sn 5899 making feminist sense of 'the anti-globalisation ... · aim 1: to develop a feminist...

UK Data Archive

Study Number 5899

Making Feminist Sense of 'the Anti-Globalisation Movement', 2004-2005

USER GUIDE

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RESEARCH PROPOSAL

Making Feminist Sense of ‘the Anti-Globalisation Movement’

CONTEXT

From the Zapatistas to Seattle, from the World Social Forum to Bolivian campaignsagainst water privatisation, struggles against neoliberal globalisation have beengrabbing the headlines and reshaping political imaginations worldwide. Manycommentators and activists consider these struggles to constitute the most significantsocial movement to emerge on the contemporary world stage, and there has been agrowing literature on this movement in recent years. In International Relations, workon the politics of globalisation, resistance and global civil society has increasinglytouched on ‘the anti-globalisation movement’ (AGM) (eg. Gills 2000; Gill 2003;Colas 2001; Held and McGrew 2002; Glasius et al. 2002). In politics and sociology, ahandful of authors have applied political process theory to the movement (Smith andJohnston 2002) while there is also a very large, and still growing, activist-producedand activist-oriented literature on this topic (eg. Bircham and Charlton 2001; Klein2002; Notes from Nowhere 2003; Kingsnorth 2003; Broad 2002).

All of this work is interesting and ground-breaking, yet it has some significantproblems. Much of the International Relations literature is empirically limited; theactivist-produced literature, although empirically rich, is theoreticallyunderdeveloped; and the political process analyses draw on a rather narrow theoreticalframework. Furthermore, it is very rare in any of the work on the AGM to findacknowledgement of the role of women’s or feminist activism, let alone sustainedanalysis of feminist concerns. Although there is an explicitly feminist literature onfeminist resistances to globalisation, this has tended to focus on transnational feministnetworks or local women’s organising and has not yet interrogated the role of suchgroups within the AGM as such (eg. Marchand and Runyan 2000; Rowbotham andLinkogle 2001; Mohanty 2003; Signs 2001; Feminist Review 2002).

Our preliminary research on this topic suggests that women and feminist groupsparticipate extensively in the AGM. Furthermore, we would argue that feminism hasmuch to offer those seeking to theorise this movement. In sum, we believe there is anurgent need for research that offers a sustained theoretical and empirical analysis ofthe AGM from a feminist perspective. Our research responds to this imperative.

AIMS/QUESTIONS

This research has three aims, each giving rise to its own set of questions:

AIM 1: to develop a feminist theorisation of ‘the anti-globalisation movement’. Thiswill involve a critique of gendered exclusions in the movement and in the literature onit, and the articulation of a feminist alternative, drawing on diverse sources includingfeminist methodology, black and third world feminist debates and feminist activistself-representations. It will involve asking questions such as: what are the dominantconceptual tools in International Relations, politics and sociology that are being

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deployed to make sense of the AGM? In what ways can feminist theory andmethodology help us to construct an alternative understanding of the AGM and itspolitical significance?

AIM 2: to collect and analyse empirical data on women and feminist activists in themovement - to map their organisational and ideological linkages and to criticallyevaluate their strategies for building alliances and for bringing about social change.This will involve asking questions such as: Which women’s and feminist groups areinvolved in the AGM? What alliances have been forged and what ideological overlapsand divergences are apparent between feminists and other strands of the AGM (suchas social democrats, marxists and anarchists)? What are the power relations between‘women’s groups’ and ‘feminist groups’? What strategies for building alliances andfor bringing about social change are these groups pursuing? What are the benefits andcosts of their differing approaches?

AIM 3: to reflect on the implications of our feminist research on the AGM for theteaching of global politics. Questions here include: how can we teach global politicsin ways that take seriously movements as objects of study and sources of knowledge?What changes to the curriculum would be required and what teaching methods wouldbe appropriate? To what extent should such innovations be seen as part of a broaderpolitics of resistance as exemplified by the AGM?

DATASET REVIEW

We have reviewed the most important database websites including UKDA's onlinecatalogue, ESDS Qualidata's catalogue (Qualicat), ESRC's research databaseREGARD, and SOSIG. No existing appropriate datasets were found. We alsotelephoned Qualidata on 25/3/04 and spoke to Libby Bishop who confirmed that noappropriate datasets are currently available.

