Análisis de las relaciones trasnacionales de los movimientos sociales frente a la minería: caso de estudio Cajamarca (Perú), 1999-2010

La república del Perú se ha configurado como una nación minera emergente en América del Sur, desde finales de la década de los noventa. La aplicación de las reformas neoliberales del Consenso de Washington introdujeron una visión de desarrollo sustentada a partir de la promoción de la inversión extranjera directa que provocó el auge de las industrias extractivas en departamentos como Cajamarca. En este contexto, surgieron problemas de contaminación y vulneración de los derechos ambientales, los cuales propiciaron la reorganización de sectores de la sociedad civil alrededor de movimientos sociales como Grufides a nivel local, y CONACAMI, a nivel nacional. Mediante el establecimiento de redes transnacionales con la ONG Global Greengrants Fund, se articuló una tendencia activista por medio del cual ésta se convirtió en el canalizador de las demandas de resistencia y promoción del desarrollo sostenible frente a los impactos de los proyectos mineros.

Corporate social responsibility, mining and sustainable development in Namibia: critical reflections through a relational lens

For its advocates, corporate social responsibility (CSR) represents a powerful tool through which business and particularly multinationals can play a more direct role in global sustainable development. For its critics, however, CSR rarely goes beyond business as usual, and is often a cover for business practices with negative implications for communities and the environment. This paper explores the relationship between CSR and sustainable development in the context of mining in Namibia. Drawing upon extant literatures on the geographies of responsibility, and referencing in-country empirical case-study research, a critical relational lens is applied to consider their interaction both historically and in the present.

Streetwise Provocations: The Global Justice Movement's take on sustainable development

An examination of the role of the global justice movement in advancing core elements of the sustainable development agenda.

"New" Social Movements: Alternative Modernities, (Trans)local Nationalisms, and Solidarity Economies

My dissertation is the first project on the Haitian Platform for Advocacy for an Alternative Development- PAPDA, a nation-building coalition founded by activists from varying sectors to coordinate one comprehensive nationalist movement against what they are calling an Occupation. My work not only provides information on this under-theorized popular movement but also situates it within the broader literature on the postcolonial nation-state as well as Latin American and Caribbean social movements. The dissertation analyzes the contentious relationship between local and global discourses and practices of citizenship. Furthermore, the research draws on transnational feminist theory to underline the scattered hegemonies that intersect to produce varied spaces and practices of sovereignty within the Haitian postcolonial nation-state. The dissertation highlights how race and class, gender and sexuality, education and language, and religion have been imagined and co-constituted by Haitian social movements in constructing ‘new’ collective identities that collapse the private and the public, the rural and the urban, the traditional and the modern. My project complements the scholarship on social movements and the postcolonial nation-state and pushes it forward by emphasizing its spatial dimensions. Moreover, the dissertation de-centers the state to underline the movement of capital, goods, resources, and populations that shape the postcolonial experience. I re-define the postcolonial nation-state as a network of local, regional, international, and transnational arrangements between different political agents, including social movement actors. To conduct this interdisciplinary research project, I employed ethnographic methods, discourse and textual analysis, as well as basic mapping and statistical descriptions in order to present a historically-rooted interpretation of individual and organizational negotiations for community-based autonomy and regional development.

New Haitian social movements: Alternative modernities, (trans)local nationalisms, and solidarity economies

My dissertation is the first project on the Haitian Platform for Advocacy for an Alternative Development- PAPDA, a nation-building coalition founded by activists from varying sectors to coordinate one comprehensive nationalist movement against what they are calling an Occupation. My work not only provides information on this under-theorized popular movement but also situates it within the broader literature on the postcolonial nation-state as well as Latin American and Caribbean social movements. The dissertation analyzes the contentious relationship between local and global discourses and practices of citizenship. Furthermore, the research draws on transnational feminist theory to underline the scattered hegemonies that intersect to produce varied spaces and practices of sovereignty within the Haitian postcolonial nation-state. The dissertation highlights how race and class, gender and sexuality, education and language, and religion have been imagined and co-constituted by Haitian social movements in constructing ‘new’ collective identities that collapse the private and the public, the rural and the urban, the traditional and the modern. My project complements the scholarship on social movements and the postcolonial nation-state and pushes it forward by emphasizing its spatial dimensions. Moreover, the dissertation de-centers the state to underline the movement of capital, goods, resources, and populations that shape the postcolonial experience. I re-define the postcolonial nation-state as a network of local, regional, international, and transnational arrangements between different political agents, including social movement actors. To conduct this interdisciplinary research project, I employed ethnographic methods, discourse and textual analysis, as well as basic mapping and statistical descriptions in order to present a historically-rooted interpretation of individual and organizational negotiations for community-based autonomy and regional development. ^

Is that all there is? The limitations of global/local, PISA, and the dilemma of transnational curriculum research

Sob o rótulo da globalização, as ciências humanas e sociais têm sido forçadas a rever seu pensamento para encontrar novas maneiras de falar sobre as situações de mudança ao nosso redor e para reorientar-se conceitualmente em um aparente ‘mundo sem fronteiras’. Este artigo analisa algumas dessas formas, sugerindo que a pesquisa em currículo transnacional como tarefa, como talvez inclusiva de algo para além dos estudos curriculares como subárea, tem preocupações, pontos de entrada e horizontes de promulgação amplos, inconstantes, imprevisíveis, que levantam uma série de questões e considerações éticas que exigem maior compromisso nos espaços em que as fronteiras percebidas forem transgredidas no ato da investigação. Usando os relatórios sobre os resultados do PISA como disparador intelectual, este artigo discute quatro questões que surgem no ato investigativo em currículo transnacional: a comparação como princípio de produção de conhecimento; as estratégias de agrupamento onto-teo-filosóficas e a delimitação da ética; o retorno do sujeito centrado, humanista, racional e as críticas a esse sujeito inspirado no Iluminismo; as questões relativas à causalidade, ou seja, como os processos de atribuição são forjados e que tipos de ‘legitimação via procedimento’ operam na crítica social. Em vez de sugerir uma nova ordem, este artigo busca um questionamento mais profundo dos repetitivos pressupostos ocidentalistas.

