Social Movements Knowledge – What Do We Know, How Do We Create Knowledge and What Do We Do With It

Social Movements produce knowledge about the social world. More specifically, they produce knowledge from below, information about society which is inconvenient to and resisted by those above: the wealthy, the mighty and the learned (or , as we might say, states, corporations and disciplines). A crucial aspect of movement practice is making known that which others would prefer to keep from public view, be that practices of torture and extra-judicial executions, the effects of individual pollutants and the costs of global warming, levels of rape and sexual abuse, the facts of poverty and exploitation, caste oppression and racism – the list is long. On a larger scale, movements highlight new ways of seeing the world: in terms of class or patriarchy, of colonisation or neo-liberalism, of ecology and human rights.

Read

Advertisement