Movements@Manchester

Abstract: Power holders in the United States are experiencing actual defeats, representing the first serious challenge to decades of their society-crushing austerity. Teachers and educators are revitalizing their unions by manifesting super majority strikes demanding more tax dollars for public, community schools, and in so doing, directly challenging corporations and the super-rich to pay more taxes in the name of democracy. Because teachers are educators, they are schooling parents and the broader community in exactly what’s at stake when the wealthy withdraw from their obligation to pay their fair share of the institutions which sustain participation by ordinary people in the electoral and civic arena. My paper will examine what I call the “interaction effect” between rank and file teachers, and the fulltime professional staff organizers who together are producing the power required to challenge capital: nothing less than 100% out mass strikes involving the whole of the community. I will connect my original research from the West Virginia strike one year ago this month, to the successful open-ended January strike by the second largest teacher’s union in America, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). The lessons have equal bearing for the UK in the throes of Brexit, and all of Europe, if not the “west” where similar dynamics require similar strategies. I first began collaborating with the progressive teacher’s caucus inside the UTLA in 2012, when I delivered the keynote speech to the union’s annual leadership conference. By 2013, three different factions of progressive teachers within the union came together to run a slate of officers in the next union election. This slate, called Union Power (UP), won every top union officer position (seven) in the union’s spring 2014 election, setting the stage for the all-out 32,000 teacher strike by January of 2019. The Union Power slate campaigned explicitly to “build an organizing union by creating an organizing department.” Within months of winning control of their union, the teacher leaders followed through, hiring their first organizing director (October 2014), an organizer who comes from the tradition of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) era unions. The CIO tradition understands being strike-ready as the foundation of power for all workers and their unions. My paper will dissect the “interaction” between skilled, experienced organizers who work fulltime, can work across unions, sectors, and, types of workers, bringing the skill of effective struggle to the commitment of rank and file unionists so that all-out, open-ended strikes become real, not merely wishful thinking. Super majority strikes require the hunger and leadership of progressive rank and file trade unionists, and the skill of experienced organizers; it’s the interaction of the two that can lead to challenging and reversing the dangers of a rising populist right.

Abstract: Colin Barker (1939-2019) is one of the few Marxist scholars who explicitly engaged mainstream academic social movement theory in an effort to construct an alternative Marxist theory of social movements. As part of this effort, for nearly a quarter century (1995-2018) Barker and Mike Tyldesley organized an annual conference on “Alternative Futures and Popular Protest” (AFPP) at Manchester Metropolitan University. During this time, Barker published more than a dozen scholarly papers on social movements—many of which were first presented at the AFPP conference—and also wrote many book reviews, short essays, and unpublished manuscripts on this topic. Among the most notable of Barker’s publications during this time is the volume Marxism and Social Movements (2013), which he coedited with Laurence Cox, John Krinsky, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, and which includes Barker’s important essay, “Class Struggle and Social Movements.” In this paper, I review the main ideas and claims in Barker’s most important writings on social movements. I examine both the Marxist ideas that Barker found most useful in his work as well as the ideas from mainstream social movement theory which he believed Marxists should incorporate into their own thinking about movements. I argue that Barker was successful in showing the relevance and indeed necessity of Marxist ideas for social movement studies. For this reason, his work deserves to be read widely by social movement scholars and by all those interested in social movements and political protest.

Abstract: This paper draws on two strands of Colin Barker’s work—on state theory and on learning and the formation of consciousness—to argue that to understand the politics of urban “commoning,” we have, at once, to focus on the implications, if realized, of actual attempts at commoning for capitalism, and on the ways in which those involved in such struggles come to be conscious of their own potential to challenge the capitalist state. Reflecting on my own involvement in a coalition to spread community land trusts (CLTs—organizations for the collective ownership and disposition of land) in New York City, I make both a critical assessment of our own practice and of critics of similar practices. In the first instance, I examine our current deficits in preparing a broader and deeper challenge to the financial and real-estate speculation that drives not just the conditions that make commoning important but also the very resources upon which the capitalist state depends at multiple scales of governance. In the second, I examine the implicit ideas of consciousness and will in critical assessments of current CLT efforts and in other efforts of urban commoning, and argue that they tend to depend on judgments removed from the actual struggle itself, however sympathetic with it, in theory, it is.

