You are invited to the Second Annual
Social Movement Working Group
Symposium:
Alternative
Cartographies of
Social Movements
March 23-24, 2007. Friday 1-5pm; Saturday 9:30am-5pm @ UNC, Chapel Hill, Frank Porter Graham Student Union, Room 3413
Event Description
Social Movements and their studies (SMS) are now prominent in the contemporary cultural, political and academic landscape. A survey of the field of
SMS, however, indicates an inadequate comprehension of actors/activists as subjects who produce their own knowledges and practices and a need for more
attention to the assumed role of the researcher as scholar/expert. The complex processes of knowledge production that go on within movements, we believe,
largely inform movement practice and harbor potential for alternative worldviews and practices of world-making. In the interest of exploring these issues in a
collaborative, interdisciplinary setting, the Social Movement Working Group (SMWG) is hosting a two-day symposium on March 23 and 24th at the University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in room 3413 of the Student Union. Friday the 23rd will feature special guests Dr. Janet Conway from York University and Dr.
Marisol de la Cadena from the University of California, Davis. Music and food will follow in an evening social off campus. Saturday will continue with a day of
discussion and sharing in relation to the themes of the symposium, light breakfast and lunch included.
Workshop Goals
The workshop has three distinct but inter-related purposes. One, to open up the question of whether and how knowledges from social movements are
articulated to, or autonomous from, other locations of knowledge production (e.g. institutional, academic, popular, etc). Two, to reflect on our own location
within an economy of knowledge and how we might be able to stage dialogic encounters, foster collaborative possibilities and negotiate strategic alliances
among the different locations of knowledge production around, about and within social movements. Three, based on different disciplinary approaches to the
very categories (economic, social, political, and cultural) that sustain the formation we are calling “social movements,” we intend to further an already vibrant
ethic of interdisciplinarity by engaging alternative cartographies of social change.
Underlying the basis of the symposium is the belief that the different locations through which knowledges are produced, disseminated and translated back
into their constitutive practices harbor potential for diverse ways of knowing and being that in turn influence processes of social change. At the same time, it
seeks to additionally ask how we are to situate and engage with the increasingly prominent status of revivalist religious, ethnic, and nationalist social and
political movements. We suggest that the contemporary conjuncture demands a different kind of critical, self-reflexive intellectual and political engagement.
This question will form the crux of our collaborative efforts in the course of this symposium.
Sponsored by the university program in cultural studies (UPCS), University Center for International Studies (UCIS) and Graduate and
Professional Students Federation (GPSF)
Background
The Social Movements Working Group (SMWG) was started in 2003. We provide a forum for scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and professional
schools, and activists to engage in critical debates about the role of contemporary social movements in the transformation of public life. By "public life" we
index the ensemble of cultural, social, economic, and political processes that inform worldviews and practices of world-making. We seek to contribute to
interdisciplinary dialog around, about and arising from social movements of various kinds. Further, we are committed to understanding and problematizing
the very categories that inhere in what counts as a “social movement”. The group operates in the interstitial spaces formed at the limits of disciplinary dialogs
on globalization, social movements, and public life. We remain aware that, as such, "social movements" are at once objects of academic inquiry and
interlocutors in a complex economy of knowledge.
Symposium Prompt
This two-day exploratory workshop will further the difficult labor of sharing our research about alternative cartographies of the social movements. To this
end, we invite each participant to write a brief (1-2 page), position paper or response to the themes of the workshop. Please send your responses to:
socialmovements@gmail.com. If you wish, responses can be organized as answers to the following three prompts/questions:
1. How does your work envision, approach and problematize the category of the social movement? What are its limits and potentialities? Why? What is
at stake in adopting particular perspectives on what constitutes a social movement? The terrain of SMS in and of itself is highly contentious. However,
SMS does not exhaust the possibilities though which social and political struggles are theorized. What's at stake in adopting specific understandings of
SMS or of adopting different approaches to social and political struggles?
2. Can social movements be seen as autonomous producers of alternative knowledges? Do you find the category, “autonomous knowledge production”
relevant? Do you consider notions such as “autonomous knowledges” problematic? Or do you find other ones such as “alternative world-views”,
“alternative life-projects”, “cultural politics” more useful?
3. How do you imagine the potential for dialogic encounters between academics, intellectuals and social movement intellectuals, acknowledging the
different and potentially incommensurable epistemological and ontological premises organizing each one of them? How can we, academic
intellectuals, forge collaborative and strategic alliances with social movements? Furthermore, given the complexities of the ways in which social
movements articulate to the broader cultural political problematic, how do we envision the dialogic, the collaborative and the strategic?
4. What are the effectivities of social movements within articulated totalities of different scales? In other words how might we think about the
articulations between social movements to the local, the regional, the national, and the global? How do social movements produce different notions of
publicity across these scales?
Please RSVP socialmovements@gmail.com ASAP so we know how much food to order. There are a limited number of spaces for free food.