Five years after Seattle and four after the first World Social Forum,
it is time to reflect upon what has happened during the last, very resonant
years, and about how to continue. In response to this, several initiatives
with multiple trajectories are beginning to emerge from the intersection
of political action and investigation. Their aim is to put archiving
and research techniques at the service of the process of social mobilization
and social change. There is not an homogeneous and/or established concept
for defining this action. It’s more a “network” of
concepts that are growing together around words like archiving, documenting,
reporting, memory, systematizing, investigation and activist research.
The development of conceptual tools is one of the key-points around
it that it is necessary to face now.
As an example of the emergence of this question, we
can note that the first International meeting on activist research and
social movements was held in Barcelona this year. It brought together
“academic-investigators” coming from different experiences
of social movement studies: from those where social movements are the
subjects of the research, like the work emerging from community researchers
or autonomous centres, to experiences where the social movements are
the object of the research, such as the production of academic theses
on social movements.
These initiatives have a variety of different objectives:
preserving what happened for future memory; making accessible the knowledge
spread at international meetings for people who cannot participate to
them, which helps to turn them into parts of a process and not just
single events; creating networking tools to enhance the effectiveness
of the process itself; critical analysis that sheds light on the contradictions
of the process, etc.
Is a passage towards a new form of commitment and antagonistic
subjectivity underlying these initiatives?
Concerning the Social Forums process specifically,
the question is starting to be addressed with the appearance of new
actors. Concretely, there now exists an active Social Forum (SF) Memory
working group depending on the World Social Forum International Council.
This is a global space to coordinate and facilitate the archiving and
systematization initiatives of Social Forums and to establish a protocol
of memory coming from each forum. A European partner to this process
has also emerged in the guise of the European group for systematization
and archiving the information, knowledge and communication generated
by the European Social Forum (ESF) process. This is a working group
depending on the ESF European Preparatory Assembly. There is also the
work developed to systematize the contents of debates and seminars at
the Paris ESF 2003 and the Florence one. Unfortunately, the London ESF
organizational system doesn’t allow us to have many expectations
about the documenting of the London ESF by the UK organising committee
and the ESF office, as a lack of attention paid to archiving, systematization
or participative communication has created difficulties or disrupted
several initiatives.
The systematization/memory groups are addressing various
aspects of the Social Forum. With a very simple (or, on occasion, fictitious)
distinction, there are two kinds of information systematization and
knowledge production that are considered necessary: one is related to
the networking organisational aspect, the other is related to the content.
This distinction doesn’t necessarily correspond to that established
between “living memory or systematization” and its opposite
(at a guess, “non-living memory”).
The networking organizational aspect gives an understanding of the nature
and richness of movements that are involved within the Social Forum
process; of what kind of organisations participated in the forum: thematically,
regionally and by type and size; an understanding of the direction in
which the process is growing through an evolution analysis; or which
kind of connectivity the Forum has created; different models of participation
etc.. It is focused on developing useful networking tools to reinforce
the Forum’s dimension of “weaving” social networks.
The second, content aspect covers the reflections and thinking among
movements and groups, as well as leading intellectuals of resistance,
addressing critiques and working out strategies for movements and what
kind of world we want.
Both aspects are important. Sharing experiences and critiques of neo-liberal
globalisation is as important as organising striking power against it,
or organising through a “reinvented” power distribution.
And of course the two are not mutually exclusive: the networking aspect
contains contents and the contents show how we organize.
I will come back later to the first of these, the networking organisational
aspect, in order to present a concrete experience that is addressing
it: the Guide for social transformation in Europe: ESF and surroundings.
As regards the contents aspect, there are again two
sides to this. One is simply the reporting of who did what in terms
of the event. The second and the more important involves keeping alive
what was discussed so that it gets into our collective consciousness.
This will also provide a basis for the evolution of our views and not
just a yearly repetition of the same views. The first, and the more
trivial part, consists of how many events of what size and themes were
organised. The second consists of the reporting of the cultural programme,
conferences, panels and workshops, and the reporting of how the media
perceived the Social Forum event.
