Abstract
‘Emancipation’ remains marginal as a theme within Latin American studies (LAS) with the focus on questions of institutional politics, democracy, democratization, citizenship and development. Yet for the past two decades social movements have been articulating new imaginaries, ideas and practices beyond traditionally conceived frameworks of social change. They are anticipating alternative arrangements towards a dignified collective life. In these alternative possibilities, emancipation does not allude to a revolutionary process to take the power of the state, but denotes other horizons that in principle transcend the state as the main locus of struggle. These movements pose methodological, theoretical and epistemological challenges to the study of Latin America.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | BLAR12525 |
| Pages (from-to) | 3–4 |
| Journal | Bulletin of Latin American Research |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 25 Jul 2016 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2017 |
| Event | SLAS Annual Conference 2012, - Duration: 11 Apr 2012 → 13 May 2012 |
Bibliographical note
Ana Cecilia Dinerstein teaches political sociology in the department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath, UK. She has a degree in Politics from the University of Buenos Aires, and an MA and a PhD degree from Sociology, at the University of Warwick, where she subsequently held a four-year lectureship to teach political sociology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels before coming to Bath in 2002. She has published extensively on Argentine and Latin American politics, autonomy, subjectivity, labour, social and indigenous movements, emancipatory struggles and the politics of policy. Her research seeks to understand and explain the means by which labour, social movements and ‘hope’ movements in Latin America but not exclusively articulate alternative praxis and horizons, or ‘concrete utopias’ in, against and beyond capitalist, patriarchal and colonial society. Ana's work challenges the 'claim-making' definition of the role of social movements by shifting the focus towards their constitutive function as vehicles for the creation of 'alternative' (new) worlds and their capacity to inspire social scientists to adopt the principle of hope as a method of critique and enquiry of social reality. Ana has written books, journal articles and book sections for academic and non-academic audiences on issues of labour and social movements, movements of protest, social emancipation, and Marxist theory, and the politics surrounding policy implementation, including the use of state violence. She is internationally known for her work on Open Marxism and her research on labour and labour subjectivity, Argentine politics and the Movement of Unemployed Workers, and the impact of autonomous organising on democracy and policy making. She is member of associate and advisory boards of Historical Materialism (London), Sociología del Trabajo (Madrid), Observatorio Latinoamericano and Herramienta (Buenos Aires). Her main publications include The Labour Debate (2002), translated into Turkish (2006) and Spanish (2009), La Ruta de los Piqueteros. Luchas y Legados (2010) and The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope (2015). She is a Research Partner of the New Politics Project (2016-2020) run by the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam) and Convenor of the new international research-activist group Women on the Verge. She has a forthcoming edited collection titled New Social Sciences for An Other Politics: Women Theorising without Parachutes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).Sara Motta is Senior Lecturer in Politics and IR, Newcastle Business School
The University of Newcastle. Sara C Motta’s scholarly practice transgresses borders - epistemological, social and spatial- as a means to co-construct with communities in struggle a critical political science practice for and of the subaltern. She has published widely in international journals including Political Studies, Latin American Perspectives, Antipode, Historical Materialism and produced a number of books including (co-edited with Alf Nilsen) 2011 Social Movements in the Global South: Dispossession, Development and Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan); the (co-edited) with Mike Cole) 2013 Education and Social Change in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan) and 2014 21st Century Socialism: The Role of Radical Education (Palgrave Macmillan). She is co-founder and Latin American editor of the open access peer-reviewed journal Interface: a journal for and about social movement; advising editor for Latin American Perspectives, and founding co-editor of the Journal of Critical Southern Studies. She has been involved in organising numerous projects of radical education including, the Nottingham Critical Pedagogy Project; Newcastle Critical Pedagogy Community of Practice; the Social Science Centre and PRONERA, State University of Ceara, Brazil. She also writes a radical feminist column Beautiful Transgressions for Ceasefire Magazine. She is currently writing a decolonial feminist monograph ‘Liminal Subjectivities’ which aims to contribute to the reimagining of an emancipatory politics of the 21st Century.
Keywords
- social movements
- epistemology
- latin america
- Bolivia
- argentina
- Brazil
- Colombia
- pedagogical
- land
- the law