METHODOLOGY/METHOD

Our empirical research will begin with the World Social Forum (WSF) process. Thisis currently the most accessible, high-profile and politically significant manifestationof ‘the anti-globalisation movement’. The initial WSF took place in Porto Alegre,Brazil, in January 2001. It is now an annual global event and has spawned a rollingseries of national and regional fora (WSF 2004; Sen et al. 2004). We attended the lastEuropean Social Forum (ESF) in Paris, November 2003, and the last WSF inMumbai, India, January 2004, where we conducted preliminary research, includingsome initial interviews, to establish the parameters of this project. We have also madeappropriate contacts with a number of key feminist ‘anti-globalisation’ groups. Wenow seek to extend and develop our research at the upcoming ESF in London,October 2004, and the fifth WSF to be held in Porto Alegre, January 2005. At theseevents, we will conduct interviews with activists in international women’s andfeminist networks involved in the Forum process, such as Articulation FeministaMarcosur, the World March for Women, Women in Black, and DevelopmentAlternatives for Women in a New Era (DAWN), in order to map their relationship toeach other and to the World Social Forum process.

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Further, we will conduct interviews with selected women and feminist activistsinvolved in ‘the anti-globalisation movement’ more generally, in the very differentlocations of the UK, Brazil and the Netherlands. Conducting interviews in these threecontexts will allow us to develop a comparative, geographically nuanced, analysis ofwomen’s and feminist activism in the AGM, and to extend our analysis beyond theconfines of the World Social Forum process. More specifically, from our base in theUK, we will interview local activists from the following groups: Globalise Resistance,Women in Black and Wages for Housework. Before attending the World SocialForum in Brazil we will take the opportunity to visit groups in Sao Paulo and PortoAlegre: Geledes, Fala Preta and Themis. In Amsterdam and Utrecht in theNetherlands, we will conduct interviews with members of the Women’s GlobalNetwork for Reproductive Rights, NextGenderation and the Feminist EconomicNetwork. Contact with many of these groups has already been made and accesssecured.

Our collection of data and methods of analysis will be informed by two broadmethodological frameworks. The first is constructivist social movement theory (eg.Melucci 1996), which insists that movements are ongoing social processes throughwhich identity, interests and goals are discursively constructed. This means thatactivist self-understandings are prioritised as sources of knowledge and that researchstrategies like interviewing and the gathering of activist-produced material arerequired to access that knowledge. This resonates with feminist methodology, oursecond framework. Feminist social science generates its questions from women’slives, experiences and struggles (eg. Harding 1987). Qualitative methods areprioritised, especially interviews with women; these should treat women as sources ofknowledge rather than simply objects of enquiry (eg. Oakley 1981). However, itshould be recognised that women’s narrations of their experiences are mediated bylanguage, context and representation by the interviewer; that the relation betweenexperience, identity and political mobilisation needs to be interrogated; and that therelation between the interviewer and interviewee is complex and hierarchical (eg.Ramazanoglu 2002: 123-144; Young 1997; Mohanty 1998). Fundamentally, feministanalysis emerges from political engagement; feminist researchers are part of themovement they are investigating and need to locate themselves in the same criticalplane as the object of research (eg. Smith 1987).

These methodological frameworks have informed our choice of the followingmethods of data collection:1. ‘participant observation’ in meetings, workshops and demonstrations (Bryman

and Burgess 1999: part one);2. collection of activist-produced literature such as manifestos, declarations and

newsletters;3. the recording of oral testimonies such as speeches and group discussions;4. semi-structured interviews with activists (eg. Reinharz 1992: 18-45).

We will employ two main methods of analysis of the data. The first is contentanalysis of the interview transcripts (eg. Krippendorff 2003). This will involve codingthe transcripts in order to identify similarities and differences in the views of ourinterviewees in relation to the themes of organisational linkages, ideology andstrategy. The second method is discourse analysis of interview transcripts, speeches

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and activist literature. This will involve identifying and juxtaposing differentdiscourses on ‘anti-globalisation’ and feminism; unpacking the processes throughwhich some discourses are authorised and others subordinated; and exploring theconstruction and potentiality of ‘subjugated knowledges’ (Milliken 1999; Howarth2000). It should be noted that all transcripts will be sent back to interviewees forverification and editing before data analysis takes place, in an effort to partiallyredress the hierarchy in knowledge production established in the interviewing process.