Abstract: In 1987 Colin Barker edited a collection of essays under the title Revolutionary Rehearsals. It examined a series of upheavals: France 1968, Chile 1972-3, Portugal 1974-5, Iran 1978-9 and Poland 1980-81 and tried to make some general sense of them. In 2012 Colin began, with Gareth Dale and Neil Davidson, to assemble a new volume. It looks at popular upheavals since 1987 (Eastern Europe, South Africa, Indonesia, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt), tries to make some general sense of them, and assesses the prospect of socialist revolution. It is scheduled for publication later this year. In this paper I will introduce the volume. I’ll begin by referring to Mark Beissinger’s data on ‘revolutionary episodes.’ He notes that whereas new revolutionary episodes occurred at a pace of 2.44 per year in 1900‐49, in 1985‐2014 they occurred at a rate of 4.10 per year. In particular, what he terms ‘urban civic revolts’ have become more prevalent and more potent. But this was also the era of neoliberalism, an era that saw the marginalisation of anti-systemic movements and, to echo Jeff Goodwin and Gabriel Hetland, “the strange disappearance of capitalism from revolutionary studies.” I shall next attempt some generalisations concerning revolutions in the neoliberal era, before concluding with a summary of the theoretical findings that are developed in the volume.

Abstract: Diverse visions of society and the economy compete in the struggles around businesses like Uber and Airbnb. The ‘Sharing Economy’ is a deeply contested term which rhetorically links such businesses with prefigurative projects such as community energy cooperatives, Freecycle and alternative currencies. Controversy over businesses’ reliance on precarious employment, exacerbating of urban tensions around housing and congestion, non-regulated and untaxed consumption, and the advance of private interests at the expense of the common have led to protests, occupations, petitions, blockades, strikes and boycotts. This paper explores the dynamics around these struggles, paying particular attention to innovative modes of legitimation employed by some of the key businesses, and how they make use of yet also compete with movement 'alternatives'. It also discusses the theoretical tools from social movement studies and other sub-disciplines that help make sense of the different forms of contention taking place. These range from ‘field’-type conflicts, forms of everyday politics similar to ‘critical consumption’, and what some commentators have called ‘ideological warfare’ in debates around how platform type businesses should be resisted, regulated and governed.

Abstract: The proposed introduction of water charges and subsequent protests in Ireland (the largest since independence) capture the contestation and contradictions between the productive and reproductive aspects of capitalist accumulation. The water charges movement, that peaked in activity between 2014-5, marks the largest per capita protest movement in Europe since the financial crisis. This is despite commentators, media, and government claiming that the Irish had accepted the necessity of austerity and the country had “successfully” exited the bail-out program the year before. Although water is clearly an issue that mobilises people in novel ways, the question remains why water, why then? Why did the biggest social movement in Ireland erupt over €200 and in a period of claimed economic recovery? This paper argues that the water movement marks a possible turning point in a growing period of re/productive unrest in Ireland, with protests around reproductive rights (Repeal the 8th), housing, health, and marriage equality all emerging after the “successful” exit from the bailout. This highlights the internal relation between the economic, political and the social, and how the resolution of one crisis, has quickly manifested as a crisis in another related sphere. Institutional cleavages are being created and also harnessed by movements, opening spaces for protest and alternatives where blockages previously existed (this relationality draws on the recent work by Kevin Gillan (2018). This is a dynamic and productive process. I propose, that when the shifting institutional formations - structuring conditions - during this period are explored in dialectical relation with the social struggles that developed (Bieler and Morton 2018), the eruption of public protest and subsequent waves of unrest are not a surprise, but actually sharpen the contradictions inherent to the Irish state and pursued capitalist accumulation strategy.

