Sociology's marginality to public discussion of the crisis stems partly from naïveté about the sociology of its own knowledge, in particular about its interlocutors' interests. Historically, sociology has repeatedly re-established its intellectual relevance through its dialogue with movements for social change; this article argues that another such dialogue is overdue.Starting from existing discussions of social movements and their knowledge production, the article focuses on the organisational dimension of such knowledge and explores how this is elaborated in the current movement wave. Looking at movement spaces of theoretical analysis, new popular education processes and movements' knowledge creation institutions, the article highlights potential contributions to renewing sociological processes of theorising, teaching and engaged research respectively, paying particular attention to movement practices of 'talking between worlds'. It concludes with a call for a dialogue of critical solidarity between public sociology and new forms of social knowledge production.
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While attention is now being paid to emotions and personal sustainability in social movements, relatively little attention has been paid to difference between social movement situations or broader cultural contexts. This paper locates the question in the broader Keywords:Social movements, emotional sustainability, political participation, activism Defining personal sustainabilityPersonal sustainability in social movements is very much a heuristic category. It covers the conditions which make it possible for specific individuals to take up and maintain effective involvement in informal politics. In this sense, personal sustainability is a crucial problem for social movements, most notably in the area of mobilisation and demobilisation (burnout and dropout).A focus on "emotional sustainability" alone hides other problems, such as age, gender, class, race, disability, and so on, by presupposing actors who are able to engage politically once they are emotionally healthy and / or supported to be so. By contrast, the literatures on social movements and popular political participation highlight the extent to which mobilisation and demobilisation are differentially affected by social structure, as well as by culture and political context.
A Case for a Marxist Revival?This book starts from a paradox.On the one hand, Marxism is a body of theory that developed from and was crafted for social movements. The work of Marx and Engels represents a distillation of the experiences, debates, theories and conflicts faced by the popular movements of the nineteenth century, that sought in turn to contribute to those movements' further development. Subsequent developments of Marxist theory in the twentieth century were intimately linked to the development of oppositional political projects across the globe, ranging from revolutionary struggles against imperialist wars and capitalism itself to anti-colonial movements and the emergence of new forms of popular assertion in the post-WWII era.On the other hand, if the main figures of 'classical Marxism' all used the term 'movement', none seems to have developed any explicit theorization of the term.Moreover, while Marxists have produced ground-breaking studies of specific movements, they have apparently not produced an explicit 'theory of movements' -that is, a theory which specifically explains the emergence, character and development of social movements. Nor have they explored how the concept of 'movement' might be interwoven with other foundational concepts in Marxist theory like class struggle, hegemony and revolution or human species being, alienation and praxis.
This article revisits the debate over Barker and Cox's (2011) (Marx, 1965), and the politics of distribution. The conclusion explores the broader implications of these experiences for the relationship between movements and research.
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