New Book Explores Digital Technologies and Global Protest Movements
Networking Futures: the Movements against Corporate Globalization provides an ethnographic account of the cultural practice and politics of transnational networking among anti-corporate globalization activists based in Barcelona with a particular focus on the links between digital technologies, new forms of organization, and emerging political imaginaries. It also explores network organizing, performative protest, and violence during mass direct actions. For more information and/or to order the book, go to: www.networkingfutures.com.
Since the first worldwide protests inspired by Peoples’ Global Action (PGA), including the mobilization against the November 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, anti-corporate globalization activists have staged direct action protests against multilateral institutions in cities such as Prague, Barcelona, Genoa, and Cancun. Barcelona is a critical node, as Catalan activists have played key roles in the more radical PGA network and the broader World Social Forum process.
In 2001 and 2002, the anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris participated in the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance, one of the most influential anti-corporate globalization networks in Europe. Juris took part in hundreds of meetings, gatherings, protests, and online discussions. Those experiences form the basis of Networking Futures, an innovative ethnography of transnational activist networking within the movements against corporate globalization. In an account full of activist voices and on-the-ground detail, he explains how activists are not only responding to growing poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation but also building social laboratories for the production of alternative values, discourses, and practices.
Praise for the Book:
“Networking Futures is one of the very first books to map in detail the multiple networks that are challenging corporate globalization. Taking as a point of departure an exemplary case - the Catalan anti-globalization movements of the past decade - Jeffrey S. Juris moves on to chronicle the collective struggles to construct not only an alternative vision of possible worlds but the means to bring them about. Networking Futures is a compelling portrait of the spirit of innovation that lies behind an array of progressive mobilizations, from anarchist movements and street protests to the World Social Forum. Based on a well-developed notion of collaborative ethnography, it is also a wonderful example of engaged scholarship: a much-needed alternative to academic work as usual.”
-Arturo Escobar, author of Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes
“Jeffrey S. Juris gives us an illuminating model for how to study networks from below using the tools of ethnography. And in the process he reveals the extraordinary power (as well as the challenges) of network organizing for social movements today.”
-Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire and Multitude
“Networking Futures is a terrific, deeply informed ethnographic account of the origins and activities of the anti-corporate globalization movement. Jeffrey S. Juris’ identity is as much that of an activist who happens to be doing first-rate anthropology as vice versa, and there is much for anthropologists to reflect on in the way that this work is set up and narrated through these dual identities.”
-George E. Marcus, co-author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary
About the Author:
Jeffrey S. Juris is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. He is a co-author of Global Democracy and the World Social Forums and has published numerous articles in both scholarly journals and activist research forums. He also serves on the Editorial Board of Resistance Studies Magazine and has taken part in numerous direct action-oriented groups and networks, including the Movement for Global Resistance in Barcelona. His new fieldwork explores the relationship between grassroots media activism and autonomy in Mexico City.
The book can also be ordered from www.dukeupress.edu or www.amazon.com.