Abstract: The post-2008 period has been marked by austerity, stagnation, but yet the stubborn persistence of a neoliberal consensus. During the same period, the prominent prospective alternatives to neoliberalism have also changed, passing through: a brief period of Keynesian hope during 2009; the prospect of radical horizontalism during the public square movements of 2011; efforts to 'occupy' the institutions of democracy, as witnessed by the movement parties of Podemos and Syriza; and now what appears to be a populism of both the left and the right, committed to some kind of re-nationalised alternative to neoliberalism. This paper argues that attempts to explain these developments require a political economy of dissent: a framework through which to understand contemporary capitalism, the contested social relations which constitute it, and the forms of resistance and reaction that have emerged from it and which have subsequently congealed into a variety of (unstable) political settlements. This requires a combination of critical political economy, institutional analysis, and social movement studies. In developing a political economy of dissent, therefore, the present paper sets out to describe, understand and explain the different trajectories of capitalism and its contestation, and the unstable institutional outcomes in which these have resulted, during the so-called 'age of austerity'. This enables the identification of different sources of social strain as they have developed since 2008, and therefore highlights the potentials for change to the state-market-society configuration in the present. Empirically, it focuses on concrete developments in the UK, US, Spain, Germany and Japan.

Abstract: New Social Movements (NSMs) and Contentious Politics (CP) dominate the research and analysis of social movements. NSMs display collective action as a battle for state’s recognition. CP depicts social movements as attempts to advance collective interests through the state. These approaches place emphasis on state concessions transforming collective subjects into claimants of either identity recognition or interests. In addition, structures, institutions, political process, demonstration, demands and reforms become pivotal in the analysis. During the financial crisis, activism and collective action questioned these approaches by highlighting their limitations. Scholars encountered difficulties in categorizing and analyzing newly emerging Solidarity Economy (SE) movement. This paper discusses the relation of SE to social movements and traces what is new with this movement. It questions the relation of SE initiatives with CP and NSMs and reinforces the hypothesis that these initiatives constitute the quintessential paradigm in order to understand a shift of collective action from CP and NSM to new forms of social movements. It argues that the movement of SE and the radical alternatives it constructs offer a different view on social movements. As a paradigm of contemporary social movements, SE includes a set of practices deviant to NSMs and CP, and in many cases draws upon elements, such as direct action, self-management and prefiguration, from anarchist and libertarian socialist tradition. Recognition in this context becomes a matter of legal protection and not an identity concern. SE initiatives go beyond state-centeredness, politics of demand and polity model and challenge the dominant frameworks for the analysis of social movements. A need to re-think social movements emerges. To prove the above argument, the paper follows two alternative projects based in Greece: the self-managed factory of Viomichaniki Metalleutiki and a local network called Proplasma.

Abstract: Cities became more and more key points of transformation and are places for dealing with social conflicts. This is also the case in South Africa: The Capetonian social movement Reclaim the City emerged in 2017 and struggles for citizens’ rights – particularly the right for housing. Processes of gentrification challenge this right for adequate housing. Citizens can’t afford the rising cost of living and have to move. Once again, in history the most vulnerable groups of the society black and coloured people are affected by evictions. Relcaim the City calls for affordable housing in the inner circle of Cape Town and occupied two houses for the people who were evicted. Based on an ethnographic field research in 2017 and 2018 the presentation investigates the role and social dimensions of occupations and new intrapersonal relations. The occupation creates a new social space for living, interaction and even a place for learning and dreaming. Therefore, the study analyses, on the basis of biographical narratives, the everyday practices and emotions of occupants. The occupations offers a new home for the evicted people which goes along with complex feelings such as relief, hope and anger or frustration due to ongoing conflicts within the occupied houses. Likewise, all occupants are engaged in protest, which requires a shared sense of belonging for organising collective action. Therefore, the paper analyses the complex interplay of emotions between the occupants, which shape the movement, and their collective action.

Abstract: Since the 2010s, the world has been shaken by new social movements, from the USA to the Middle East, from Europe to Latin America. Turkey experienced the same during the summer of 2013, when a group of protesters camped inside Gezi Park in Istanbul, to protect it from being transformed into a commercial complex. This paper explores the occupation of Gezi Park and aims at advancing knowledge on the relationship between urban space and protests. For this purpose, the paper primarily uses the data collected through the desk search such as the interviews conducted with the protesters published in the media, information on the demographic profile of protesters and the visuals of the occupation and protests. The paper argues that first; the occupation of Gezi Park reflects variegated “rights to, of and in the city” created through the practice of “commoning”. The park becomes a “socio-spatial bricolage”, i.e. socio-spatial hybrid which contains past and present, traditional and contemporary and global and local subjects, practices and images and different realms such as urban space and politics, urban space and protesters and the physical and the virtual. Last, the paper argues that the park reflects a new political and collective subjectivity using play and humour against the authorities.

