Assessing the Transformative Significance of Movements & Activism: Lessons from A Postcapitalist Politics

How do researchers and/or practitioners know when change efforts are bringing about significanttransformation? Here we draw on a theory of change put forward by the feminist economicgeographers, Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson. Proposing “a postcapitalist politics” thatbuilds on possibility rather than probability, they direct theoretical attention and communityengaged action research to recognizing and supporting non-capitalist economic practices andsensibilities that already exist despite the dominance of capitalism that keeps them hidden andignored and to understanding the “reluctant subject” of change efforts. We enter into aconversation with their theory of change by inferring criteria for assessing significance and usingthose criteria in dialogue with two social movements we have researched: the feminist movementin Bogotá in the 1970s and 1980s and the contemporary local food movement in North Carolina.Lessons from these movements, in turn, help refine the criteria. Gibson-Graham are unusual – andconsequently resonant with cultural-historical activity theory and related social practice theoriesof identity – in that they bring into dialogue theorists of the political and those interested inembodiment and the micro-politics of everyday life enabling both to better understand and supportconditions for positive social and economic transformation

Of Love, Blood and the Belly: Politicization of Intimate Ties of Caring and Belonging in Colombia

This dissertation focuses on the relatives and peers of victims of paramilitary and State violence. I investigate how intimate ties of caring and belonging, such as family, communal, and organizational membership, are politicized in the context of pervasive political violence, and how it leads to the creation of a social movement of victims of State and paramilitary violence in the country. This research tackles four main objectives. The first aims to understand the role of emotions in the mobilization of victimized subjects. The second discusses the process of identity construction and subjective transformation. The third inquires into the ways in which power circulates between the State, “victims,” and their organizations, as well as between and within victims’ organizational movements. The fourth objective looks to explore the contributions of the movement of victims of State and paramilitary violence to Colombian society. This dissertation is the product of militant, participatory, and co-intentional research that has been designed as a decolonial effort to decolonize the production of knowledge in a concrete moment: the transition to peace in Colombia. Throughout the dissertation I explore the existence of a deeper ontological struggle in the current transitional conjuncture of which victimized subjects’ experiences are a window into the less evident. This is a struggle in which not only conceptions about democracy and politics are at stake, but also ethical and moral premises, conceptions about the person, the human, the body, and the collective, as well as the relationship with nature, ancestors, and dead people.Doctor of Philosoph