Occupy With Art. The Dzieci Theatre in Liberty Square, 1st march 2012

COOLS kicked off yesterday first of March. The Cultural Occupation Of Liberty Square started with a bang, with the Dzieci Theatre group. The idea of COOLS’ facilitating group is to “inspire the movement, build community and keep the call for power and income equity sounding by occupying using teach-ins, workshops, music, art, sign-making and the like” as stated on the virtual hub of this month-long initiative by one of the Occupy Wall Street working groups.

Occupy Town Square – Occupy Tompkins Square (26th February 2012, New York)

I came last week to New York from Finland to attend an academic conference, as soon as I was done with that I joined the activities of the Occupy movement. This is a brief (not so brief in all honesty) piece on my first afternoon with the Occupy Wall Street movement. These are part of my field notes complemented by some research and few links to online resources. The highlights were the good atmosphere, the encouraging turnout (if perhaps lower than some hoped) and the wealth of activities, not to mention the charming setting, the bright sun and the blue sky.

Networking Futures

A version of this review will appear soon enough on Social Movement Studies:

The movement against corporate globalization came of age in Seattle at the end of 1999 during the mass demonstration that contributed to disrupt a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the following years it developed into an articulate global(ising) movement. From the initial demonstrations against WTO, World Bank, G8 and International Monetary Fund (IMF) it consolidated into the social forum movement. Spearheaded by the first World Social Forum held in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 2001, it developed into a vast network of global, regional, national and local events gathering from few hundreds to over a hundred thousand NGO and social movement activists. Its global events have taken place in Brazil, India, Kenya, Senegal and soon in the Maghreb in solidarity with the revolutionary youth of the Arab Spring. What the alterglobalization movement and the revolutions in the Arab world have in common is their fluid nature structured around an intense use of social media, like Facebook and Twitter. The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for movement organising has been central from the very inception of the alterglobalist movement. ICTs were crucial, for instance, to coordinate activist convergences in Seattle and global solidarity with the Zapatista uprising in Mexico against the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. These technologies are not only instruments of communication, states Juris, but they have contributed from the very inception of the alterglobalist movement to defining it both organisationally and with respect to political values and practices.

The “miracles” of the Arab Revolution: Notes from the World Social Forum International Council meeting, Paris May 2011.

Among the incredible feats achieved by the revolutions that have been sweeping the Maghreb-Mashreq region in the past months, there is one that perhaps won’t make the news but is not less remarkable.  At the International Council meeting of the World Social Forum, held in Paris between the 25^th and the 27^th of May, presenting the work of the Expansion Commission, tasked with deciding the next venue of the WSF global event, its spokesperson told his colleagues the following. Never before, in the history of the WSF (whose first edition was held in Brazil in 2001), the decision regarding the venue of the next event had been so quickly taken with absolute consensus. The decision followed days of intense reflections and deep analysis of the regional events of the past months.

For a Cosmopolitan Social Science: lessons from the “Arab Spring”.

Dubbed by the global media the Arab Spring, the Arab Awakening, the Arab revolution and often by activists the Arab Intifada, the wave of protests that started in Tunisia in December 2010 spread like wildfire through Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and on to Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Syria and Libya. The multiple denominations allude to the difficulties to make clear sense of the large social phenomena that are currently taking place in the Middle East and North Africa. In order to learn more about the struggles, the demands and the people involved I joined, in April, a solidarity caravan of civil society activists from thirteen countries and three continents who travelled across Tunisia. Interacting with activists and citizens involved in the uprising and engaged in the reconstruction of a wounded society allowed the members of the caravan to add flesh and soul to the too often abstract debates that have been sweeping the global mediascape.

Liquidated. An Ethnography of Wall Street by Karen Ho

This groundbreaking ethnography of Wall Street was inspired by a paradox: the profound disjuncture between the interests of American corporations and those of their employees. She queried therefore the rationale behind the downsizings imposed by Wall Street and supported by the instrumental ideology of shareholder value. Further she explores the relationships between layoffs, corporate profits and stock prices. She discovered that the rationalisation of overgrown and inefficient corporations did not positively correlate to a long term increase in shareholder value and would not generate the expected growth of the labour market which would follow the brief (but painful) shock therapy. Such initial recognition of the paradoxical mismatch between stated claims and actual results by Wall Street bankers led her to investigate the broader mechanisms through which Wall Street makes markets in the face of recurrent failures in achieving its stated goals.

Glimpses of the Tunisian Revolution: The Victory of Dignity over Fear

“You can tear a flower but you can’t stop spring from coming!”
(An activist in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia)
 

The African Social Forum, continental Chapter of the World Social Forum (WSF), has convened a solidarity caravan across Tunisia from the 1^th to the 5^th of April to meet the women and men that ignited the transformations that now affect several countries in North Africa and the Middle East. Dubbed by mainstream media the Arab Spring (though it started in December), the wave of protests started in Tunisia spread like wildfire through Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and on to Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia (briefly, or so it seems) Syria and Libya. The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings and the ousting of their dictators have given a distinctive flavour of exhilaration and hope to the latest World Social Forum held in Dakar from the 6^th to the 11^th of February.