TIMETABLE

Month 1:

Oct 2004

Complete preparation and design work, attend ESF London,commence collection of data, commission transcription.

Month 2:

Nov 2004

Collect data in London, transcribe interviews, continuetheoretical research.

Month 3:

Dec 2004

Trip to collaborate. Commence data analysis of ESF/Londontrips, continue theoretical research, prepare for WSF PortoAlegre.

Month 4:

Jan 2005

Collect data in Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre. Attend WSF PortoAlegre.

Month 5:

Feb 2005

Commission transcription of WSF interviews, collect data inLondon, trip to collaborate, continue data analysis, commencewriting up of analysis for March conference.

Month 6:

Mar 2005

Present conference paper, collect data in the Netherlands,transcribe London and Netherlands interviews, complete datacollection phase, continue data analysis.

Month 7:

Apr 2005

Continue data analysis, continue theoretical research.

Month 8:

May 2005

Trip to collaborate, complete data analysis, writing up ofanalysis for June conference papers.

Month 9:

June 2005

Present two conference papers, complete theoretical research,continue writing up.

Month 10:

July 2005

Continue writing up.

Month 11:

Aug 2005

Continue writing up.

Month 12:

Sept 2005

Complete writing up.

In the three months subsequent to the completion of the research and the ending of theaward, we plan to submit our dataset to the UK archive and to write the End-of-Award report.

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ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

This research has received approval from the Department of Government EthicsCommittee at the University of Strathclyde and from the School of Historical,Political and Sociological Studies Ethics Committee at the University of Exeter. TheCommittees have scrutinised our research plans in terms of the areas of concernidentified by the ESRC: the need to inform interviewees about the purpose, methodand intended and possible uses of our research; the need to guarantee confidentialityof information and anonymity of respondents; and the question of the independenceand impartiality of researchers. The Committees have accepted the validity of ourfeminist methodology, which brings with it an imperative to critically reflect on ourown relationship to feminist and ‘anti-globalisation’ politics and to the subjects of ourresearch. With their guidance and approval, we have constructed a consent form fordistribution to interviewees, which informs them about the purposes and uses of ourresearch and provides them with guarantees with regards to confidentiality andanonymity.

We have sought advice from the ESRC on which professional code of conduct weshould refer to when addressing ethical questions in the course of the research. TracyDavies, Senior Science Manager, advised us on 31/3/04 to refer to the code of theadministering institution of the principal applicant, ie. the University of Strathclyde’sCode of Practice on Investigations on Human Beings. Please see Annex 2 forpertinent extracts from this code.

OUTPUTS

The main output of this research will be a book. We have already secured a contractfor the publication of this book from Routledge, a high-profile and widely respectedscholarly press that also has appeal to readers outside of the academic community. Adraft will be completed at the end of September 2005. We anticipate that, afterrevisions, the book will be published by spring/summer 2006.

We will also produce three associated papers for academic conferences. The first,which we will co-write, will be presented at the annual conference of the InternationalStudies Association in March 2005. The second and third papers, which we will writeindividually, will be presented at the annual conference of the Women’s StudiesAssociation in Britain and Ireland, summer 2005. These papers will represent draftchapters of the book.

Finally, we will translate some of our findings into non-technical language and placethem in activist publications such as journals, newsletters and websites. Potentialoutlets include the World Social Forum website, Indymedia websites and thenewsletters of the World March for Women and the Women’s Global Network forReproductive Rights.

TOTAL WORD COUNT: 2, 138

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ANNEX 1

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bircham Emma and John Charlton, eds. 2001. Anti-Capitalism: A Guide to theMovement, 2nd edition. London: Bookmarks.

Broad, Robin, ed. 2002. Global Backlash: Citizen Initiatives for a Just WorldEconomy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Bryman, Alan and Robert G. Burgess, eds. 1999. Qualitative Research, vol. 2.London: Sage.