Abstract: American cities are facing due to the car-orientation of their urban development approach. Recently, a broad ‘cycling’ movement has emerged promoting the use of the bicycle by creating a distinct and visible cyclist (counter-)culture in the city and pressuring the municipality of Belo Horizonte to take (more) decisive policy steps. In the past few years, the municipality has formulated new urban mobility policies focusing on the promotion of more sustainable urban mobility modes. However, the implantation of these plans does not go without obstacles and so far has delivered little results what concerns the bike-friendliness of Belo Horizonte. This paper elaborates an explanation for this discrepancy between favorable policy arrangements and the lack of positive results by studying the cycling movement in the context of its ‘urban political opportunity structure’ (UPOS). The paper develops a framework for studying the political context of urban social movements building on previous frameworks for political opportunity structures focusing on the national and, sometimes, international level. The framework shows how an interest in urban (sustainability) transitions can be fruitfully combined with an interest in social movements making analytical space for power dynamics, often neglected in transition studies. Our findings show that - while the UPOS for the cycling movement in Belo Horizonte offers leverage points, such as room for potential alliances with relevant political actors – it also creates major barriers, such as weak access points to the institutionalized political system, the lack of accommodation of the cycling theme within society, and inadequate governmental structures to cope with the policy ambitions. We, therefore, argue that Belo Horizonte’s cycling movement was too narrow in its attempt to exploit window of opportunities for advancing cycling as a part of a sustainable urban mobility transition.

Abstract: Dominant neoliberal economic doctrine during the past thirty years has wrought profound damage to democratic practices, cultures, institutions and imaginaries. As Wendy Brown argues, political participation and the right to equality have been reduced to market freedom and the right to compete, while individual activity in the market has replaced shared political deliberation and rule. This has resulted in a 'post-political consensus' that has circumscribed what is deemed as 'legitimate' behaviour in institutions, the media and decision-making in society as well as attempting to circumscribe what can be seen and heard in political debate and protest. Reflecting on this, Jacques Rancière argues that the social world and the people in it are constructed in particular ways that allow participation to some, while excluding and separating others. This occurs through a set of formal and informal rules and procedures that determine what is visible and what can be said and heard in political discourse as well as the spaces in which this occurs, and obscures and renders unrecognisable substantial portions of the population. However, Rancière argues that such rules and procedures are always incomplete and unstable and thus open to challenge, when those excluded by such orders make themselves seen and heard, by enacting political interventions. For Rancière, politics is characterised by dissensus: the appearance of subjects (women, workers, farmers, indigenous people) in a re-figured space so as to be seen and heard in it. The practice of dissensus places one world into another, if only momentarily, and makes visible the partiality of the political order. Politics in this sense "confronts the blindness of those who 'do not see' with that which has no place to be seen". However, what is missing from the analysis of political practice by Rancière is a fully rendered account of the spatial politics of protest. This paper provides fully rendered strategic spatial coordinates and interpretive frames with which to analyse and understand social movement action, mobilisation, identity and politics. I suggest six different yet interrelated 'spatial strategies', that consider the importance of place, scale, mobility, creativity, emotion and discourse to the practice of protest while also examining the power relations involved in its prosecution. I will also interweave this analysis with a consideration of the deployment of different yet interrelated 'sites of intervention': material or conceptual spaces within a system where activists apply pressure in order to disrupt its’ functioning or argue for change as part of broader strategic goals of campaigns.

