detail on the American New Left in the 1960s. More recent analysis has highlighted the prefigurative elements of the alterglobalisation movement (Graeber, 2002;Maeckelbergh, 2011) and Occupy (Graeber, 2011;Juris, 2012), again drawing attention to their innovative structures and democratic processes. Commitment to a prefigurative approach also influences the types of action that movements engage in.…”

Section: Emphasis)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Practice is central to understandings of social change from the bottom up, of how awareness can be raised and how support for a movement might grow, understandings that tend to inform prefigurative action. It is fundamentally about experimenting with new technologies and processes, testing them out and demonstrating -not merely persuading or demanding, but 'actively setting up alternative structures so that people can experience for themselves' (Maeckelbergh, 2011: 16, original emphasis) -that another world is possible, that viable alternatives exist (Graeber, 2002;North, 2011;Portwood-Stacer, 2012). …”

Section: Emphasis)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Everyday consumption practices as a site for activism? Exploring the motivations of grassroots reuse groups

Foden¹

2012

PPP

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Abstract AbstractThis paper draws on early findings from a study of grassroots groups and individuals engaged in alternative consumption practices: ways of acquiring, exchanging, using and disposing of goods outside of the formal economy. The study focuses on individuals and groups that take items that would otherwise be classed as waste and try to put them (back) to use. It is especially concerned with ethical and political dimensions of these practices: how small day-to-day acts are associated with trying to live according to a set of values and how they might make a difference to wider problems. Two existing ways of theorising the connection between everyday individual acts and social change are put forward: prefigurative politics and political consumerism. Initial findings suggest ambivalence concerning the political nature of such activities, with participants recognising a politics of consumption, but hesitant to describe their engagement in alternative consumption practices as a political act.

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Section: Emphasis)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Emphasis)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday consumption practices as a site for activism? Exploring the motivations of grassroots reuse groups

Foden¹

2012

PPP

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“…In part this involves the politics of prefiguration that theorizes action through doing, fashioning alternatives through lived practice (e.g. see Graeber, 2002;Maeckelbergh, 2011), while also recognizing that such practices constantly require the negotiation of unequal power relations (see Routledge, 2002;Chatterton et al 2008). Further, resourcing potential can contribute to the creation of a "radical imagination" whereby people can begin to envision better, more socially just futures, based on the analysis of the root causes of social problems (Khasnabish and Haiven, 2012).…”

Section: Resourcing Potentialmentioning

confidence: 99%

Situated solidarities and the practice of scholar-activism

Routledge

Derickson

2015

Environ Plan D

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Grounded in an analysis of an ongoing collaboration with rural peasant movements in Bangladesh, we explore the possibility of forging solidarity through practices of scholar-activism. In so doing, we consider the practice of reflexivity, reconsider forms of solidarity, and draw on the concept of convergence spaces as a way to envision sites of possibility. We draw on the work of Nagar and Geiger's notion of situated solidarities (2007) to propose an alternative form of reflexive practice in scholarship. We then posit that there are 6 "practices" that provide a useful schematic for thinking through the opportunities for the construction of these solidarities.In this paper, we consider the possibility of forging solidarities through practices of scholaractivism. Scholar-activists are those that seek alignment between their academic work "and their political ideals to further social change and work directly with marginal groups or those in struggle" (Autonomous Geographies 2010). Done thoughtfully, scholar-activism practiced through what Nagar and Geiger (2007) call "situated solidarities" can be an effective strategy for producing knowledges that "abide by" (Ismail 2005) the struggles of marginalized communities in ways that refuse but do not ignore the violent and imperialist histories of the academy. By way of illustrating how such solidarities might be achieved in the course of doing scholaractivism, we identify six practices: 'being moved'; 'dispersing power'; 'resourcing potential'; 'resourcing solidarity'; 'challenging assumptions and norms'; and 'sustaining collaboration'. We ground our analysis in recent work conducted by Routledge in Bangladesh with the Bangladesh Krishok (farmer) Federation (BKF) the largest rural-based peasant movement in the country, and the Bangladesh Kishani Sabha (Women Farmers' Association, BKS).In an earlier paper (Derickson and Routledge 2015), we suggested a 'politics of resourcefulness' as a guiding ethos for engaging in the process of doing scholar-activism. This entails commitments to channel the resources and privileges afforded academics to advancing the work of non-academic collaborators; designing research explicitly to ask and answer questions that non-academic collaborators want to know; and engaging in research that explores barriers to sustained and active participation and activism. We also argued that we should engage actively with both sides of the hyphen, emphasizing scholarly work and interventions in scholarly debates as well as resourcing the activist realm. Our intention with this paper is to build on these foundational ethics by engaging the notion of situated solidarities as simultaneously a goal of and a strategy for doing scholar-activism. Situating solidarities of scholar-activismAs social subjects, we act in "a world over-determined by relations of power exploitation, inequality and violence" (Juris and Khasnabish, 2013: 371). Such relations are accentuated with respect to our location in a dominant institution such as a University, that is enro...

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Section: Triangulating Resourcing and Doing Scholar-activism: Reflementioning

confidence: 99%

Resourcing Scholar-Activism: Collaboration, Transformation, and the Production of Knowledge

Derickson

Routledge

2014

The Professional Geographer

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In this paper we propose the concepts of 'resourcefulness' and 'triangulating the research question' as guiding principles for engaging in scholar-activism and discuss the way in which our own experiences in the Glasgow neighborhood of Govan have informed these concepts. In so doing, our objective is to propose one possible way forward for the practice of scholaractivism that responds to concerns regarding power dynamics, the limits of academic inquiry, and the need for reflexivity. We argue that reflective and collaborative scholars can engage in the co-production of knowledge without being paralyzed by such concerns.Key words: scholar-activism, resourcefulness, GovanThe purpose of this paper is to provide a set of 'resources' for scholar-activists to (ref)use as they see fit. We do this by first elaborating on the notion of resourcefulness and the ethical practice of resourcing the various insurgencies with which we collaborate as scholar-activists.Grounded in the ethos of resourcing activism, we then offer an approach to scholar-activist research design we refer to as 'triangulating' the research question, laying out our approach to the co-production of knowledge with and for our community-based collaborators. We then draw from existing literature on the role of emotion in scholar-activism to engage with the question of what motivates a scholar to pursue this particular form of academic inquiry and how one might choose their research projects and partners. Our objective is to offer a set of conjectures or propositions for how one might go about doing scholar-activism based on our own experiences and reflections on those experiences. While we have nearly two decades of such research in various locations around the globe in this kind of research between us, we use

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Doing is Believing: Prefiguration as Strategic Practice in the Alterglobalization Movement

Cited by 312 publications

References 9 publications

Everyday consumption practices as a site for activism? Exploring the motivations of grassroots reuse groups

Everyday consumption practices as a site for activism? Exploring the motivations of grassroots reuse groups

Situated solidarities and the practice of scholar-activism

Resourcing Scholar-Activism: Collaboration, Transformation, and the Production of Knowledge

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