There is one ambit of the reporting that is currently being missed altogether.
This is the kind of technologies and other innovations that are required
to push the movement of the Social Forum forward. A coherent report
of the technologies: what works well what does not, what are the support
structures required and what kind of organisations and people are needed
for this, should be part of the reporting of a Social Forum experience.
But going further, the key for the future is to use technology. The
use of technology to advance movements should also be the task of Social
Forums and these need to be folded into the memory/systematization process.
There are clear synergies amongst the News Technologies of Information
and communication, the translation system and the possibilities for
the systematization of the process and making it accessible. For example,
using the Nomad translation system allows us to have a record of the
event. The Website is a basic “wardrobe” of information
sources on the Forums and a basic tool to spread the systematization
of its results. We look upon the web as the primary organisational tool
as well as the primary disseminating mechanism.
But doing and spreading the systematization of information and knowledge,
several formats have to be considered: digital, audio-video and physical/printed.
EXPERIMENTING INVESTIGACTION: Guide for social transformation in Europe:
ESF and surroundings.
In order to bring into focus and explore a series of
elements that ‘swarm’ around what could be understood as
Investigation, I will present a recent experiment in action, the Guide
for social transformation in Europe: ESF and surroundings.
The Guide is an experiment in putting applied research and archiving
techniques at the service of the process of social movement convergence
in Europe and in particular around the ESF process. It is inspired to
traditions like participation action-research and 'con-research'.
Exploring from where the Investigaction could/should
be done, the Guide research project is programmatically situated within
the action of transforming social movements; implied within the needs
directly or indirectly expressed by the social movements; and developed
by research groups and collectives internal to the emerging social movements
process.
The research springs from the relation between the
subject-investigator (the investigator as a subject) and the subject-investigated,
both of whom are involved in the composition process. Rather than treating
the social movements as objects of investigation, this non-instrumentalist
research is an investigation without an ‘object’. Instead,
the movements, as well as the investigator, are subjects in a process
in which everybody is left reconstituted. It is not a research ‘about’
Social Movements; rather it is “from” and “for”
Social Movements in the immanence of the process. Rather than locating
itself at an already codified position already codified, it produces
the terms of the situation. The subject-investigator participates in
the situations investigated, is open about his or her motives and opinions,
and is not necessarily a person with a specialized university education.
On the contrary, the traditional role of the academic-investigator,
as an individual specialist operating at a supposedly objective prudent
distance, is questioned by this approach.
The Guide is based on a non-disciplinary methodology.
It looks for the overcoming of the fictitious academic compartmentalization
of reality. On the contrary, reality is understood as a totality that
combines manifold interconnected aspects.
It is a piece of research explicitly tailored to action
for the critical transformation of the current reality. The research
pursues the creation of a knowledge that is valued for its practical
effectiveness in generating changes, as opposed to an objective and
contemplative theoretical knowledge, as in the traditional academic
manner; knowledge that generates and maximizes action and whose fruits
serve the process of constituting new antagonistic subjectivities through
social movement convergence processes. In the sense of practical effectiveness
the core of the Guide is to build useful “networking tools”
such as a Directory and contact details of the collectives and organisations
which have participated to the ESFs of Florence, Paris, London, organized
thematically and by region; and a Map of the European networks developed
within and around the ESF process. The level of utility is defined by
the capacity of the use-builders of the Guide itself to make it grow
through the identification of actors with the networking process, of
resources for the action, of reflection for social transformation.
It also aims to reinforce action research/investigation
as a new antagonistic commitment. Another aim of the Guide is the creation
of a convergence space for common action amongst activist researchers/investigators
operating within the social movements at the European level. For this
reason it is and it will be carried out by an open network of groups
and research centres, called the Action research network for the ESF
confluence process. Moreover, the Guide will contain a specific Map/directory
of groups which are producing research within and around the new movements
in Europe too.
