Jeffrey S. Juris

The New Digital Media and Activist Networking within Anti–Corporate Globalization Movements:

This article examines how anti–corporate globalization activists have used new digital technologies to coordinate actions, build networks, practice media activism, and physically manifest their emerging political ideals. Since the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, and through subsequent mobilizations against multilateral institutions and forums in Prague, Quebec, Genoa, Barcelona, and Porto Alegre, activists have used e-mail lists, Web pages, and open editing software to organize and coordinate actions, share information, and produce documents, reflecting a general growth in digital collaboration. Indymedia has provided an online forum for posting audio, video, and text files, while activists have also created temporary media hubs to generate alternative information, experiment with new technologies, and exchange ideas and resources. Influenced by anarchism and peer-to-peer networking logics, anti–corpo-rate globalization activists have not only incorporated digital technologies as concrete tools, they have also used them to express alternative political imaginaries based on an emerging network ideal.

Performing politics: Image, embodiment, and affective solidarity during anti-corporate globalization protests

This article brings together the anthropological, sociological, and related literature on media, emotion, and performance to explore the role of counter-summit protests within anti-corporate globalization movements. Counter-summit actions produce both external and internal effects, allowing activists to communicate political messages, while generating deeply felt emotions and political identities. However, activists eventually tire while public interest may wane as protests become routine. Moreover, the most unpredictable, free form actions which produce high levels of affective solidarity among core activists often elicit media frames that stigmatize or trivialize protesters. Through comparative ethnographic accounts of mass mobilizations in Prague and Barcelona and subsequent media analysis, I argue that counter-summit protests are important networking tools, but they are difficult to reproduce over time, while the emotional and media impacts of counter-summit actions are often contradictory. I further suggest that grasping the affective dimensions of protest requires an engaged and embodied ethnographic praxis.

Violence Performed and Imagined Militant Action, the Black Bloc and the Mass Media in Genoa

The Battle of Genoa has become an iconic sign of wanton destruction, evoking images of tear gas, burning cars, and black clad protestors hurling stones and Molotov cocktails at advancing lines of heavily militarized riot police. In this article, I explore the complex relationship between performative violence and mass-mediated constructions of violence during the anti-G8 protests in Genoa. Performative violence is a specific mode of communication through which activists seek to produce social transformation by staging symbolic rituals of confrontation. Young militants enact performative violence in order to generate radical identities, while producing concrete messages challenging global capitalism and the state. At the same time, dominant media frames reinterpret the resulting images as random acts of senseless violence, undermining activists more generally. I further argue that the prevailing ‘diversity of tactics’ ethic reflects the broader networking logics associated with anti-corporate globalization movements themselves.

Alter-Activism : Emerging Cultures of Participation among Young Global Justice Activists

Through ethnographic fieldwork among young global justice activists based in Barcelona, Paris, Mexico City, and San Francisco, this article examines an emerging political praxis we call alter-activism. We argue that alter-activism represents an alternative mode of (sub-)cultural practice and an emerging form of citizenship among young people that prefigures wider social changes related to political commitment, cultural expression, and collaborative practice. Alter-activism specifically involves an emphasis on lived experience and process; a commitment to horizontal, networked organisation; creative direct action; the use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs); and the organisation of physical spaces and action camps as laboratories for developing alternative values and practices. Although observers tend to associate these attributes with global justice movements generally, we contend they are more precisely linked to youthful movement sectors and are particularly visible among alter-activists. Moreover, rather than a complete break, alter-activism expands on many of the features associated with past youth movements, although it is more highly globalised, more profoundly networked, more open and collaborative, and more deeply shaped by new technologies than its predecessors.

Global citizenship and the ‘New, New’ social movements Iberian connections

The past two decades have witnessed the rise of a new global cycle of collective action not only organized through the Internet and made visible during mass pro-test events, but also locally shaped by diverse organizations, networks, platforms and groups. Focusing on specific cases in two Iberian cities — Barcelona and Lisbon — we argue that this protest cycle has given rise to new kinds of movements referred to here as ‘new, new’ social movements. We analyze particular aspects of each case, but also discuss their European and global dimensions. The article will also highlight the role of youth, discussing the characteristics associated with the participation of young people in the ‘new, new’ movements. After a short introduction to the research on this topic, focusing on the emergence of the ‘anti-corporate globalization movement’ and related theoretical implications, we provide a description of four protest events in Barcelona and Lisbon. Next, we analyze the local contexts that anchor these events. Finally, we discuss the main characteristics of the ‘new, new’ social movements, examining the links between Barcelona and Lisbon and the wider international context that shapes them and paying particular attention to contemporary networking dynamics.

Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political

Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xv Introduction. Ethnography and Activism within Networked Spaces of Transnational Encounter / Jeffrey S. Juris and Alex Khasnabish 1 Emerging Subjectivities 1. Spaces of Intentionality: Race, Class, and Horizontality at the U.S. Social Forum / Jeffrey S. Juris 39 2. Tracing the Zapatista Rhizome, or, the Ethnography of a Transnationalized Political Imagination / Alex Khasnabish 66 3. The Possibilities and Perils for Scholar-Activists and Activist-Scholars: Reflections on the Feminist Dialogues / Manisha Desai 89 4. From Local Ethnographies to Global Movement: Experience, Subjectivity, and Power among Four Alter-globalization Actors / Geoffrey Pleyers 108 Discrepant Paradigms 5. The Global Indigenous Movement and Paradigm Wars: International Activism, Network Building, and Transformative Politics / Sylvia Escarcega 129 6. Local and Not-So-Local Exchanges: Alternative Economies, Ethnography, and Social Science / David J. Hess 151 7. The Edge Effects of Alter-globalization Protests: An Ethnographic Approach to Summit Hopping in the Post-Seattle Period / Vinci Daro 171 Transformational Knowledges 8. Transformation in Engaged Ethnography: Knowledge, Networks, and Social Movements / Maria Isabel Casas-Cortes, Michal Osterweil, and Dana E. Powell 199 9. Transformative Ethnography and the World Social Forum: Theories and Practices of Transformation / Giuseppe Caruso 229 10. Activist Ethnography and Translocal Solidarity / Paul Routledge 250 11. Ethnographic Approaches to the World Social Forum / Janet Conway 269 Subversive Technologies 12. The Transnational Struggle for Information Freedom / M. K. Sterpka 295 13. This Is What Democracy Looked Like / Tish Stringer 318 14. The Cultural Politics of Free Software and Technology within the Social Forum Process / Jeffrey S. Juris, Guiseppe Caruso, Stephane Couture, and Lorenzo Mosca 342 Conclusion. The Possibilities, Limits, and Relevance of Engaged Ethnography / Jeffrey S. Juris and Alex Khasnabish 367 References 391 Contributors 423 Index 427

Negotiating Power and Difference within the 99

The Occupy movements have given voice to the widespread frustration that so few (the 1%) seem to hold all the power. The vast majority (the 99%) lacks an (equal) say in the social, economic, financial, political and ecological processes that affect our lives. Inspired by the 2011 global wave of protests including the Arab Spring, the Greek resistance, the acampadas in Spain, the Wisconsin uprising and the Israeli summer, and starting with the takeover of New York Citys Zuccotti Park on 17 September 2011, the Occupy movements have sought to overturn these power imbalances by using the occupation of public spaces, mass assemblies, tent cities and direct action to shine a light on the effects of growing inequality and the disproportionate influence of corporate power over our politics and economy. However, while the occupations rally against external systems of power, a widespread logic of aggregation and majoritarian populism have complicated efforts to recognize and address internal differences and inequalities. This article examines power and exclusion in the Occupy movements through an analysis of race within Occupy Boston, which began in late September 2011 and has continued in a decentralized fashion since the camps mid-December eviction. As scholar activists from diverse backgrounds, we employ observant participation, interviews and activist reflections to explore how occupiers in Boston have represented, negotiated and addressed internal power relations, suggesting that a shift toward networking logics, practices and forms offers a promising avenue for engaging differences as well as racial, class and other modes of exclusion.

Freeing Software and Opening Space: Social Forums and the Cultural Politics of Technology

Since appearing in 2001, the social forums have formed part of a wider global justice movement characterized by the innovative use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Th e power of new ICTs such as the Internet to transform the speed, scale, and mode of organizing first became apparent in the mid-1990s with the early anti-Free Trade Campaigns and Zapatista Solidarity Networks.2 Activists soon began to employ e-mail lists, webpages, and collaborative software to communicate and coordinate within transnational networks such as Peoples’ Global Action and to organize mass anti-corporate globalization actions, including the November 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. New ICTs have not only facilitated action-at-a-distance, they have also changed the way social movements organize, favoring decentralized, networked structures involving a widespread “cultural logic of networking”.3

Introduction: Ethnography and Activism within Networked Spaces of Transnational Encounter

From December 30, 2006, to January 2, 2007, nearly two thousand activists from around the world, including large contingents from Spain, Italy, the United States, and Mexico, gathered in the Zapatista caracol (literally shell, refers to a meeting point and a regional seat of autonomous government) of Oventik for the first of a series of international gatherings between the Zapatista Pueblos and the Pueblos of the World. Unlike the Intergalactic Gathering for Humanity and against Neoliberalism in 1996, where the internationals and the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (ezln; Zapatista National Liberation Army) leadership dominated the discussions, this time the Zapatista base communities held center stage. For four days members of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Good Government Councils) from the five Zapatista caracoles recounted their successes and challenges over the past twelve years while implementing autonomy in their communities.1 The internationals and activists from other parts of Mexico listened intently, for the most part, as the Zapatistas told of their experiences in diverse areas such as autonomous government, justice, health, education, and media. Beyond the scheduled workshops, visitors mingled informally, if uneasily at times, with each

Movement Building and the United States Social Forum

Despite the growing academic literature on the World Social Forum process, few scholars have attempted to systematically analyze the social, cultural, and political impact of the forums. This has to do in part with the inherent difficulties of assessing movement consequences, which is particularly complicated for an activity geared toward creating ‘open spaces.’ This article presents an analytic framework for evaluating the impact of the social forums through an analysis of the 2010 United States Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit from the perspective of a local Boston-based delegation called the Boston Freedom Rides. We then use that framework to consider the impact of the 2010 USSF, bridging the academic literature on movement outcomes with activist perspectives. We make two related claims. First, the social forums, and the USSF in particular, should be viewed and their impact assessed in light of their generativity as ‘movement-building machines’: infrastructures designed for the production of social capital, networks, solidarities, meanings, frames, identities, knowledges, strategies, skills, and repertoires. Second, with respect to the Freedom Rides, the 2010 USSF contributed to movement building on multiple levels, but more so within rather than across movement sectors. Our goal is less to make a definitive argument about the impact of the 2010 USSF than to provide a helpful way of thinking about movement building as a social movement outcome, which can be applied and refined through further comparative and longitudinal research. We thus favor breadth over depth in outlining a broad framework for future inquiry.