Gender and health: a social movement’s agenda for Big Pharma.

Social movements have an important new campaigning and organizing competence in new information communication technologies. These technologies also enable the members of social movements to readily research the accuracy of information: knowledge becomes globalized and readily accessible. In relation to Big Pharma, women’s social movements and social movements of the medicated intersect, and there is now a substantial challenge to Big Pharma both within developed and developing countries from the terrain of gender and health. This paper documents those challenges and looks towards their consequences in the future both in respect of Big Pharma but also in terms of 'academic' research

New and Alternative Social Movements in Spain: The Left, Identity and Globalizing Processes

This collection offers a diachronic analytical study of new and alternative social movements in Spain from the democratic transition to the first decade of the 21st century, paying attention to anti-war mobilizations and the use of new technologies as a mobilizing resource. New and alternative social movements are studied through the prism of identified linkages among the left, movement identities and global processes in the Spanish context. Weight is given to certain important historical aspects, like Spain’s relatively recent authoritarian past, and certain value-added factors, such as the weak associationalism and materialism exhibited by the Spanish public. These are complemented by exploring insights offered by key theoretical approaches on social movements (political opportunities structures, resource mobilization). The volume covers established social movement cases (gender, peace, environmental movements) as well as those with a more explicit connection to the current context of global contestation (squatters’ and anti-globalization movements).

Contemporary Social Movements and the Web

Social Movements are decentralising in the modern world. Web 2.0 has driven latency structures in social movements, and made activism more personal than ever before, but it has also introduced the concept of slacktivism. Micro-Macro relationships are becoming important theoretical frameworks for Social Movement research on the Web - has the Global Justice Movement of 1999 become Global Justice Networks in 2013?

The Internet as opportunity and challenge in contemporary social movements

This paper explores the relationship between the rise of “new” social movements (15-M and Occupy) and the Internet. The new social media gives rise to new kinds of social movements  which embed this technology from the moment of conception. The future of social movements will be characterised by movinets, which will have the effect of developing new efficient ways of activism. The movinets, with their embedded technology and capacity to circulate ideas among different spheres of reality, have a potential to alter the dynamics of social mobilisation.

The Global Financial Crisis : Neo-Liberalism, Social Democracy, and Criminology

This chapter begins with a discussion of the economic, political, and social context of the recent global financial crisis, which casts into relief current boundaries of criminology, permeated and made fluid in criminology's recent cultural turn. This cultural turn has reinvigorated criminology, providing new objects of analysis and rich and thick descriptions of the relationship between criminal justice and the conditions of life in ‘late modernity’. Yet in comparison with certain older traditions that sought to articulate criminal justice issues with a wider politics of contestation around political economies and social welfare policies of different polities, many of the current leading culturalist accounts tend in their globalized convergences to produce a strangely decontextualized picture in which we are all subject to the zeitgeist of a unitary ‘late modernity’ which does not differ between, for example, social democratic and neo-liberal polities, let alone allow for the widespread persistence of the pre-modern. It is argued that that contrary to this globalizing trend there are signs within criminology that life is being breathed back into social democratic and penal welfare concerns, habitus, and practices. The chapter discusses three of these signs: the emergence of neo-liberalism as a subject of criminology; a developing comparative penology which recognizes differences in the political economies of capitalist states and evinces a renewed interest in inequality; and a nascent revolt against the ‘generative grammar’, ‘pathological disciplinarities’, and ‘imaginary penalities’ of neoliberal managerialism.

Can an Australian rap fan be a social actor in the African-American social movements?

I live in the Sydney North Shore suburb of Northbridge. In many ways it is a white middle class enclave, comparable to places like Cabramatta that are identified with a specifically represented ethnic group. Gated primarily by the inflated property prices, it is a location that marks a territory principally for the white middle class. It is not a place of African-American movements. Or is it? Radio, television, film and Internet increasingly constitute a large portion of the sonic and visual landscapes of our suburban lives. In our lounge rooms and in our cars we are presented texts that take us beyond our local environments, into the places of other nations. This paper will explore the position of a fan of rap music, physically located beyond the cultural and political circumstances that drive sustained action for the movements of African-Americans. It will analyze whether such a fandom can indicate membership, as a social actor, in this group and in doing so illuminate the boundaries of movement activity in an information society.

Key issues in the study of new and alternative social movements in Spain: The Left, Identity and Globalizing Processes

This article highlights the importance of dedicating a whole special issue on New and Alternative Social movements in Spain. It sets the basis for this endeavour by emphasizing the importance of the 2004, unexpected, electoral victory of the Spanish socialists, and the subsequent satisfaction of the important demands promoted by certain social movements actors and Spanish society in general (the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq, the cancellation of the National Hydrological Plan and the Legalization of same sex marriages. The view supported is that these developments signify the end of a protest cycle, which could have the same effect with the early 1980s socialist victory. After a discussion around the low associationalism that characterizes Spanish society and recent experience of authoritarianism, it is suggested that it is time for the study of new and alternative social movements in Spain and other south European societies to move beyond the emphasis on exceptionality but appreciate differences by focusing on the available political opportunities and the identity of social movement actors. The remainder of the article is dedicated to introducing the contributing articles.