The Movements of Movements: Part 2: Rethinking Our Dance

Our world today is not only a world in crisis but also a world in profound movement, with increasing numbers of people joining or forming movements: local, national, transnational, and global. The dazzling diversity of ideas and experiences recorded in this collection captures something of the fluidity within campaigns for a more equitable planet. This book, taking internationalism seriously without tired dogmas, provides a bracing window into some of the central ideas to have emerged from within grassroots struggles from 2006 to 2010. The essays here cross borders to look at the politics of caste, class, gender, religion, and indigeneity, and move from the local to the global.

Rethinking Our Dance, the second of two volumes, offers a wide range of essays from frontline activists in Afghanistan, Argentina, Brazil, Niger, and Taiwan, as well as from Europe and North America that address the question, “What do we need to do in order to bring about justice and peace?” The Movements of Movements aims to make the bewildering range of contemporary movements more meaningful to the observer and also to be a space where global movements speak to each other.

This book will be useful to all who work for egalitarian social change—be they in universities, parties, trade unions, social movements, or religious organisations.

Contributors include Kolya Abramsky, Ezequiel Adamovsky, Ousseina Alidou, Samir Amin, Chris Carlsson, John Brown Childs, Lee Cormie, Anila Daulatzai, Massimo De Angelis, The Free Association, David Graeber, Josephine Ho, John Holloway, François Houtart, Jeffrey Juris, Michael Löwy, Tomás Mac Sheoin, Matt Meyer, Muto Ichiyo, Rodrigo Nunes, Michal Osterweil, Shailja Patel, Geoffrey Pleyers, Stephanie Ross, and Nicola Yeates.

Praise:

“Possible futures right now in the making become legible in how The Movements of Movements doesn’t shy away from the complex and unsettling issues that shape our time while thinking through struggles for social and ecological justice in the wider contexts of their past and present.”
—Emma Dowling, senior lecturer in sociology at Middlesex University, London

“This collection offers a thought-provoking opportunity to parse multiplicities and recent directions in global justice organizing. Jai Sen’s framing in this book sets us up to take stock of two decades of social and political movement in terms of dynamic motion—not only as strategy and organization, but as kinaesthetic experience, embodied transformation through space and time. This agile cluster of contributors leads us through the cumulative dialectic of Zapatismo, altermondialisme, and their various permutations and relations in resistance to global capitalism, guiding the steps of the social dance repeatedly back to earth from the ethereal spaces of hypermobile globality to place feet on the ground in the most deeply rooted sites of embedded struggle.”
—Maia Ramnath, author of Decolonizing Anarchism and The Haj to Utopia

“Edited by Jai Sen, who has long occupied a central position in an international network of intellectuals and activists in movement, this is an important contribution to a developing internationalism that doesn’t assume that the North Atlantic left has all the answers for the rest of the world and which recognizes that emancipatory ideas and practices are often forged from below. The essays here range across the globe, look at the politics of caste, class, gender, religion, and indigeneity, and move from the local to the global. This book will be useful for activists and intellectuals in movement—be they in universities, parties, trade unions, social movements, or religious organisations—around the world.”
—Richard Pithouse, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

Jai Sen, associated with the India Institute for Critical Action: Centre in Movement (CACIM), is an activist, researcher, and author on and in movement. He has intensively engaged with the World Social Forum and contemporary emerging movements on a world scale, as moderator of the listserv WSM Discuss and as coeditor of several books including World Social Forum: Challenging Empires and World Social Forum: Critical Explorations.

See and hear editor interviews, book reviews, and other news on Jai Sen’s page HERE

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