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Disobedient Theatre ‐ A Toolkit for Change, facilitated by Aylwyn Walsh and Paul RoutledgeOld Bridge Street Church, Leeds, UK, 5 October 2019

This paper examines tactical performance – a creative and humorous form of protest - as a form of alter-geopolitical intervention that poses counter-hegemonic challenges in society. This paper extends the writing on humour in political geography through a consideration of the spatial use of humour in political protest. My analysis is informed by a scholar activist methodology rooted in collaboration with resisting others and an ethic of solidarity. The paper argues that the practice of tactical performance requires a narrative that is attentive to an ‘action logic’ that mobilises humour and requires both emotional and spatial registers understood as sites of intervention that articulate alternative geopolitical narratives and practices from below through various forms of material action. This approach to alter-geopolitical action is grounded in an empirical case study in which the author participated, namely the Dawn of the Debt zombie action during the 2004 May Day protests in Glasgow, Scotland. Drawing upon disposition theories of humour, and a Marxist understanding of the figure of the zombie in contemporary capitalism, the paper argues that while in engaging with particular action logics and sites of intervention, the use of humour in political protest remained ambiguous in its results. This poses challenges to the deployment of humour and tactical performance as forms of alter-geopolitics while at the same time opening up new avenues to activist engagement.

Possibilities for engendering sustainable and just futures are foundering in part because key resources are managed by elites through ‘top down’ environmental governance and management, and knowledge production regimes, largely committed to retaining the status quo, fail to pursue new ways of managing resource consumption and distribution. In this paper, we argue for an alternative climate justice agenda that is enabled through grassroots mobilisation in collaboration with state action. To do this we consider the state as a continued terrain of possibility for positive social, economic and environmental change, noting the imperative of historically attentive state-enabled redistribution along persistent axes of difference. In articulating an alternative understanding of the state, we emphasise the importance of social movements capable of cultivating networked militant particularisms that can be channeled through and beyond state governance processes. In order to ground these ideas, we provide two brief case studies, tracking food sovereignty and energy remunicipalization initiatives.

This paper considers the politics of land occupation in Bangladesh. Contentious politics have been conceptualised as 'societies in movement' by Raul Zibechi, defined through their attempts to disperse power through the reconfiguration of social relations between peasants, the state and capital. Drawing on the author's ethnographic engagement with peasant farmer movements in Bangladesh since 2002, the paper analyses the differential powers generated in, by and through the production of relations and connections involved in land occupations. This requires a consideration of both relational and structural understandings of contentious politics. Organisational structures and dynamics, as well as the 'resourcefulness' of social movements (e.g. their capacities to deploy material resources, skills and knowledges), enable land occupation since these are crucial in creating and maintaining the socio-material relations necessary for political activity to be prosecuted. Drawing together these insights, the paper conceptualises land occupation as a process of 'territorialising movement' articulated through three interwoven spatial practices: strategic occupation, reconfiguration of social relations and territorialisation of translocal solidarities.

Participatory approaches have become increasingly popular within geography in recent years, but some would argue that participatory working is both in vogue and in crisis. In this special section of Area we have drawn together a series of papers to reflect on the complexities, tensions and difficulties that are caught up with the potentials and politics of participatory ways of working and thinking. In this introductory editorial we set out the impetus behind the special section, reflecting on the history of participatory geographies and the contemporary challenges arising from such ways of working. The role of the Participatory Geographies Research Group as a collective supporting and critically engaging with participatory research is also outlined.

This paper examines the gendered politics of national and international networking amongst peasant farmers' movements in South Asia. In particular the paper provides an ethnographic account, based upon the author's critical engagement with the Bangladesh Krishok (farmer) Federation and the Bangladesh Kishani Sabha (Women Farmers' Association), of the Climate Change, Gender and Food Sovereignty Caravan that was organised in Bangladesh in 2011. The paper draws upon Antonio Gramsci's theory of the philosophy of praxis and feminist research on social reproduction, dispossession and materiality to interrogate the spaces of encounter and solidarity-building practices of the Caravan between different communities in the country and between different social movement actors. The paper examines how processes of political organisation and consciousness-raising within and between social movements are problematised by gendered power relations. The paper concludes with suggestions concerning how the philosophy of praxis in Bangladesh might be "engendered" to incorporate a politics of social reproduction.

