Euromovements: since 2004 the european action research network has been working on the development of activist research regarding the documentation of information merging from social movements in Europe. Euromovements is a translocal informal network focused on creating a space of convergence to debate, exchange and share ideas about political research practices.

Euromovements proposes that you participate in a compilation of online material about "maps, visualizations and social transformation". We would like to give you an overview of the actions, experiences, methodologies and groups that are working on creating and developing maps for/from social transformation (i.e tools and knowledge to empower actors and groups acting towards social and political action against Empire).

This newsletter will be in several languages. We won't assure translation tasks, except on voluntary activist base.

The contents of those newsletters were registered under copyleft/creative commons, there hasn't been any commercial use of them. This newsletter will follow the same characteristics. It will be widely spread abroad several emails lists, webpages and other networks of exchange and conversation.

Contents

We do propose some general questions to help to start those exchanges.

> The roots of maps, visualizations and social transformation:

How are our desires and needs related to social transformation, are depending of communicating, making visible, our struggles, resistances, knowledge produced among those experiences? How those needs are linked to the production of methodologies and tools to visualize, clarify the challenges, the networks, the intangibles phenomenoms behind mobilizations?

What are the links between contemporanous political praxis of mapping and its roots? How dadaism, art brut, cut-up method, derive, are connected with mapping as social transformation? What does those groups, methods and concepts learn us about new forms of political, social and artistic creativity?

The evolution of mapping and social transformation must also be put in perspective with its most recent past. Cyberactivists, hackers, cyberpunks, can be also considered as impulsors of maps/visuals and social transformation. The field of action related to digital tools, and so called cyberspace, is full of ideas, reflections and researches towards the construction of tools to map its diversity, its flux, its rhytms.

> Mapping the movements Vs Mapping the biopower:

Technopolitical tools and social transformation constitutes an interesting interaction domain. Some of us are calling for the production of "anti-technologies of resistance", arguing for methods that can't be replicate elsewhere, so evanescent that they can't be produced with a guideline to understand it. The exercice of mapping is always under the danger of capturing something it wants to be free. How groups producing maps, analysing and/or producing technopolitical tools to systematize large amount of data deal with those questions? Which are the ethical and philosophical challenges and limits about mapping social transformation, social movements and networks activities? How to reverse control surveillance engineering? How to challenge the pancapitalism, through mechanisms Brian Holmes call "grass roots top down surveillance systems"? What is the role of technology and software development inside this activist research field? We do also get the sensation that maps/visualization field of action is highly competitive, and is fulfilled with private actors and entreprises. How do actors and groups from social movements and hacklabs challenge this?

Other groups are working in mapping the "enemy". Their activist research focuses towards the identification of the networks acting and supporting actively neoliberalist policies and dynamics. Those last years seems to have seen a huge increasing of didactic maps (under digital or printed form) to make available to people information about who is ruling, where, how and in which bases. There has been a high production about ongoing subjects of activist research such as biotechnologies, biopower, neoliberalism, actors of the so called new society of information, Enron practices, the war on Irak, and the list is much more longer.

> Methodologies, ways of doing it

We wonder about the several methodologies to develop those maps, as individuals or as groups creations. As pieces of activist social communication, what are their repercussions? Are they creating new forms of mediatical interferences inside the mass mediascape? Are they able to help in the appropriation of information to be turned in collective action? Are maps/visuals a subject for specialists and experts? Even if it is obvious that there are real difficulties to develop, program, read and analyse maps, in which ways do people and groups involved in making maps do try to avoid those problematics? Those last questions raises also the cartographic methodologies to work with diverse variety of publics on social and political thematics. Developing maps and cartographies can also mean to develop collective methodologies of empowerment. Maps can mean insertion, immersion, exchange, conversations, several levels of sociabilities, the rize of geopoetic tools, intimate maps, to be produced by kids, young ones, immigrants, women, communities of neighbours, etc. How to develop in group collective tactical maps? Where is the border between individual artivism work? Where are the technical possibilities to develop descentralized maps from several groups perspectives, etc.?


Taxonomy used to classify the received papers
(rollover a word/keyword to display his definition)