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Disciplinary pressures within academia often produce specialised and one-sided accounts of complex social processes. Convincing accounts of popular education regularly acknowledge the importance of social movements but without theorising them adequately – and vice versa. This one-sidedness is compounded by a widespread tendency to generalise from often highly specific institutional and political contexts, as though all movements learned in the same way across space and time and popular education's role in fostering this learning is simple. Unchecked, this leads to the reification of 'critical' theory and the reduction and flattening of emancipatory practices to methods or even predefined goals. This paper constructs a dialogue between the work of Choudry, Freire and other authors in both fields, aimed at both celebrating and problematising their contribution to learning from our struggles. By developing a conversation between them, we want to explore how their insights might be usefully integrated for contemporary social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This practice note discusses why movements have a need to learn and the kinds of problems that present them with this need, both in identifying the need for movement and when movement institutions fail to have the effects intended. It discusses who owns the means of intellectual production that movements rely on and the differing capacities movements have around learning. It asks how we can place movement logics rather than media or academic ones at the centre of our learning, and concludes with three brief examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This practice note discusses why movements have a need to learn and the kinds of problems that present them with this need, both in identifying the need for movement and when movement institutions fail to have the effects intended. It discusses who owns the means of intellectual production that movements rely on and the differing capacities movements have around learning. It asks how we can place movement logics rather than media or academic ones at the centre of our learning, and concludes with three brief examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much radical writing on academia is grounded in a mystified view of knowledge in which an ecosocialist pedagogy would be "theory from above." This article argues for a different understanding of knowledge as materially situated in social and ecological relationships; oriented towards practice; developmental and contested from below, demystifying third-level education from the perspective of movement-generated knowledge. Concretely, this means starting from participants' existing praxis and "learning from each other's struggles"—using "frozen" movement theory and activist experience—to move towards a wider, more radical understanding. In Ireland such pedagogy is rooted in working-class community self-organising, rural environmental justice alliances, women's and GLTBQ activism, and the anti-capitalist "movement of movements," encapsulating Audre Lorde's dictum, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." The article focusses in particular on a "Masters for activists." The course supports movement participants to deepen and develop their activist practice but also to situate it within these wider and more radical understandings and emancipatory alliances. Taking movement praxis—rather than "contemplative" knowledge—as a starting point raises very different questions about theory and practice, forms and distribution of knowledge and the purpose and shape of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the tensions between activism and academia, the role of Marxism in the study of social movements, and the contours of the current political moment. Topics discussed include information on financial crisis and Great Recession of 2007–2009; decline of neoliberal hegemony; and importance of Marxism in the study of social movements.

This paper uses participant narratives and Marxist social movement theory to analyse resistance to water charges as the driving force of Irish anti-austerity struggles - or "the social movement in general". It locates this movement within the history of working-class community-based self-organisation in Ireland. Contemporary resistance to metering and refusal to pay are not "spontaneous", but articulate long-standing local rationalities. The current situation has seen the crisis of other forms of working-class articulation: union dependence on a Labour Party which enthusiastically embraced austerity in government; the co-optation of community service provision within "social partnership", under attack from the state since the mid-2000s; and the collapse of far left initiatives for shared parliamentary representation and resistance to household charges. New forms of popular agency are thus developing; community-based direct action has enabled a historic alliance between multiple forms of working-class voice and unleashed a vast process of popular mobilisation and self-education. Finally, the paper relates the Irish movement to the wider loss of consent for austerity on the European periphery, and asks after the political prospects for effective alliances "within the belly of the beast". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note explores some methodological challenges arising from biographical research on early Irish Buddhists in the colonial period. It briefly situates the role of such figures in relation to Asian anti-colonial movements and highlights the research challenges posed by multiple languages and countries, the variable preservation and digitisation of different kinds of sources, and the polarisation provoked by such figures. Practical solutions include international collaboration, digitisation, and a combination of quasiphilological precision and quasi-ethnographic understanding. The note highlights three relevant findings: a relativisation of the importance of organisations, a greater appreciation of the meanings of failure, and a historical materialist approach to possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walter Benjamin called upon historians to be cognisant of debts and danger, debts owed to the dead who had struggled and sacrificed and danger in the present. This historian realises that even the dead will not be safe without historians' active intervention, that memory of losses and sacrifices will be lost or distorted in the interests of the presently powerful, and most importantly, that memories of past struggles, the flashes seized, can become inspiration for political movements in the present and future (Kelly 1998). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses several reports published within the issue, including the relationship between social movements, knowledge and political contexts in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as well as key problems in movement strategy and ethics.

