Insurgent Encounters illuminates the dynamics of contemporary transnational social movements, including those advocating for women and indigenous groups, environmental justice, and alternative—cooperative rather than exploitative—forms of globalization. The contributors are politically engaged scholars working within the social movements they analyze. Their essays are both models of and arguments for activist ethnography. They demonstrate that such a methodology has the potential to reveal empirical issues and generate theoretical insights beyond the reach of traditional social-movement research methods. Activist ethnographers not only produce new understandings of contemporary forms of collective action, but also seek to contribute to struggles for social change. The editors suggest networks and spaces of encounter as the most useful conceptual rubrics for understanding shape-shifting social movements using digital and online technologies to produce innovative forms of political organization across local, regional, national, and transnational scales. A major rethinking of the practice and purpose of ethnography, Insurgent Encounters challenges dominant understandings of social transformation, political possibility, knowledge production, and the relation between intellectual labor and sociopolitical activism.
Contributors. Giuseppe Caruso, Maribel Casas-Cortés, Janet Conway, Stéphane Couture, Vinci Daro, Manisha Desai, Sylvia Escárcega, David Hess, Jeffrey S. Juris, Alex Khasnabish, Lorenzo Mosca, Michal Osterweil, Geoffrey Pleyers, Dana E. Powell, Paul Routledge, M. K. Sterpka, Tish Stringer
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Ethnography and Activism within Networked Spaces of Transnational Encounter - Jeffrey S. Juris and Alex Khasnabish
- Emerging Subjectivities
- 1. Spaces of Intentionality Race, Class, and Horizontality at the U.S. Social Forum - Jeffrey S. Juris
- 2. Tracing the Zapatista Rhizome, or, the Ethnography of a Transnationalized Political Imagination - Alex Khasnabish
- 3. The Possibilities and Perils for Scholar-Activists and Activist-Scholars Reflections on the Feminist Dialogues - Manisha Desai
- 4. From Local Ethnographies to Global Movement Experience, Subjectivity, and Power among Four Alter-globalization Actors - Geoffrey Pleyers
- Discrepant Paradigms
- 5. The Global Indigenous Movement and Paradigm Wars International Activism, Network Building, and Transformative Politics - Sylvia Escárcega
- 6. Local and Not-So-Local Exchanges Alternative Economies, Ethnography, and Social Science - David J. Hess
- 7. The Edge Effects of Alter-globalization Protests An Ethnographic Approach to Summit Hopping in the Post-Seattle Period - Vinci Daro
- Transformational Knowledges
- 8. Transformations in Engaged Ethnography Knowledge, Networks, and Social Movements - Maribel Casas-Cortés, Michal Osterweil and Dana E. Powell
- 9. Transformative Ethnography and the World Social Forum Theories and Practices of Transformation - Giuseppe Caruso
- 10. Activist Ethnography and Translocal Solidarity - Paul Routledge
- 11. Ethnographic Approaches to the World Social Forum - Janet Conway
- Subversive Technologies
- 12. The Transnational Struggle for Information Freedom - M. K. Sterpka
- 13. This Is What Democracy Looked Like - Tish Stringer
- 14. The Cultural Politics of Free Software and Technology within the Social Forum Process - Jeffrey S. Juris, Giuseppe Caruso, Stéphane Couture and Lorenzo Mosca
- Conclusion: The Possibilities, Limits, and Relevance of Engaged Ethnography - Jeffrey S. Juris and Alex Khasnabish
- References
- Contributors
- Index
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