Colas, Alejandro. 2001. International Civil Society. Cambridge: PolityFeminist Review. 2002. Special Issue on Globalisation (70).Gill, Stephen. 2003. Power and Resistance in the New World Order. Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan.Gills, Barry, K. ed. 2000. Globalisation and the Politics of Resistance. Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan.Glasius, Marlies, Mary Kaldor and Helmut Anheier, eds. 2002. Global Civil Society

Yearbook 2002. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Harding, Sandra. 1987. ‘Introduction: Is there a Feminist Method?’ in Feminism and

Methodology, ed. Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Held, David and Anthony McGrew. 2002. Globalization and Anti-Globalization.

Cambridge: Polity.Howarth, David. 2000. Discourse. Buckingham: Open University Press.Kingsnorth, Paul. 2003. One No Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global

Resistance Movement. London: Free Press.Klein, Naomi. 2002. Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the

Globalisation Debate. London: Flamingo.Kripendorff, Klaus. 2003. Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology, 2nd

edition. London: Sage.Marchand, Marianne and Anne Sisson Runyan, eds. 2000. Gender and Global

Restructuring: Sightings, Sites, Resistances. London: Routledge.Melucci, Alberto. 1996. Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information

Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Milliken, Jennifer. 1999. ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A

Critique of Research and Methods’. European Journal of InternationalRelations 5 (2): 225-254.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,Practicing Solidarity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1998. ‘Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics ofExperience’ in Feminism and Politics, ed. Anne Phillips. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Notes from Nowhere, eds. 2003. We are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of GlobalAnti-Capitalism. London: Verso.

Oakley, Anne. 1981. ‘Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms’, in FeministResearch, ed. Helen Roberts. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Ramazanoglu, Caroline, with Janet Holland. 2002. Feminist Methodology:Challenges and Choices. London: Sage.

Reinharz, Shulamit. 1992. Feminist Methods in Social Research. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

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Rowbotham, Sheila and Stephanie Linkogle, eds. 2001. Women Resist Globalization:Mobilizing for Livelihood and Rights. London: Zed.

Sen, Jai, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar and Peter Waterman, eds. 2004. World SocialForum: Challenging Empire. New Delhi: The Viveka Foundation.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 2001. Special Issue on Globalisation26 (4).

Smith, Dorothy. 1987. ‘Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology’ inFeminism and Methodology, ed. Sandra Harding. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press.

Smith, Jackie and Hank Johnston, eds. 2002. Globalization and Resistance. Lanham:Rowman and Littlefield.

World Social Forum (WSF). 2004. Homepage at http://www.wsfindia.org/.Young, Stacey. 1997. Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics and Feminist

Movements. London: Routledge.

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ANNEX 2

UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE CODE OF PRACTICE ONINVESTIGATIONS ON HUMAN BEINGS

(EXTRACT, PP.7-11)

4. GUIDELINES

1. General Principles

For all investigations covered by this Code approval must be given by the relevantEthics Committee (i.e. either the University Ethics Committee or the DepartmentalEthics Committee) before the work may commence.

There is an obligation on all researchers to protect the volunteers from possible harmand to preserve their dignity and rights.

Investigations should not involve any significant risk to the physical or mental well-being of the volunteers. Confidentiality and privacy must be maintained and theinvestigator’s intentions in this matter must be made known to the volunteers and tothe Ethics Committee. Any waiver of confidentiality must be justified and agreed bythe volunteer in writing. Any investigator intending to process personal data should beaware of and comply with the provisions of the Data Protection legislation. …

Research which duplicates other work unnecessarily or which is not of sufficientquality to make a useful contribution to existing knowledge is in itself unethical. If theUniversity Ethics Committee has any concerns about a particular project submitted toit for approval it may seek independent expert advice before reaching a decision …

2. Specific Principles

i) Recruitment of volunteers

The recruitment of volunteers should, wherever possible, be via a letter, notice, or, iforally, through a group approach rather than to individuals. If advertising forvolunteers, then investigators need to consider where to place such advertisementsand will need to inform the appropriate Ethics Committee of this as well as provide acopy of the advert. The Ethics Committee needs to know how volunteers will berecruited for the project. Random street or doorstep surveys are also acceptable.

Investigators should justify the number of participants chosen for each study. Ifstudies are considered to be ‘under-powered’ then this is in itself unethical.

