Catching up on social movement theory
In 2004 my friend and colleague Madeline Gardner and I embarked on an in-depth collaborative study of social movement theory. We had collaborated on a number of grassroots organizing efforts in the five years before (e.g. the Minnehaha / Highway 55 campaign and then A16 and the global justice movement) and we were both looking for an opportunity to reflect more deeply on our experiences. We both enrolled at the University of Minnesota and we found two professors, John Wallace and Patrick McNamara, who were interested in working with us on independent studies that we carried out in Argentina. In Argentina we spent most of our time studying three movement forms that had emerged in the wake of the nation’s severe economic and political crisis of 2001. These three forms were: Neighborhood Assemblies, Recuperated Factories, and Movements of Unemployed Workers. (A great deal of our time was spent with the latter, volunteering with MTD Solano and MTD la Matanza.) We also studied Argentina’s political history, with an emphasis on the second half of the 20th …