Abstract: The Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 has long been in the pantheon of radical history. It has received deserved attention in Mike Leigh’s exciting movie. What is less well known is the scale of popular protest across Britain which immediately followed the event. One of the largest protests was the Reform Demonstration of October 1819 in Newcastle upon Tyne when The Timesreported a gathering of 100,000 people. Strangely it has never merited more than a line or two in even regional histories. This paper, The Wind from Peterloo, seeks to trace the debate which preceded it, its assembly, the numbers claimed, its participants and their ideas, the response of the local and national state and its fate in historical accounts

Abstract: On Friday, January 13th, 1911, the bazaars of colonial Rangoon closed down and “men women and children” pulled a gaily decorated cart containing Buddhist monk U Dhammaloka to the Chief Court for his appeal against his conviction for sedition. In the face of extensive popular mobilisation, the trial date was postponed and the eventual sentence restricted to binding over to keep the peace. Dhammaloka – an Irish-born sailor, hobo and “poor white” – was a thorn in the side of the colonial establishment across Asia. By 1911 he was a celebrity preacher who drew mass audiences across Burma and confronted empire, Christianity and western culture; a skilful organiser active in today’s Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand and present from Japan to Sri Lanka; had initiated a tradition of confrontation which became central to Burmese anti-colonialism; had successfully challenged official corruption and abuses; and distributed vast numbers of anti-missionary pamphlets drawing on western free thought. Using material from a ten-year research project, this paper explores the context of Dhammaloka’s sedition trials to understand the “uneven and combined” politics of resistance and repression in late colonial South and Southeast Asia, drawing on elements of the “new subaltern studies” approach. In particular it discusses his 1909 tour of Ceylon, in which police, government agents, legislators and the colonial press mobilised against his collaboration with local radicals; the support he received from the direct action wing of the Indian National Congress in a period of repression; alliances between Muslim dockworkers, the Chinese diaspora, Burmese peasants and the urban middle class; a forgotten radical newspaper; a 1911 proto-extradition attempt, a faked death and Dhammaloka’s final disappearance. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

Abstract: It is fashionable to emphasize how the internet has enabled the rapid diffusion of protest. This paper explores to what extent telegraph, postal, railway, and road networks shaped protest diffusion in the early twentieth century. The argument is illustrated with the case of Egypt during the 1919 Revolution, when anti-British protests broke out across the country in just a few days. Matching event data derived from Arabic-language newspapers and colonial security reports with geo-referenced maps, the paper shows how the country's communications infrastructure facilitated the rapid spread of protest in a semi-agrarian context characterized by political disorganization. Protest also diffused faster to areas with more students and professionals. These findings point to the enduring role of communications infrastructure in processes of protest diffusion -- and highlight the potential uses of historic GIS in the study of revolutionary mobilization

Abstract: Between the years of 1978 and 1984 on the evening before May 1, violent confrontations took place between youth and police in the city of Oslo. These events, as well as similar events in other Norwegian cities, led to a public discussion in Norway on urban youth problems and how they should be handled. The immediate government reaction was to let the police handle such situations when they arose. However, in 1981, after the fourth consecutive year of confrontations that steadily grew in size, the government funded a sociological research project aimed at better understanding the protesting youth and later budgeted 220 million kroner in total to fund various measures aimed at alleviating youth problems. This paper give an overview of the riots. Furthermore, it looks at the perceptions and definitions put forward by politicians and researchers, and in what ways they shaped the policy-making that followed. Through the study of research reports, newspapers, government reports and a cabinet white paper on youth, I examine how the definition and framing of the youth riots influenced the perceived urgency of the situation, as well as the relevancy of different explanations and solutions. I argue that the perception of the riots changed from them being described as instances of “mass psychosis”, to being described as resulting from the social and economic difficulties of the youths and being seen as being part of a broader European youth revolt. This change in perception was in a large part based on the findings of the state funded research project and a state Ministers engagement in the case. It also had a significant impact on the policy-making that followed. Leading to the increase in youth policy spending, which sought to provide housing and work for youths in the hope of alleviating youth problems in Oslo and in the country at large.

