[15/10/2005. Chronos website is online! ]
This project aims to be open, participative and to be develop in cooperation within several activists, researchers and activist researchers that share an interest for the social movements. How do they communicate their fights and resistances? how do they participate together in drawning a collective memory of the social movements?
This project is impulsed by Di Vittorio Foundation and the action research network: Euromovements.
We propose a project in three times:
Searching part to develop a global european chronology of social mobilizations in Europe since 1999:
Built this chronology in an inclusive and participatory way so that the arquitecture of the database (categories, definitions, search engine, formulary) will be uesful for people involved in searching, activism and social transformation.
Discuss methodologies, categories, definitions, keywords.
Exchange on database language and system:
Spread the project to groups involved in maps and social transformation, define systems and languages that will be used in first part development database
Index and compel informations around social mobilizations inside an online database programmed with free software. The finality of this database is to be a place where people will be able to make a research around existing chronologies and to enter personal information about those subjects through formularies. The result being in the first stage a database that will allow researchs and information upload around 3 kinds of entries: geographically/ temporal/ thematic.
We would also like to try to make a didactic presentation of those chronologies so they can be useful for searchers, activists and persons interested in social transformation in general: we would like to imagine visual nice presentations and get away of linear/catalogue listing, per e.j. demo map 1.0, so people could go from the space/date/characterization of the event to essential documents related to this space/time/collective action crossroads. This part aims also to involve people and groups involved actually in working on mapping social transformation, as the same time, that they do develop maps for social transformation throught action and research.
We do count on a elist to exchange:
chronos@lists.euromovements.info
you can register HERE, get involved!!
Social Movements and chronologies: a project in 3 times
Fifty years ago, Maurice Hallwbachs, a French sociologist write an essay called "La mémoire collective" (The collective memory). Inside he tried to analyse as hugely possible the relations existing between the "memory" as an individual perception/skill, as a collective interaction, and as a historical abstraction determine by some specialists. In this book, the author was trying to deal and measure himself with various complex theories managing with those questions: per example he realizes a critic of the subjectivity of the Bergson lecture of time proposed inside its 1922 :"Difference and repetition, a lecture of Einstein relative theory”; he was also trying to measure himself to the professional corpus of theories that where guiding the actions and thoughts of historians and he was compelling them about their habit to create false separations of events, memories and contexts inside the flew of (universal, cosmic, human) time in order to try to make understandable the past.
In a sense, this French sociologist was trying to play with concepts that were surely painful, it doesn’t look easy to participate in developing concepts related with our senses of "when" and "where", because time and space are always shaking hands in a certain way and not in always in an easy manner.
The tentative of Hallwbachs to reshape those concepts was also courageous because the subjectivity and the relations of power and domination are centrals and dynamics elements inside the conception of past events: everyone knows/experiences that frequently it’s the “winners” of the wars that write the history we learn at school; it is not a topic, it is just an entrance to understand that social movements are dealing with hard boiling thematic when they try to shape, build and communicate their own conception of what has been going on inside the social movement.
The actors that are trying to resume through a timeline the essential moments of development of the social movements or group they have involved with are really realizing an exercise of style, conceptually and subjectively. They are actively being the ones who takes into their hands the role of drawing the historic and collective’s moments that are essentials to the memory of the group in action; in a sense, it is an activity for activist research, being able to resume, synthesize, communicate, inside a timeline the way(s) a social movement has been developing its nature… in a way, chronologies are an exercise of mapping the beats of collectives actions, the frequencies and rhymes of desires, necessities and actions develop by a group of actors involved with social transformation. Chronologies are a tool to communicate resistances and fights to the rest of the world; it is an active tool of communication and information used by actors inside social movements and activist research. It is a way to listen and feel the rumours of resistances with their specific histories, reasons, goals and means, and how those specific histories travel until us.
This introduction tries to point out some essential difficulties related to develop chronologies:
Chronology is extensively understood as the science of determining the order in which events occurred: related to this first sense there is three majors maners to understand it: "A chronology, also called a timeline, is an arrangement of events into chronological order. It can be understood as a "temporal relation" in a sense of an arrangement of events in time, a "communication frame inside time" in a sense of a record of events in order of their occurrence, or a "cognition interaction" in which it tries to achieve a determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events.”(source:http://www.hyperdic.net/dic/chronology.htm).
As we can see, a chronologic exercise tries to give light (even if subjective of course) to some repetitive and precise points:
- The need/desire to determine the evolution of something: in our case we want to identify the evolution of social movements in their complexity, richness and multiplicity
- The need/desire to identify where does this evolution expresses itself as a qualitative or quantitative evolution, in our case it would be: why can we say that there has been a significant evolution/change/breakpoint of a social movement/organization involved in social transformation and where was taking place this evolution?
- Is there a date (day/year/month) that can be extract related to this evolution that interest us?
Related to this three first questions common to any chronology we would personally add:
From who and where does come out the chronology? Is it a matter of activist research, is it related to an historical-academic process, is it a “memory” process coming out of the communication energy of the social movement? To repeat ourselves, does the chronology comes from a "collective memory" on going and able to produce its own determinations of what has been chronologically relevant or is it a historic exercise coming out from actors that were not inside the social movement they are trying to resume?
In our proposal of research we are interest by both kind of memories but we do think that it is necessary to differentiate where, when and how the chronologic exercise does merge/come from!
All that reasons impulse us to think that building a chronology is never as simple as it looks like. In a way, chronologies results useful exercises to get an image of how a social movement has been developing its actions and spaces around. At the same time, any chronology reminds partial and needs to be contemplate in a larger social, political and cultural context. Anyway, we do believe that chronologies are useful but never more than when they are compiled together and related to other kind of documents that do extend the sense of moment/place/event.
Some Existing chronologies:
Chronology from Carta magazine Italy
OSAL January 2003 (Castilian)
Jose A Seoane (Castilian)
LSE Global civil society Year book (English)
We Are Everywhere (English)
Lignes de repère (French)
Marches Européennes contre le chômage, la précarité et l'exclusion (French)
Ecologistas en Action agenda/calendar (Castillian)
Chronology about neoliberal governance compiled by Coady Buckley. The
Commoner, N.7, Spring/Summer 2003 (English)
Days of Dissent: Reflections on Summit mobilisations (English)
Chronology Thematic and Regional Social Forums:
Year 2002 (Portugues, French, Spanish, English)
Year 2003 (Portugues, French, Spanish, English)
Year 2004 (Portugues, French, Spanish, English)
Anti capitalism movement chronology of events (English)
Campaign against ALCA (English)
Zapatist movement (English)
Dissent actions almanach (French)
Other Davos (French, Spanish, English)
Tools for Change, chronology of counter-globalization movement (English)
Timeline of mobilizations against EU in Denmark (English)
Timeline of Seville Summit against EU (Spanish)
Petite chronologie subjective de l'activiste contemporain (French)