In this article we offer a set of resources for scholar-activists to reflect on and guide their practice. We begin by suggesting that research questions should be triangulated to consider not only their scholarly merit but the intellectual and political projects the findings will advance and the research questions of interest to community and social movement collaborators.

Articulations of climate justice were central to the diverse mobilisations that opposed the Copenhagen Climate Talks in December 2009. This paper contends that articulations of climate justice pointed to the emergence of three co-constitutive logics: antagonism, the common(s), and solidarity. Firstly, we argue that climate justice involves an antagonistic framing of climate politics that breaks with attempts to construct climate change as a “post-political” issue. Secondly, we suggest that climate justice involves the formation of pre-figurative political activity, expressed through acts of commoning. Thirdly, we contend that climate justice politics generates solidarities between differently located struggles and these solidarities have the potential to shift the terms of debate on climate change. Bringing these logics into conversation can develop the significance of climate justice for political practice and strategy. We conclude by considering what is at stake in different articulations of climate justice and tensions in emerging forms of climate politics.

This paper is concerned with the political performance of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) during the protests against the G8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland in 2005. In particular, the paper is concerned with how emotional experiences within political moments or events can be constituted through performances that fashion “sensuous solidarities”. Sensuous solidarities are generated through diverse bodily movements and techniques, and are indicative of both the performative character of activist subjectivities and the content of activists’ public (political) performances. Reflecting on my participation in CIRCA, this paper will argue that sensuous solidarities constituted a series of complex, contradictory and emotive co-performances and resonances with police, other protestors and the public and in doing so will consider the efficacy of those forms of activism that Duncombe (2007, Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. London: The New Press) has termed “ethical spectacles”.

********** The solidarity rally through the Narmada river valley arrives at Nisrapur, a village of 10,000 people near the banks of the river. This village is one of 62 slated for submergence as a result of the construction of dams along the Narmada.... People throng the streets. The beat of drums and metal thalis [plates] is interspersed with the trilling of flutes.... Slogans rend the air as flower petals rain down. Women and girls rush to apply red and yellow powder tilaks [devotional marks] to our foreheads. Rallyists swallowed by the crowd are swept along by the rhythm of the night, by the chanting, dancing, music-driven river of faces. The river swirls and eddies, flows forward and meanders. From the market square, long into the night, speeches, songs, and poems fill the air. Water is passed to slake our thirst. Like the Narmada river, it is water for life, not for the death that the dams will bring. A song of rebellion is taken up by the crowd and accompanied by rhythmic clapping.... Within it flows a message to a ll those who would sit back and bemoan the plight of the dispossessed and displaced of the world without doing anything to challenge it. It is simple: "So that there is no darkness to fear, so that life is not drenched with tears.... That is why we choose the path of struggle." This extract from my summer 1999 research journal captures a moment of fieldwork, describing a struggle in central India that was an indelible part of my field experience. Its embodied philosophy of collaborative engagement raises questions about the appropriate practice of research. For three months of that summer, I conducted preliminary research on the construction of a multidam project in the Narmada Valley, India, and participated in resisting its construction. THE RIVER The Narmada River runs for 1,289 kilometers through the Indian states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat, passing though fertile plains and a series of hill ranges including the Vindhyas and Satpuras. The river valley is home to wealthy cash-crop farmers and adivasi (tribal) subsistence farmers such as the Bhil and Bhilala. The Narmada Valley has been home to these peoples for generations, and the river is itself one of India's most sacred. Daughter of the Hindu god Shiva, Narmada is worshiped in numerous temples located along her banks. For generations, devotees have undertaken a parikrama, a foot pilgrimage along both banks of the river that traditionally takes three years, three months, and three days. For forty years, since 1961, the distant central government has wanted to construct 30 large, 135 medium, and 3,000 small dams along the river to harness the waters of the Narmada and its tributaries in order to provide water and electricity for development. The Sardar Sarovar Dam is the largest, currently in operation at a height of 85 meters, with a final proposed height of 136.5 meters. More than fifty villages have already been submerged during its construction. The central government claims that the Sardar Sarovar Project will irrigate 1.8 million hectares, including the drought-prone areas of Kutch and Saurashtra in Gujarat. However, the dam already consumes 80 percent of Gujarat's irrigation budget, with only 1.6 percent of cultivable land in Kutch and 9 percent of Saurashtra's cultivable land in its command area. Most water will in truth irrigate the sugar farms of wealthy Gujarat farmers (Fisher 1995; Roy 1999). A spate of independent research on megadam projects documents them as ecological, economi c, and cultural disasters that deliver but a fraction of purported benefits (McCully 1996). When construction of the planned dams along the Narmada is completed, up to 15 million people (especially adivasis and peasant farmers) will eventually be displaced through flooding, the construction of a canal to divert water from the Sardar Sarovar Dam, and the establishment of construction colonies and wildlife sanctuaries. …

