This book explores how the World Social Forum (WSF) has developed in response to the current period of profound crisis and transition in the history of Western capitalist modernity. The WSF has been thrown up by social forces as a laboratory of practices for other possible worlds; it is at a leading edge of the transition, where other possible futures are being imagined and constructed, but it is also firmly rooted in the order that is passing. Based on ten years of field work on three continents, this book examines social movements as knowledge producers. It pays attention to specific movements and their praxis-based knowledges and its arguments are grounded in sustained empirical attention to what movements are doing and saying on the terrain of the WSF over time and from place to place. Engaging with several strands of social and political thought, global civil society, autonomism, and transnational feminism, each chapter outlines a set of contestations and contributions with relevance beyond debates about the WSF.It will be of strong interest to students and scholars of social movement studies; international politics; gender studies; sociology; political theory and social work.

Praxis and Politics explores the knowledge arising from activist praxis and its significance for reimagining radical and democratic politics. It is based on five years of direct involvement in the Toronto-based Metro Network for Social Justice and their work in coalition building, campaign-organizing and 'economic and political literacy' work in the aftermath of the signing of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. The book breaks new theoretical and methodological ground in social movement studies in drawing on a wide range of traditions including cultural studies, urban studies, political economy and feminism.

Praxis and Politics explores the knowledge arising from activist praxis and its significance for reimagining radical and democratic politics. It is based on five years of direct involvement in the Toronto-based Metro Network for Social Justice and their work in coalition building, campaign-organizing and 'economic and political literacy' work in the aftermath of the signing of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. The book breaks new theoretical and methodological ground in social movement studies in drawing on a wide range of traditions including cultural studies, urban studies, political economy and feminism.

This book analyzes the World Social Forum (WSF) in a context of crisis and transition in the history of Western capitalist modernity. Based on ten years of fieldwork on three continents, this book treats social movements as knowledge producers. It pays attention to what movements are doing and saying on the terrain of the WSF over time and from place to place, and to how they theorize its significance. Framed by the Latin American modernity-coloniality perspective, the book critically engages with discourses of global civil society, autonomism, and transnational feminism toward a reading of the WSF through the lens of 'colonial difference'. Each chapter outlines a set of contestations and contributions with relevance beyond debates about the WSF. It will be of strong interest to students and scholars of social movement studies; international politics; post-colonial studies; gender studies; sociology; political theory and social work.

Coalition formation, broad-based campaign organizing, and activist education are among the methods discussed in this practical text for grassroots organizations attempting to advance their goals. The execution of social movements on a day-to-day basis is explained with attention to how social justice organizations struggle because many of the groups are disparate and poorly organized. The specific experiences of a leader of the Metro Network for Social Justice in Toronto are analyzed in detail to provide a practical discusssion of the key challenges facing social organizations: representation structures, decision making, democratic governance, and power in activist politics. The application of these issues illustrates methods and best practices for social change in other similar organizations.

Conditions for global solidarities and social movements have changed radically since their high point in the 1990s United Nations conferences. This collection considers how political solidarities are being understood and constructed in a variety of cross-border struggles and for what ends under twenty-first century conditions. In studies grounded in different world regions at a variety of scales, authors address: how the Cold War divide and its aftermath have structured contemporary asymmetries in European LGBT movements and in 'global' feminisms; how 'colonial difference' in Latin America confronts feminist and social justice movements with problems of translation across worlds; how travelling concepts essential to constructing solidarities across distance and difference traverse linguistic divides and attendant power imbalances in world cities and transnational networks; how rurality as a form of colonial difference challenges established categories of intersectional feminism. Feminist politics of power and difference, and attention to gendered agency, are at the centre of this inquiry into the possibility of twenty-first century solidarities across borders.