Michelle Williams

The local in the global: rethinking social movements in the new millennium

In this article we discuss the failure of social movement theories to adequately understand and theorize locally based, grassroots social movements like the landless workers movement in Brazil, ‘livability movements’ in third-world cities, and living wage movements in the USA. Movements such as these come to the attention of most social movement analysts only when the activists who participate in them come together in the streets of Seattle or international forums like the World Social Forum. To date, it is the transnational character of these protests that have excited the most attention. Building on scholarship that looks at the link between participatory democracy and social movements, this article takes a different tack. We show how some social movements have shifted their repertoire of practices from large mass events aimed at making demands on the national state to local-level capacity building. It is the local struggles, especially the ways in which they have created and used institutions in civil society through extending and deepening democracy, that may be the most significant aspect of recent social movements, both for our theories and for our societies. Yet these aspects have received less attention, we believe, because they are less well understood by dominant social movement theories, which tend to focus on high-profile protest events. We look at the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and the Justice for Janitors Campaign in Los Angeles to illustrate the important terrain of civil society as well as the role of community organizing.

Alternative production and consumption relations? Fair trade, the State, and cooperatives in the global South

This paper explores the relation between the fair trade market in the North and producer cooperatives in the South. It specifically focuses on three agricultural cooperatives in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and South Africa to look at the way in which the fair trade market and the state have promoted or hindered alternative production in the global South. Fair trade has gained considerable popularity among Northern consumers in the last decade. For many consumers, the assumption is that buying fair trade ensures producers in the South receive a fair price for their goods. However, fair trade is much more complex than consumer choices or simply offering fair prices to producers. Does fair trade constitute an alternative trading system or is it an attempt to introduce fairer conditions within the current system? What is the role of the state? What is the role of the market? Are there other ways to ensure producers in the global South receive fair prices? These are the central questions explored in this paper.

Women in rural South Africa: a post-wage existence and the role of the state

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider women in rural villages of Keiskammahoek in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. What the author discovered is that some women are carving out a space through a complex, triple relation to the state. The state is distributor of social grants, a midwife of economic activity, and a technocratic system of governance and “service delivery.” The paper asks whether post-wage livelihoods are simply survivalists or have emancipatory potential. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on research conducted in 2013-2015 in the rural villages of Keiskammahoek. The author spent time in the villages informally speaking to women and conducted 39 in-depth interviews. Findings The author found that the women are finding ways to engender non-capitalist relations in new and creative ways within their rural communities. The three sources of state activity (and power) – grants, economic projects, and governance – are engaged and used in different ways, but together create an interesting nexus of livelihoods and survival. What is interesting is the survivalist livelihoods – even if not representing an alternative mode of production – are allowing women a degree of independence, dignity, and self-determination. Originality/value The research has not been published and this argument has not been made before. The manuscript is a new approach to understanding post-wage livelihoods.

‘Practicing’ women’s agency and the struggle for transformation in South Africa

ABSTRACT In this paper I look at the way in which women in a South African township practice their ‘agency’ in their personal lives, in their economic activity, and in their community commitments. In the post-apartheid period, women enjoy a supportive policy environment and an extraordinary increase in women’s representation in political spaces, yet the ANC led state has not maintained ‘invited’ spaces for women to engage with the structural conditions of gender inequality at the local level. Nevertheless, we find extraordinary accounts of women creatively ‘practicing’ their agency. I explore the way in which women push the boundaries of effective agency despite the conditions of oppression that characterise the broader social, economic, and political context. I show how the women face many obstacles to effecting transformative agency, but nevertheless carve out their independence through consciously determining the way in which they carry out their daily activities in collective and individual ways.