This study will consider how the reconfiguration of political life in relation to globalising economic and social processes has seen renewed efforts by social movements to extend their reach beyond local or national boundaries. To achieve this, social movements are constructing multiscalar networks of support and solidarity for their particular struggles, and participating with other movements in broad networks to resist neoliberal globalisation. Much of the recent literature on transnational activism has neglected the spatial practices of transnational political activity, and presents a singular notion of what constitutes transnational resistance networks. This study will discuss how, within such networks, diverse interests and identities are constituted within geographically complex set of relations, reconfiguring politics at all scales.

The recent emergence of global justice networks (GJNs) to counter neoliberal globalization has been an important political and geographical phenomenon. Much has been written about the emergence of a new global civil society, centred upon a new `network' ontology. In engaging with these debates in this paper, our purpose is to develop a more critical spatial perspective. We argue that issues of space and place are critical in understanding the operation of GJNs and their potential to contribute to an alternative global politics. Spatially, the global linkages of GJNs can be seen as creating cultural and spatial configurations that connect places with each other in opposition to neoliberalism. However, the individual movements that comprise networks, while not necessarily place-restricted, remain heavily territorialized in their struggles. Additionally, networks evolve unevenly over space. Some groups and actors within them are able to develop extensive translocal connections and associations whereas others remain relatively more localized. Potential conflicts arise from such complex geographies, which only become evident through analysing the operation and evolution of different networks. This leads us to focus not solely on the transnational character of networks but also upon how the global is enacted through the localized practices of movements within them, in considering the potential for GJNs to form more sustainable political alternatives to neoliberalism.

The development of a global production networks (GPN) perspective in economic geography has brought valuable insights into the social and political relations between regional, state and corporate actors in understanding processes of value capture in the production of commodities. However, to date, little has been said about labour as an active constituent of the global economy, rather than the passive victim of restructuring processes. In this article, we seek to rectify this situation by, first, theorizing the agency of labour in GPNs and the continuing role of class struggle in shaping the global economy, and second, exploring the positionality of unions within this framework. Through a case study of ICEM (the International Chemical, Energy, Mining and General Workers Federation), we show how union strategies evolve through contested socio–spatial relations both within unions themselves and with other social actors. Promoting transnational labour rights and improved employment conditions at the global scale is an aspiration of most union actors, but this is inevitably compromised by different subject positions in relation to broader processes of capital accumulation.

