Alternative Futures and Popular Protest conference

international | education | news report Saturday April 16, 2005 00:00 by Laurence Cox lcox at iol dot ie

report on academic / activist event

About 90 people took part in the annual Alternative Futures and Popular Protest conference at Manchester, focussed on researching social movements. A major theme in this year's event was activist research processes which are springing up within the anti-capitalist movement.

Alternative Futures and Popular Protest

… is the name of an annual get-together of people researching social movements, utopias, revolutions and other times of grassroots power. It’s not an explicitly activist gathering, but it’s sufficiently far outside the academic mainstream that most participants are activist academics, involved in the movements they’re researching. This year’s conference (Manchester, March 30th – April 1st) had about 90 participants, mostly from Europe and North America.

There were great talks on unionising sex workers (Ana Lopes), the MTD Solano (Sara Motta), anarchism and environmentalism (John Carter and Dave Morland), the history of a Manchester co-op (Andy Price), reflections on the Anti-Nazi League (Peter Alexander, Red Saunders, Dave Renton), US working-class resistance to war (Penny Lewis), water rights struggles (Philipp Terhorst), organising against workfare (John Krinsky), activist communities (Sharon Stevens) – as well as paper after paper on the anti-capitalist movement…

By contrast with five years ago, a lot of movements have started generating their own research processes outside of academia, while a lot of younger activists have become researchers as part of their “day job” as postgrads. The idea in both cases is to add to the theorising and fact-finding that already goes on within our activism – whether trying to understand the enemy better or thinking about how we do things ourselves.

This was the theme of one of the most interesting sessions, which brought together Spanish autonomist Pablo Iglesias researching the “Beyond the ESF!” space, Catalan EYFA activist Mayo Fuster Morell talking about action research in the ESF process, and Red Pepper editor Hilary Wainwright discussing the learning process within the WSF.

Mayo listed the different kinds of activist research going on out there – Colectivo Situaciones in Argentina, the University of the Poor in the US, the Zapatista Consultas, German work on telemarketing, Spanish work on precarity, the ESF-based Guide for social transformation in Europe, the Radical Theory Forum, mapping of multinational power and local conflicts, Wikipedia, the Corporate European Observatory, activist think-tanks and more.

After this session, about 15 of us jammed into the pub for a 2-hour roundtable, and repeated it the next day after the conference, trying to see how we could link up our work without either getting taken over by academic purposes or duplicating existing projects. Work in progress…

More details:

(NB a lot of these sites are multilingual, so worth checking around to see if you can find something in a language you can read!)

• ASEED research on GMOs http://www.aseed.net
• Barcelona meeting on activist research and social movements http://www.investigaccio.org
• Buenos Aires project on street art and resistance http://gacgrupo.tripod.com.ar
• CASA activist / academic summer school http://casa.manifestor.org
• Colectivo Situaciones, Argentinian “militant investigation” http://www.situaciones.org
• Corporate European Observatory http://www.corporateeurope.org
• Guide for Social Transformation in Europe http://www.euromovements.info
• Irish-based participatory action research project http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/ma.html
• Mobilised Investigation activist researchers e-list http://manifestor.org/mi
• Spanish radical media/research http://www.sindominio.net
• Social-movements activist / academic e-list http://listserv.heanet.ie/social-movements.html
• Transnational Institute thinktank http://www.tni.org
• Université Tangente maps http://utangente.free.fr
• University of the Poor http://www.universityofthepoor.org