Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production

The dynamics, politics, and richness of knowledge production within social movements and activist contexts are often overlooked in scholarly literature, and sometimes even in the movements themselves. Given the academic emphasis on whether an action, campaign, or movement can be judged a “success,” the intellectual work that takes place in movements frequently goes unseen, as do the politics, processes, sites, and locations of knowledge production and learning in activist settings. Even social movement scholarship that draws upon or is embedded in movement actor perspectives has an expressed interest in “taking the measure of the new movements” (see Tom Mertes, 2004, p. Xi, a collection of interviews with activists, originally published in New Left Review). The contributors to this collection, however, suggest that many powerful critiques and understandings of dominant ideologies and power structures, visions of social change, and the politics of domination and resistance in general emerge from these spaces and subsequently emphasize the significance of the knowledge-production dimensions of movement activism. Learning from the Ground Up also challenges ways in which grassroots and movement voices are often overwritten or otherwise marginalized in the context of purportedly “alternative” civil society networks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The interdisciplinary approaches adopted by the authors in this volume are as rich as the varied movements, processes, and dynamics of knowledge production that these chapters explore and elucidate.