Abstract: Global social justice movements, including those focused on land rights, people organising against systemic racism and in decolonisation movements, and those working on labour rights draw on long histories and trans-cultural protest movements. Activism’s geographic grammars have included mapping alliances across contexts and organising skills sharing beyond local conditions (Bogad, 2016). Performance, on the other hand, enables crucial use of aesthetics, play and innovation in the field and in scholarly dissemination. Drawing on an emerging dialogue with Tshisimani (activist educators in South Africa), this presentation concerns popular protest movements in South Africa and the role of performance in such protests. Grassroots activism in South Africa remains focused on conscientisation and rights education. RhodesMustFall and other related protest movements in South Africa moved beyond student activist circles. At this historical moment, land rights/ decolonisation is the background that frames and forms the optics for the issues to be explored. Scholarly work about activism is often predicated on historicising European practices, despite many significant movements emerging from the Global South, as explored in Paul Routledge’s latest work Space Invaders: Radical Geographies of Protest (2017). This work envisions an alternative future in which marginalised voices and experiences are staged as central to the concerns of popular protest movements in South Africa. Cape Town- based organisation Tshisimani highlights the value and the values of the arts that enables a particular way of learning about and through activism. Human geography and performance studies come together in dialogue. Both disciplines engage in processes of thinking through spatial, embodied practices that firstly constitute understanding of worlds, and secondly represent experiences of worlds. Together, they enable rigorous consideration of the tactics of activism.

Abstract: The sudden move from a Brazil dominated by the Workers Party to a country led by an extreme-right, racist and misogynous President is in part the outcome of another shift that took place in the 1980s: the attacks on liberation Christanity and concomitant arrival of neo-Pentecostal churches. Liberation Christianity, and in particular its ecclesiastic base communities, have acted as popular and political education groups from which a new militant culture and thousands of activists have emerged, contributing to the deep transformation political, social and cultural of Brazil between 1980 and 2016. In the 1980s, the conservative turn in the Vatican led to a series of attacks against liberation theology and their grassroots communities who were concentrated in the favelas and working class areas. The impact of this turn was little visible in Brazilian political arena in the following decades, as formed activists kept their progressive commitments in laid organizations, parties and movements. On the long run however, its impact has been devastating. The conservative actors in the Vatican simultaneously blocked the source of progressive culture and the formation of actors from working class areas who had transformed Brazil, and left a vast space for the conservative evangelists in the working class areas which have now become one of the main sources of recruitment of militants and voters for Jair Bolsonaro. This article makes a plea for a better articulation of the sociology of religions and the sociology of social movements by paying more attention to religious movements, whether progressive or conservative, and to their interactions with social movements. Brazil reminds us of the whole importance of the “War of the Gods”. It also demonstrates that one should not confuse the front lines of this war with those of religions and religious organisations. Religions are both participants in the battle and are themselves divided by it. An essential part of the struggle has played out within the Catholic Church. Its 1980s conservative shift succeeded in weakening Liberationist Christianity and led to the desertion of numerous working-class areas, leaving the field to the evangelical churches, to the stifling of progressive actors, the legitimating of conservative ideas and the rise in power of moral themes mainly associated with sexuality, rather than social justice.

Abstract: In this paper I elaborate on the concepts of stance-taking and solidarity in order to scrutinize the strategic place of popular education in social movements. In particular, I consider how formalized spaces of popular education can act as important mobilizing structures for progressive social movements working to transcend the multiplicity of crises generated by neoliberal capitalism. Attention is placed on how sites of popular education can channel people’s grievances toward the cultivation of solidaristic stances and how these stances help social movement agendas and campaigns attain an agentive presence in society. Drawing on preliminary findings from a new ongoing project, I focus on the case of a popular education initiative operating across nine sites in the post-industrial landscape of francophone Belgium or ‘Wallonia’. Working from a praxeological perspective, I look at how the actors affiliated with this popular education initiative have worked with diverse sectors of the Belgian populace (e.g. blue- and white-collar workers, school-teachers, the un[der]emplyed, youth, pensioners, undocumented migrants) to craft counter-hegemonic processes of collective learning and knowledge production. While this organization was originally founded within a context of radical labor unionism during the 1970s, in more recent years it has sought to expand its base so as to include a broader range of agendas linked to unemployment, migrant rights, feminism, and environmental justice. Ultimately, my paper draws on the nuances of the Belgian case in order to elaborate more broadly on how the intersubjective stances and solidarities produced through sites of popular education can contribute to the strategic capacities of progressive social movements in times of entrenched crisis.