In this paper I will draw upon ANT to consider how political associations are generated within a global network of grassroots peasant movements. ANT has failed to fully consider the ways of generating such associations, especially the processes through which such associations are made. In so doing, the causes of and accountability for differential power relations have been precluded, as have the productive dimensions of that power. Through a consideration of the moments and strategies of network translation, I will show that power inequalities and intentionality act to determine the contours of network association.

In this paper we draw critically upon actor network theory (ANT) in order to analyse the contours of relationality, communication, and operational logic within a global justice network—People's Global Action Asia. Drawing upon the concept of translation, we consider how connections are fostered and sustained within the network, focusing upon the work of key organisers (those we term the ‘imagineers’) and key events in producing the network. In so doing, we ground ANT in direct political engagement and introduce the concept of ‘grassrooting vectors’ to highlight the power relations at work within global justice networks, a consideration which is crucial to the formation of mutual solidarity between social movements.

There is a new breed of trades union press journalists - and they are fast breeders, writes Routledge. Union membership has more than halved, to 6.5 million, since the mid-1970s, yet there are dozens of media officers in the labour movement, and a clutch of ex-union PRs are in the House of Commons, some of them in senior ministerial positions. "By the same token," writes Routledge, "the number of journalists specialising in industrial affairs has diminished almost to vanishing point, yet the number of full-time spin-doctors seeking to bend their ear has sharply increased. Some kind of inverse Parkinson's Law is at work, requiring the number of press officers to rise in direct proportion to the decline in trade union activity. What is going on?"

This paper considers grassroots globalization networks, which comprise a diversity of social movements working in association to engage in multi-scalar political action. Drawing upon David Harvey’s notion of militant particularism (regarding the problems of effecting politics between different geographical scales), and recent research on networks and their relationship to places, the paper analyses People’s Global Action, an international network of social movements opposing neoliberal globalization. From an analysis of the process geographies of People’s Global Action, the paper proposes the notion of convergence space as a conceptual tool by which to understand and critique grassroots globalization networks. The paper argues that contested social relations emerge in such convergence spaces and considers the implications of these for theorizing such networks, and for political action.

This paper analyses the conflict surrounding the construction of mega-dams along the Narmada river valley in central India. In particular, the paper examines various repertoires of resistance employed by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (save the Narmada movement, NBA) the principal protagonist resisting the Narmada valley development project. Various spaces of economic, cultural, ecological, and political erasure are engendered by the construction of the Narmada dams, and the NBA articulates resistance, and engages in constructive development alternatives, in each of these spaces. The discursive articulations of resistance provide a crucial counterpoint to material expressions of struggle. Discursive resistance takes the form of academic analyses, peasant testimonials and slogans. Utilising Warren’s concept of testimonios, the paper argues that movement identity articulates a unity that effaces internal difference, contradiction and ambiguity. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the role of academics in highlighting such ambiguities, in the context of collaboration with social movements.

There has been a renewed intellectual concern with the politics of geographical research in recent years, which has expressed, at times, the need for an engagement between the often separate worlds of academia and activism. Interventions by critical geographers such as Ian Maxey, and feminist geographers, including Cindi Kate, Heidi Nast, Gillian Rose, and J-K Gibson-Graham, have provided important insights into the political commitment geographers bring to their research, critical and reflexive forms of engagement, and the politics of fieldwork, representational strategies, and collaborative research. This paper examines the author's collaborative critical engagement with two organizations—the Goa Foundation and the Jagrut Goenkaranchi Fouz (Vigilant Goan Army)—involved in resisting tourism development in Goa, India. Collaboration took several forms, particularly the author masquerading as a tour operator, Walter Kurtz, in order to elicit information concerning the contravention of Goan environmental laws by hotel developers. Drawing, in particular, upon the insights of the aforementioned feminist geographers concerning identity, difference, and power in the conducting of fieldwork, I examine the problematic ethical and power relations that were encountered during the performance of collaborative research. In so doing, I argue for a relational and reflexive ethics of research that is attentive to difference in seeking a common ground with resisting others.