There should be no financial inducement nor any other coercion, actual or implied,that might persuade people to take part in any investigation. Staff or students of thedepartment may be invited to volunteer to take part in the study, but investigatorsneed to recognise that theseindividuals may feel vulnerable to pressure from someonein a position to influence their careers. This is particularly the case for students, and

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students need to be reassured that neither agreeing or declining to participate in aparticular study will affect their academic progress in any way. On the other hand it isrecognised that it is reasonable to expect students to be recruited to take part in datagathering exercises where one of the primary objectives is to enable them to maketheir own observations and learn by the experience.

Recruitment from certain groups raises particular ethical, and in some cases, speciallegal issues which require particular consideration. These groups are those with acognitive disability or learning difficulty, or those who live in or are connected to aninstitutional environment. …

ii) Informed Consent

Investigators should give each volunteer an information sheet which provides fullrelevant details of the nature, object and duration of the proposed investigation in aform that is readily understood. Volunteers should be told what procedures theinvestigation will involve and whether any discomfort or inconvenience is likely to beentailed during the investigation or afterwards. Volunteers should also be given fullinformation about any risks to health that the investigation may pose.

All volunteers taking part in investigations, and particularly in any clinical trial orinvestigation that involves invasive procedures or psychological studies, must do soon the basis of having received full information about the investigation and what isinvolved and on the basis of having freely consented to take part. An informedconsent form must be signed by such volunteers – a list of the information that theEthics Committee would expect to see on a consent form is attached at Annex 4. ThePrincipal Investigator must retain copies of the signed consent forms for eachvolunteer.

Volunteers must be free to withdraw from the investigation at any time without givinga reason, and they must be told that they have the right to do this. However, anopportunity should be provided in this event for them to discuss privately their wishto withdraw if they require it.

iii) Adverse Events

If volunteers report any problems during the course of the investigation itself (eitherto the investigator or to a member of the Ethics Committee) or if the researchers haveany cause for concern, the project may need to be stopped and the PrincipalInvestigator must inform the Ethics Committee of what has occurred. The PrincipalInvestigator must report any untoward event arising during an investigation to theEthics Committee and, where appropriate, to the volunteer’s own doctor with his orher consent. Should such a situation occur then the investigation should be stoppedfor the individual in question and consideration should be given to stopping theinvestigation as a whole, depending on the nature and/or severity of the symptom orevent …

[…]

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5. APPROVAL FOR STUDIES

All investigations on human participants require approval from either the UniversityEthics Committee or, where appropriate, from the Departmental Ethics Committeebefore they can commence. For investigations involving the NHS, ethical approvalmust be sought from the relevant NHS Local Research Ethics Committee (see alsosection 6 Procedures).

1. University Ethics Committee

All investigations governed by the Code that involve any of the following techniquesor procedures must be submitted to the University Ethics Committee for priorapproval:

I. where any harm, discomfort, physical or psychological risk is potentiallyinvolved;

II. where participants are used whose ability to give voluntary consent is limited,including

III. cognitively impaired persons, prisoners, persons with a chronic physical ormental condition, or those who live in or connected to an institutionalenvironment;

IV. where any invasive technique is involved, DNA testing, or collection of bodyfluids or tissue;

V. where an extensive degree or duration of exercise or physical exertion isinvolved;

VI. where manipulation of cognitive or affective human responses are involvedwhich could cause stress or anxiety;

VII. where drugs, including liquid and food additives or other substances, areadministered for research purposes;

VIII. where deception of participants is used of a nature which might cause distressor which might reasonably affect their willingness to participate in theresearch;

IX. where highly personal, intimate or other private or confidential information issought;

X. where payment is made to participants other than to cover expenses or timeinvolved.

Where children under 16 years of age are involved in investigations, then providedthey are willing to take part, none of the above procedures or circumstances areinvolved and parental/guardian consent is given, these do not necessarily have to beconsidered by the University Ethics Committee but may be considered by aDepartmental Ethics Committee.

2. Departmental Ethics Committees

Where it is clear that none of the above apply the Departmental Ethics Committeescan approve investigations on human participants, whether involving adults orchildren under 16 years of age where parental/guardian consent has been given. Thiswill largely comprise class teaching experiments and demonstrations, student andstaff research projects which do not involve any of the techniques or procedures

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outlined above, and any other instances when the University Ethics Committee hasdelegated authority to a Departmental Ethics Committee. If a Departmental EthicsCommittee has any doubts about any particular investigation it is asked to consider, orif it cannot reach agreement, then this will be referred to the University EthicsCommittee for consideration….