Abstract: In this paper I approach religious and socio-political change with Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the assemblage. Rejecting the dialectic of town and countryside in accounts of religion and rebellions in the Philippines, I propose a non-linear account of Filipino history. As such, I identify instead three Filipino assemblages which I call the (i) church-plaza assemblage, (ii) the Banahaw assemblage and (iii) the media-church assemblage. Each assemblage routes spatial flows of ideas, bodies and objects in specific ways, from the tightly regulated, gendered and racial flows of the Spanish walled town to the counter-flows of religion in mountain groves and on to contemporary flows of mass-mediated worship in new physical and virtual spaces. The suggestion is that each assemblage is a kaleidoscopic transformation of the other. This move enables us to envision social and political change in new ways, in particular by allowing an account of religious and socio-political change to emerge that dispenses with the human subject, a move with significant consequences for understanding religions and social movements, rebellions and revolutions.

Abstract: In 2010 I published an article entitled ‘Rebellion of the poor: South Africa’s service delivery protests - a preliminary analysis’. Somehow, it made a bit of an impact. I recently discovered it has more Scholar citations than any other published in African studies journals going back to 2006, and the notion of ‘rebellion of the poor’ was taken up by the Congress of South African Trade Unions and come community organisations. This paper revisits the original article and considers: ‘What happened next?’ In short, the rebellion continues, with more protests and a higher level of disorder than a decade ago. Moreover, the Marikana Massacre opened the vista of a parallel ‘rebellion of the workers’. Actually, there are probably twice as many labour protests as community protests, and, although an earlier claim that South Africa is the 'protest capital of the world’ requires some nuance, there is a consistently high level of resistance by international standards. In 2015 and 2016 there was an insurgent movement among students, so one can reasonably talk or a ’triple rebellion’. But, so far, there has been nothing approaching a revolution. Indeed, most commentators think the governing ANC will, again, win the national elections to be held in May, and may even win a majority of votes cast. How should we explain this paradox. The paper floats a number of possible factors. These include: partial victories; poverty in protesting communities; different relations to the means of protest; divisions and ideological weaknesses within the labour movement and opposition parties; disjuncture between protesting and politics; and social mobility. The paper has implications for historically high global inequality alongside ‘missing revolutions’, and, in this regard, relates to some work by Colin Barker.

Abstract: This presentation aims to show how two different activist cultures within the movement against the private retirement model in Chile, can build an effective relationship and even start to change themselves, in order to produce a rich, complex and massive movement. On the one hand, I reveal a trade-union based activist culture, which performs as ‘the brain’ in the movement, bringing the knowledge, the experience, and the platform for organization. On the other hand, a citizen-driven activist culture, performing as ‘the megaphone’, which provides the communication channels from the digital world, the massiveness, and the resonance with a larger audience. By using some concrete examples about the organization and execution of the first national massive rally of the movement, also known as 24J (July 24, 2016), I argue that the process of meeting of these two activist cultures is essential, first of all, for a successful rally, and secondly, for the effective production of this social movement. This uncovers various problems, tensions, and finally, some learnings for surpassing them. In the end, both activist cultures become inextricably necessary for the movement, providing different approaches to its claims and the enemy, its tactics, its visions about the social and politics, providing a rich and unique collective critique to the Chilean model of society. This opens an interesting debate about to which extent social movements should -still only- rely in traditional organizations as trade-unions, or, if it is enough -as nowadays movements- to just build a movement from the cybersphere. I finally propose to discuss to go beyond a single-based approach which highlights just one angle, and rather consider an interdependent one.

