Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YD, UK.
E-mail: ias@lancaster.ac.uk
Making Global Civil Society: Grassroots Practice and Academic Theory of Globalisation from Below
4-6 November 2005
Please note, this research programme has now concluded and these pages are maintained here as a record of the activities of the Institute for Advanced Studies.
A weekend gathering for collective reflection amongst activists and academics
Contact: Martin Pedersen or Nina Moeller
The aim of the gathering was to discuss key aspects of the historical
development of the capitalist economy that drives globalisation from above
- such as enclosures, (precarious) labour, structural violence, colonialism,
and their justifying cultural imagery – and to make visible alternative
architectures of social organisation emerging through the processes of
globalisation from below, that is, through grassroots movements cooperating
to create a global civil society based on human rights and mutual aid,
and to restore the (intellectual) commons, in the street, on the land,
and in cyberspace.
The weekend brought together first-hand accounts of the successes and failures of social, cultural and political projects and experiments with theoretical elaborations by academics trying to understand the reality of globalisation and the connections between its manifestations from above and below. By opening up a space for collective engaged reflection, we hope to create an atmosphere in which practice can inform theory and where theoretical academic perspectives can facilitate a reflection on activist practices.
Discussions covered the following topics:
- conceptions of global civil society, counter-public sphere and counter-hegemonic movements
- the dynamics of enclosing knowledge and genetic material
- history and change of precarious labour
- resisting enclosures, resisting precariousness, constructing alternatives
- transformations of colonialism: biocolonialism, TRIPs and structural adjustment
- networked databases, biometrics, and border control
- subversive and transhuman uses of technology
- reclaiming/liberating urban spaces and rural land
- sexual politics, discourse, and resistance
- radical media and art collectives
- self-organisation and consensus processes conceptually
- non-central, non-hierarchical networks and governance;
- etwork-centric thinking
- human rights as community building, form of resistance, and as global vision of movements.
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