The article reviews the forthcoming November 2016 issue of "Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements."

This article revisits the debate over Barker and Cox's (2011) use of Gramsci's distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals to contrast academic and activist modes of theorizing about social movements. Often misread as an attack on personal choices in career and writing, the distinction aimed to highlight the different purposes, audiences, and social relationships entailed by these different forms of theorizing. Discourses which take 'scholarship' as their starting point position 'activist' as a personal choice within an institutional field, and substitute this moral commitment for a political assessment of its effects. By contrast, few academics have undergone the political learning curve represented by social movements. This may explain the widespread persistence -- beyond any intellectual or empirical credibility -- of a faith in 'critical scholarship' isolated from agency, an orientation to policy makers and mainstream media as primary audiences or an unquestioned commitment to existing institutional frameworks as pathways to substantial social change. Drawing on over three decades of movement participation and two of academic work, this article explores two processes of activist training within the academy. It also explores the politics of different experiences of theoretical publishing for social movements audiences. This discussion focuses on the control of the "means of mental production" (Marx, 1965), and the politics of distribution. The conclusion explores the broader implications of these experiences for the relationship between movements and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including international solidarity in social movements, crisis of international trade union bodies and tensions between southern and northern groups within Jubilee 2000 transnational debt campaign.

Sociology’s marginality to public discussion of the current economic, social and political 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 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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This teaching note discusses the MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. This is a practitioner course in social movement practice, now in its fourth year of operation. The note explains the MA's origins, discusses how it works in practice and explores some unresolved challenges. It concludes with some reflections on the role of such educational projects in relation to movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on a symposium on social movements with activists hosted by the Transnational Institute Amsterdam. The symposium focused on movement organising in Europe, and identify strategic implications in a way that can be usefully shared with activists across Europe. The symposium was attended by researchers including Jille Belisario, Coffi Badou-Bonsou, Brid Brennan, Ewa Charkiewicz, Daniel Chavez, and Laurence Cox.

This article explores strategic conceptions within the alter-globalisation movement in Ireland. Based on action research carried out within the left-libertarian ('Grassroots') wing of the movement, it notes imbalances in participation in a very intensive form of political activity, and asks how activists understand winning. It finds substantial congruence between organisational practice and long-term goals, noting social justice and participatory democracy along with feminist, environmental and anti-war concerns as central. Using Wallerstein's proposed transition strategy for anti-systemic movements, it argues that Irish alter-globalisation activists are realistic about popular support and state power, and concerned to link short-term work around basic needs with the construction of alternative institutions and long-term struggles for a different social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores some important aspects of U Dhammaloka's Buddhism, drawing in particular on the work of his Rangoon-based Buddhist Tract Society between 1907 and 1910. It explores his work-in the Society and more generally-as in effect a social movement organiser within the Buddhist Revival, looking at his funders, publishers, printers, translators and distributors as well as those who wrote about him, laid down their hair for him to walk on, covered his train or boat fares, put up his friends in monasteries or let them cross borders, and so forth. It also looks at what we know about his organisations and involvement in other people's organisations, asking who he intended to mobilise and who his audience was, how his use of confrontation and polemic fitted into this, and how successful he was. Following this, it goes on to discuss the intellectual sources of the free-thinking (atheist) positions espoused in the Society's publications, and asks more generally how his posture can be located in relation to the politics of plebeian freethought in Ireland, Britain, the USA and Asia. These questions arose out of an attempt to shed some light on the missing half-century before Dhammaloka became a public Buddhist figure; while the article can give no definite answers in terms of organising experience, intellectual inheritance or formative backgrounds, it suggests an alternative perspective that highlights a substantial, internationally connected 'Workers' University', grounded in the freethinking cultures of self-taught plebeian radicals, at the roots of western Buddhism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: 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 history of thinking about ordinary people''s political engagement since the French Revolution. It explores various literatures relating to the topic, arguing that emotional sustainability is only one aspect of personal sustainability in social movements. Using the example of WB Yeats'' response to the 1916 Easter Rising, it highlights the importance of locating this in place, time and culture. The paper offers a typological approach as a counter-strategy to the assumption of uniformity, focussing on difference in social situation, organising contexts and background cultures. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]