MI session at Manchester conference
merijn.o@gmx.net, 13.04.2003 08:13
The Mobilised Investigation project will be presented at the Manchester social movement conference -22nd to the 25 of April- together with other activist research projects.
Session on Mobilised Investigation
At the Manchester conference on social movements
Tuesday 22th of April 4:00–6:00 pm
Beyond the stereotype of the lone male intellectual,
Towards collective emancipatory knowledge production
Session on Mobilised Investigation (MI)
What a lot of academics that study social movements seem to forget, is that the networking mass of social researchers is in itself a social movement. A movement in dire need of self-study. Although different scholars have already pointed out that knowledge is always situated knowledge, very little discussion has taken place among social researchers on their particular situation of knowledge production. As a consequence, the role of the objective, lonely and distant intellectual continues to demand it’s due.
Now, a new movement has risen, and is already being accompanied by another phenonemon: the sudden resurrection of the peace movement. The time for analysis is now, and the way to do that has become an essential question. It is time to learn from past mistakes of social researchers and intellectuals, it is time to break the spell of the self-absorbed circles of academia, it is time to find out how our work can contribute to radical social change.
Different persons that are commited activists as well as curious investigators have initiated projects to combine the best of both worlds and push for radical social change. They will discuss self-organisation, methodology and possibilities for cooperation.
-A brief presentation of the network proposal Mobilized Investigation (MI), an initiative to create a network among the people that are developing research from and are active in social movements.
-Three presentations of experiences of research that are useful tools for social movements:
-The experience of the Practical Guide for Social Transformation in Barcelona. A guide with thousands of contacts, experiences and researches, being developed as a collective exercise, creating access to the information and knowledge developed in the past 2 years of ongoing mobilizations in Catalunya.
By Mayo Fuster
-Brian Holmes presents the cartography projects “Refuse the Biopolice" and "European Norms of World-Production". They are both projects of Bureau d'Etudes, developed within the framework of Université Tangente.
-The book project proposal Sights on Struggle edited By Uri Gordon.
-After the presentation a debate on the problematic connected to this kind of investigation and on ways to improve collective discussion, co-operation and co-ordination and discuss the (concrete and theoretical) possibilities of the Mobilized Investigation network initiative.
Background of the people involved:
Mayo Fuster Morell is from Oliva (Valencia), Spanish State and is now working on her "Social movements and urban studies" PhD University Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona) about the European process of social mobilization. She has been active with the Movimiento de Resistencia Global (MRG) in Barcelona and promoting the European Social Consulta project, as well as in dynamising the mobilizations to Prague, Genoa and Barcelona. She is now primarily working with the EYFA network for environmental and social justice based in Amsterdam.
Merijn Oudenampsen is from Amsterdam (Netherlands), a fourth year student of political science in Amsterdam. He is and has been active in diverse organisations and projects, among which the Anarchist collective Eurodusnie in Leiden and the Peoples’ Global Action (PGA) network. He has also been involved in the big mobilisations around the IMF/WB in Prague and the G8 in Genoa. He is now working with Greenpepper in Barcelona, a European quarterly currently working on an issue on the war.
Brian Holmes, art critic, culture critic and activist, usually all at once. He lives in France and is bilingual (Spanish and Italian too). He has been participating in many demonstrations these last years, first with the group Ne pas plier and more recently with Bureau d'Etudes, who try to map out the actors of global capitalism and the resistance to it. He has also done some writing on the kind of subjectivity formed by the new regime of networked capitalism; most pertinent in this respect is his essay, "The Flexible Personality: For a new cultural critique," which you can find at .
Uri Gordon, an Israeli doctoral student in political philosophy at Oxford, working on an anarchist theory of democracy. Much of it is inspired and informed by what he has been encountering as an activist in the movement’s blessedly ultra-democratic structures, with all their strengths and limitations. Activism-wise he has been working on the European Social Consulta and on international coordination of direct action in Palestine/Israel – besides being an engaged summit-hopper.