Other contents of the Guide are:
• Short presentations of particular experiences of movements and
networks developed in Europe
• A chronological basic map of European mobilisations
• A map of web-bibliographic articles on the European confluence
processes, articles of reflection about the new social movements and
the new confluence spaces in Europe and articles on the data and the
new knowledge generated by the Guide itself, as a tool of reflection
and debate
• A conceptual dictionary about the SF process and new movements
in Europe.
The main methods are questionnaires to organizations,
web searches and the systematization of information sources generated
by the ESFs: for example, the main information source for the European
directory is the registration databases for the ESFs and the parallel
spaces surrounding them.
The Guide has an explicit political commitment to the
present cycles of protests and the ESF and it surroundings. It was born
from the consciousness of this process of resistance and reaction rather
than from a perspective that is merely communicative or contemplative.
It is not intended to ‘give’ voice to the excluded populations,
considered other from us, but to establish cooperation among ourselves,
with the acknowledgement of our own exclusion from the outset. It is
not constituted through a separated consciousness, but it makes the
research one more tool in the process of confronting the system that
excludes us.
It is a tool at the service first of all of the ESF
confluence process: aiming to help the self-organization of the ESF
itself as well as the creation of European and transnational networks.
And it will produce knowledge, more self-consciousness among the protagonists
of the ESF process; and more focused actions and strategies for the
future.
In a process of collective creation, it is nurtured
by a spirit of experimentation and cooperation through an open and pluralistic
network structure. The Guide is developed from a network of very diverse
nodes, politically and organizationally, such as research groups internal
to the social movements (Transform! Italia, Transnational Institute,
Glocal a-research centre) or social movement organizations (ARCI, EYFA,
UNITED for Intercultural Action), in collaboration with academic departments/centres
(The University of Florence or The Centre for the Study of Global Governance-
LSE), Trade Union Foundations (like the CGIL’s Fondazione Di Vittorio),
hackers support teams (Pangea), International archive institutions (IISH
- International Institute of Social History) and a cluster of 40 advisers.
It is also being developed with the collaborative interaction and recognition
by the working groups internal to the social forum process which were
mentioned above.
The research is developed like an effective procedure.
Its development is already producing one of its intended results, to
the extent that it is helping to weave a new network and harness new
kinds of antagonistic subjectivity.
The Guide hopes to generate free, public, inclusive, common and nondiscriminatory
knowledge for universal use, without property, copyright or mercantilist
aims. It has a Creative Commons licence (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
2.0), which allows for copying, distribution, display, and performance
of the work and the making of derivative works, with very light limitations.
The results will have accessible formats for quick diffusion through
the website and an easily accessible printed version. It is therefore
adopting a working method that rejects the commodification and privatisation
of knowledge as one of the causes of social exclusion.
Building a Useful Guide for social transformation in Europe is a process
that is now in process. Join it!!!
Mayo Fuster i Morell - Glocal a-research centre, Barcelona
E-mail: mayo@moviments.net
http://www.euromovements.info
e-mail: info@euromovements.info
BASIC WEB-BIBLIOGRAPHY AND CONTACTS
International meeting on activist research and social movements http://www.investigaccio.org
Social Forums Memory working group of the World social
forum International Council e-list: memoria@mapeadores.net
Prabir Purkayastha, All India Peoples Science Network
and WSF India. WSF Memory Seminar: WSF 2004 Mumbai Experience http://www.wsfindia.org
European group for systematization and archiving the
information, knowledge and communication generated by the ESF process
working group of the European ESF assembly
e-list: systematize@fse-esf.org
Statement document:
http://www.moviments.net/euromovements/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=62
Progetto Scriba: ESF Florence 2002:
http://www.fse-esf.org/florence/scriba/
Memory ESF Paris 2003 http://www.fse-esf.org/
Rioufol, Veronique., with the collaboration of Nicolas Haeringer and
Françoise Feugas. Practical Proceedings for Documenting the ESF
2003.
Guide for social transformation in Europe: ESF and
surroundings http://www.euromovements.info
e-mail: info@euromovements.info
Cox, Laurence and Colin Baker, 2001 “What have
the Romans ever done for us? Activist and academic theorising.
http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/afpp/afpp8.html