Panel Cluster on Social Movements, Unions, and Youth Resistance: Social Movements, Education, and Learning

Group Submission Type: Panel Session

Proposal

In an era of increasing global inequality, conflict and rising authoritarianism (Streeck, 2016; Piketty, 2014, Scarhill, 2013, Rogers, 2016) social movements often represent a first line of defence for some of the most marginalized communities on the planet, seeking to defend and extend the conditions for a basic and dignified human existence. This panel seeks to explore the learning and knowledge production processes of different social movements. The study of social movement organising and learning processes has been identified as one particularly relevant area for social movement analysis, which seeks to be movement-relevant (Zibechi, 2007; Santos, 2006). This has led many towards the work of ‘popular education’, which has its roots in the work of Paolo Freire, the Brazilian educator, but also extends to Walter Rodney, the Guyanese activist and scholar and several others. Popular education is seen as one of the vehicles through which the process of challenging unequal structures can be achieved (Kane, 2001). It has, at its centre, a fundamental commitment to social change in the interests of marginalised groups and communities. Furthermore, there is a direct relationship between this type of education and the institutions and organisations, such as trade unions and social movements, that have historically emerged to defend the interests of the poor and the marginalised – movements that this education seeks explicitly to strengthen (Jara, 1989 cited in Kane, 2001, p.9). This organic relationship means that the ‘organisation’ becomes the ‘school’ in which popular education takes place, and their “struggles and actions, their forms of organisation, their ‘culture’, in the broadest sense, constitute the starting point of popular education and its field of enquiry” (Kane, 2001, p.13).

The first paper overviews research on four different social movements, in Colombia, Nepal, Turkey and South Africa. Each movement, to different degrees, has been victim to state repression. The paper outlines the authors’ understanding of social movement learning and the strategies, methodologies and theories that underpin the research. The second paper discusses lessons from the co-edited collection, Reflections on knowledge, learning and social movements: History’s schools highlighting (a) ideas, insights and visions produced in the course of people collectively working for social, economic and political change; (b) knowledge about systems of power and exploitation developed as people engage in struggle; and (c) existence of rich, often underexplored, archives and publications of earlier generations of movements. The third paper documents the experiences of a newly formed group, Puente, consisting of deportees who are learning how to construct new lives in Tijuana after expulsion from the United States. The paper explores how this community group continues to organize and gain members, and its potential to become an important political advocating for the rights of migrants living along the U.S.-Mexico border. Finally, the fourth paper examines the motivations and experiences of student activists involved in the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) student movement, exploring the movement’s local rationalities, militant particularisms, campaigns, and broader social movement projects. Together, these papers offer important insights about movements in learning in diverse global contexts.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Globalization and Education

Chair

• Rebecca Tarlau, Penn State University

Individual Presentations

• Social movement learning and knowledge production in the struggle for peace with social justice - Mario Novelli, Centre for International Education, University of Sussex

• History's schools: Past struggles and present realities - Aziz Choudry, McGill University; Salim Vally, University of Johannesburg

• An ethnography of learning and radical social change: The beginning of Puente, and the politics of possibility emerging post-deportation in Tijuana - Abigail Thornton, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

• Counter-hegemony on campus: an ethnography of Students for Justice in Palestine - Hiba Anwar, University of Maryland; Josette Graham, University of Maryland

Discussant

• Sangeeta Kamat, University of Massachusetts Amherst