Collective action and the politics of affect

The anti-globalisation has shifted away from a politics that aims to uncover and resist neoliberal ideology to one that bypasses and potentially disrupts habits of thinking about neoliberalism. Focusing on mass gatherings such as the Seattle demonstrations in 1999, several scholars suggest that the anti-globalisation movement has embraced a politics of affect that, while potentially increasing the collective's capacity for action, also risks strengthening existing divisions and creating sad passions. In response to these concerns, this article develops an account of the affective politics the World Social Forum has moved to. Drawing on my experiences at the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre I describe the Forum as a space in which social movements from around the globe testify to their experiences of struggle. I employ Freireian pedagogical techniques and theories of brain-body connections to develop an account of the way in which testimony and dialogue generate new thinking from which a collective language can emerge. I suggest that the discourse that arises can lead to new ways of being

Collective action : assembling concerns

As this volume demonstrates, theories of social change have a long history and include a range of theoretical approaches. This chapter focuses in the post-structural view of collective action. In particular, I explore how the idea of collective action is used within the diverse economies research field to enact economic, social, and environmental change. From this perspective, collectives can be understood as hybridised assemblages coming together around a particular issue. They are post-human in gathering diverse species, technologies, and matter. And they are non-essentialist in that they hold no foundational ontology but rather seek to bring into being possibilities for action. I illustrate this theory of collective action with reference to a range of movements, including the World Social Forum and the Slow Food movement

Broadening the horizons of economy

From corporations to occupied factories, a growing number of widely accessible books and documentary films have emerged to represent an array of economic concerns and the groups gathered around them. Viewed as a new form of political association, these representations offer a lens to contemporary social change. This article draws on theories of performativity to explore the ways in which such diversely constituted assemblies might transform the economy. Representation has a number of different meanings; it relates to how economic concerns are discursively represented and thereby made real while also referring to the political representation of different groups gathered around that concern. Putting these two senses of representation together, this article examines the temporal and spatial composition of two alternative economic representations, the documentary films The Take and Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse [The Gleaners and I]. Through The Take I explore the way in which alternative economies are performatively brought into being. I argue that The Gleaners and I illustrates how one might go about representing and reassembling the geography of economy through the idea of the periperformative. Together these films offer a way of broadening economy that has implications for the performative potential of research more generally

Building Dignified Worlds: Geographies of Collective Action

Building Dignified Worlds investigates social movements that do not simply protest but actively forge functional alternatives. Gerda Roelvink takes actor network and performativity theories of action as starting points for thinking about how contemporary collectives bring the new into being

Politics in the anthropocene

This review essay examines the book Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future by Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann. It focuses in particular on the methodological approach taken by the authors and on the final section of the book, which explores postcapitalist possibilities centered on equality, inclusion, and dignity. While the book offers both scholars and activists much in their struggle for a climate-just world, a further opening could be explored that steps to the side of the predominant focus on sovereignty and on an older form of Marxist politics

Community economies and climate justice

This chapter hopes to contribute to affirmative experimentation with political–economic arrangements in which the environment is central to economic decision making. An important feature I focus on regarding the collectives concerned about climate change (see Roelvink 2016) is the shift they have made from a politics of resistance (such as that associated with the more traditional left, including in academic critique) to one of affirmation (Roelvink 2016). Thus, the kind of social movements concerned with climate change that this chapter explores are not focused on resistance but rather are actively experimenting with new ways of living with others, other species and nature. One of the aims of this chapter, then, is to provide some strategies for affirmative, collective, economic action that other movements centred on climate justice might explore. Rather than focusing on injustice, I examine some of the ways in which just economies are created in response to climate concern

Performing posthumanist economies in the Anthropocene

This chapter sets out to offer some thinking tools for extending the diverse economies project in response to climate change. I begin by reviewing some of the ways in which diverse economies work currently engages with the more-than-human world. To do so I frame the diverse economies project as posthumanist. Michael Hardt describes this “new ontology of the human” as one in which “the body’s power to act corresponds to its sensitivity to other bodies” and “the mind’s power to think corresponds to its receptivity to external ideas” (2007, x). With this in mind, in the remaining discussion I seek to develop our sensitivity to the bodies of earth others by extending the conversation between community economies and another, external, set of ideas developed in ecological humanities