Connecting the peripheries: networks, place and scale in the World Social Forum process

Abstract

Communication technologies occupy a central place in contemporary theorizations of transnational social movement networks. Not only does the internet provide the technical infrastructure through which activists communicate and share information, increasing their capacity to introduce oppositional messages into the public realm (Castells); its network architecture is also closely linked to the organizational logic of contemporary social justice movements (Juris). While recognizing the fundamental importance of communication technologies for such movements, this article cautions against overly disembodied conceptions of transnational activist networks and highlights the need to pay attention to issues of place and scale, as well as the importance of affect in the construction of alternative global imaginaries. Through a case study of a small social forum event held in February 2010 in a poor urban community in the south of Brazil as part of the World Social Forum process, the article examines activists’ use of communication technologies to construct transnational networks between different place-based actors. It shows that these practices are not simply concerned with establishing links between already existing places; the creation of networks is also inextricably bound up with particular constructions of place. By engaging in a politics that is simultaneously place-based and global in scope, these actors challenge traditional conceptions of scale as well as dominant epistemological paradigms.

Keywords:

• World Social Forum
• social movement networks
• new communication technologies
• place
• globality

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the organizers of the Expanded Social Forum of the Peripheries for their hospitality and acknowledge their intellectual contributions to this article.

Notes

1. For key arguments in this debate, see, for example, Patomaki and Teivainen (2004), Teivainen (2004), Wallerstein (2004), Whitaker (2008), as well as contributions to the 2005 special issue on the WSF of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29 (2).

2. Dunas hosted its first social forum in late 2000, inspired by the preparations for the inaugural WSF in nearby Porto Alegre, which was held in January 2001. Forums held in Dunas since then include the Dunas Social Forum (Fórum Social Dunas) in 2006, the Social Forum of the Communities of Rio Grande (Fórum Social das Comunidades do Rio Grande) in 2007 and the Social Forum of the Periphery (Fórum Social da Periferia) in 2008.

3. The notion of “the periphery” has a particular meaning in the Brazilian context. In general usage, it refers to areas located on the outskirts of big cities and is loaded with connotations of deprivation and poverty. “The periphery” is also claimed as a political identity by many urban social movements wishing to redefine the concept and condition of being on the margins in positive terms.

4. All quotations from interviews have been translated from Portuguese by the author.

5. The modernity/coloniality programme is associated primarily with the work of Argentine/Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel, Peruvian sociologist Ánibal Quijano and Argentine/US cultural theorist Walter Mignolo. Coloniality, in this framework, refers to the “underside” of modernity – “those subaltern knowledges and cultural practices world-wide that modernity itself shunned, suppressed, made invisible and disqualified” (Escobar 2004, 210) – which has existed alongside modernity since the conquest of the Americas and is, fundamentally, constitutive of it (Mignolo 2000). See Escobar (2007b) for a critical overview.