Beyond The Crisis: Global Justice, Equality, Social Movements

national | anti-capitalism | event notice Wednesday March 23, 2011 17:19 by Laurence Cox - NUI Maynooth

Day seminar for activists and researchers

How can we think beyond the immediate pressures of responding to the recession, the IMF/EU bailout, the elections and so on? How has the ground shifted under the feet of social movements in the last few years? Where do struggles for equality and global justice stand now? This event brings together activists and researchers from Mexico, Scotland, the US and Ireland in an open event aimed at thinking strategically and understanding both what is now becoming harder to imagine and what is now becoming possible.

When: Saturday, May 7th 2011, 9.30 - 6.00
Where: Seomra Spraoi social centre ( http://seomraspraoi.org), 10 Belvidere Court, Dublin 1 (off Gardiner St - directions at http://seomraspraoi.org/copy_of_contact-us)

All welcome, admission free

A joint initiative of the MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism (http://ceesa-ma.blogspot.com) and the MA in Anthropology and Development ( http://anthropology.nuim.ie/postgraduates-0)

Timetable:

9.30 Arrival / registration / etc.
10.00 Welcome / round of introductions
10.15 John Holloway (Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico): "Rage against the rule of money"
11.15 Break
11.30 Eurig Scandrett (Queen Margaret University, Scotland): "How can we learn from popular struggles?"
12.15 Kathy Powell (NUI Galway): "Why do people not revolt?"

1.00 Lunch break

2.00 Parallel sessions
- Laurence Davis (independent scholar): "What are we fighting for? On not settling for too little"
- Rosie Meade (University College Cork): "Has culture been bought?"
- David Nugent (Emory University): "Is development a substitute for social change?"
- Aileen O'Carroll (National Qualitative Data Archive): "Does work leave us time for a revolution?"

3.30 Break
4.00 Plenary
6.00 Ends

About the presenters and facilitators:

Laurence Davis is the author of numerous publications on the relationship between utopian aspirations and popular empowerment, including the co-edited volumes Anarchism and Utopianism (MUP, 2009) and The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (Lexington Books, 2005), and a wide range of articles on contemporary anti-capitalist and ecological movements, countercultural and revolutionary politics, and the politics of art, work and love. He is a founding member of the U.K. Anarchist Studies Network, a series editor of Continuum Book's new Contemporary Anarchist Studies book series, and a member of the Steering Committee and media team co-chair of Irish Ship to Gaza.

John Holloway, born in Dublin, is Professor of Sociology, Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico. He is the author of Change the World Without Taking Power (new ed. Pluto, London 2010) and Crack Capitalism (Pluto, London 2010).

Rosie Meade works in the School of Applied Social Studies, UCC. Her research interests include the politics of community development, cultural democracy and cultural resistance. She has been involved in a number of campaigning and community based organisations in Cork City, including Cork Women’s Support Group, Immigrant Solidarity, William Thompson Weekend and Cork Community Artlink.

David Nugent is currently Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, where he directs the Masters in Development Practice. He has done field research in the eastern Canadian Arctic on Inuit subsistence patterns, in east Africa on government-sponsored sorcery eradication, in the Peruvian Andes on state formation and underground political movements, and in the western U.S. on indigenous land and water rights. He is the award-winning author and editor of several books, including Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885-1935 (Stanford University Press, 1997), Locating Capitalism in Time and Space: Global Restructurings, Politics and Identity (Stanford University Press, 2001), and (with Joan Vincent) A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (Blackwell Press; 2004).

Aileen O'Carroll is manager of the Irish Qualitive Data Archive. Her research interests include the sociology of time, life history, work organisation, class and economic sociology. She is currently working on a book about post-industrial working time.

Kathy Powell is an anthropologist based at NUI Galway studying socio-economic change, political culture and political practices in rural Mexico. Her research focusses on hegemonic processes, political rationality and relations of power, and particularly on interrelations between the practices and discourses of clientelist politics and corruption, and between forms of violence, social and political inequalities and identity. Other interests include political ideology, identity and ’informality’ in Cuba.

Eurig Scandrett is an educator and activist in environmental, peace, gender and trade union issues employed at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh where he teaches sociology and social justice and carries out research into environmental justice movements. He coordinated the Bhopal Survivors’ Movement Study and edited Bhopal Survivors Speak: emergent voices from a people’s movement (2009, Word Power Books). He was previously Head of Community Action at Friends of the Earth Scotland.