Abstract: Though political theory has much to say about the conditions of disobedience, it has little interest in the performance of disobedient action, or in what happens to activists when they are arrested and prosecuted, and subjected to law within what Jasper and collaborators define as arenas. Equally, both normative and performative distinctions are mostly ignored in (if not completely irrelevant to) classic repertoire accounts of protest, whose historicising approach to protest form tends to flatten vital questions of how practices carry ideology and identity. This is particularly problematic for disobedient action, as questions of accountability carry great significance for the meanings that activists bring to their protest practices and speak directly to the transformative potential of action. In this paper, I draw on our observation of the recent high profile ‘terrorist trial’ of the Stansted 15 anti-deportation activists. Through the trial, the activists developed a discourse of accountability collapsing the normative bright lines between civil disobedience and direct action. This discourse was both more conservative than civil disobedience (in that it eschewed a political analysis, and was based on a conscious performance of the ‘ideal activist’) and more radical (in that it sought not simply to convince legislators of the need for legal and political change with respect to UK detention and deportation practices, but to bypass state institutions entirely in favour of an ethics of mutual solidarity and care). As a result, I argue that understanding how the meanings and contours of a given action are constructed requires a situational and performative analysis, which is subject to the interplay of materialised relationships of power and constraint. I argue that these meanings are open to transformation through the changing and successive material and symbolic contexts of the 'career', or multiple connected performances, of action.

Abstract: If social movement scholarship has any collective mission, then it is to understand this triumvirate: social movements, protest and social change. Much social movement scholarship takes a relatively narrow approach to these terms, so that movements appear as sets of demands being make on authorities; protest as the various culturally available scripts through which groups can make such demands publically; and social change figuring, therefore, as a change in state policy. Ultimately this is a theory of social movements wedded to the professional political scientist's theory of social change in democracies. This talk is intended to take a broader approach that begins with the recognition that participants in social movements have their own (varied) theories of social change, and that such theories shape patterns of behaviour that become characteristic of different kinds of movements. I will explore four key categories of strategic practice, drawn from the wider literature on social movements and each indicative of a different underlying theory of social change: 1) demonstrations of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (Tilly's version of the classic political scientists' theory); 2) direct action attempting an unmediated impact on an opponent; 3) prefiguration of a better society through creating alternative social forms; 4) lifestyle action embedding alternatives in the routines of everyday life. I will argue that the identification of these ideal types raises the potential to move research on movements and social change in a productive direction, and one that may be more suitable for the study of strategic practices in a wider range of socio-political contexts.

Abstract: In the orthodox interpretation of the history of protest, the 19th century is seen as a move between discrete stages: from local, direct action, to the modern social movement which emerges by about 1830. However, rioting presents a challenge to this interpretation. Using a catalogue of 450 riots from Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow (1800-1939), I will argue that they evolved in different ways across these various historical stages and played a central role in city life right the way through to the end of the 19th century. Riots therefore bridged the gap between the modern and premodern repertoire, while their gradual evolution makes them very difficult to categorise as a part of either period. In fact, the history of rioting as a living, evolving practice undermines this whole periodisation. Moving away from it forces us to focus on the histories of particular forms of protest, like rioting; charting their contingent, convoluted and individual development. This marks a departure from Charles Tilly’s immensely influential account of the evolution of protest and focusses on a different aspect of the ‘repertoire’ metaphor: instead of searching for discrete periods, we should try to trace the lineages of particular routines or practices across time and space

Abstract: Whether social movements can make a difference remains a perennial question of social movement scholarship. This paper makes a contribution to this debate by examining the contentious collective action of indigenous people(s) in Latin America. As identity-based movements grow globally, indigenous politics in Latin America provide a wealth of examples of social movement ‘success’ inviting further study. This has the potential to enrich both the Latin American scholarship on indigenous politics, which often takes the impact of indigenous movements for granted, and the social movement scholarship on outcomes, which seems to increasingly question whether protest can have any direct impact at all. This research suggests that neither approach is adequate; factors under the control of indigenous movements themselves can lead to positive outcomes. The choice of tactics, the nature of claims and the way in which they are framed, play a role, both directly and in interaction with contextual variables. Taking into account movements’ strategic claiming and framing is thus crucial for understanding social movement outcomes. Few studies have been able to show the effect of framing in particular on movement outcomes; partially at least this is because the claiming (what) and framing (how) of social movements have not been distinguished well within framing theories. To have an impact, movements need to be able impose a material and symbolic cost on their targets that exceeds the cost that meeting their demand would present. Overall, this paper thus suggests that despite the overwhelming empirical support for the thesis that social movements tend to rely on political opportunities for securing desired outcomes, this is not inconsistent with the fact that social movement can at times succeed even in apparently unfavourable political conditions. In the latter situation, if protest can impose a high enough combination of both material and symbolic costs, it can indeed matter.