For the full Code, see http://www.mis.strath.ac.uk/Secretariat/Ethics.htm (clickon the link to <Code of Practice on Investigations on Human Beings>).

TOTAL WORD COUNT FOR ANNEXES: 1, 751

Reference 000-22-0902

END OF AWARD RESEARCH REPORT

Making Feminist Sense of ‘the Anti-Globalisation Movement’

1. Background

The origins of our book project dates back to 2001 when, during a fortuitous meeting, we discovered strongly overlapping research interests. At that time, Catherine’s book, Global Democracy, Social Movements and Feminism, had just been published and Bice had recently completed her PhD entitled Contemporary Social Movements and the Making of World Politics. Shortly afterwards, we took the decision to collaborate on a co-edited book on critical theories in International Relations (IR) and the so-called ‘anti-globalisation movement’. Apart from offering diverse empirical analyses of this multifaceted ‘movement of movements’, one of the central aims of the co-edited book was to explore the extent to which critical perspectives in IR could help us to conceptualise this arguably new form of resistance politics. During the process of putting the co-edited book together, we were surprised by the paucity of empirical academic research on the movement and particularly on feminist activism within it, and by the preliminary nature of most critical theorising on the topic. Inspired by this the obvious need for further research, we decided to embark on a second book that would focus on feminism and the anti-globalisation movement and bring together empirical research with critical theorising. 2. Objectives As stated in our original grant application, three central objectives have animated our research project. First, we seek to conceptualise the anti-globalisation movement from a feminist perspective. Second, we aim to provide an empirical mapping of feminist anti-globalisation activism and, in this way, to generate a more comprehensive story of the anti-globalisation movement more generally. The central questions guiding this empirical analysis are:

• when, where and why did feminist anti-globalisation activism emerge? • who are the main protagonists of this activism? • what are their central beliefs and ideologies? • what are their main practices/strategies to bring about change?

Third, we aim to draw out the implications of our feminist research on the anti-globalisation movement for the teaching of global politics. To this end, we ask in what ways a feminist reading of the anti-globalisation movement and, in particular, of the self-understandings of activists, can illuminate alternative ways of thinking about what constitutes global politics and how we go about teaching it. The first two objectives will be met in our co-authored book, while the third will be developed separately in a forthcoming journal article. We want now to expand briefly on how we have addressed each of these objectives. In terms of re-conceptualising the anti-globalisation movement, we have pursued three theoretical lines of inquiry. First, we have studied the existing literature on

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social movements and in particular feminist inspired variations of it. Second, given the feminist imperative of treating women’s experiences and views as important sources of knowledge, we have sought to develop theoretical insights from our empirical data. Finally, we have explored how the claims and practices of our interviewees chime with or challenge the prevailing stories told in the literature on the anti-globalisation movement. Turning to the objective of mapping feminist anti-globalisation activism, we decided at an early stage to root our empirical investigations in the World Social Forum (WSF) process, arguably the most accessible and high profile gathering of anti-globalisation activists in recent years. While not an unproblematic space, the WSF attracts activists, including feminists, from all over the world. Moreover, participants are encouraged to articulate strategies and alternative worlds as well as critiques of the current world order, and they use the site to build broader networks and advertise diverse activist practices and agendas. This has enabled us to glimpse the wider terrain of feminist anti-globalisation activism. Concretely, we conducted preliminary interviews and fieldwork at the Paris European Social Forum (ESF) in November 2003 and the Mumbai WSF in January 2004. The ESRC grant allowed us to extend and deepen our research, attending the London ESF in November 2004 and conducting follow-up interviews in London and the Netherlands, and, finally, participating in the fifth WSF in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January 2005. In total, we have interviewed 78 women, written in-depth fieldnotes on four Forum sites and gathered written documents from 60 women’s and/or feminist groups. In terms of our third objective, that is, drawing out the lessons from our research on feminist activism for teaching global politics, we have made some important changes from our grant application. While we still plan to write on the subject, we have decided not to address it in our jointly-authored book as originally planned. We were prompted to review this goal when an otherwise very positive report from an anonymous referee argued strongly that we were trying to do too much by including this theme. In an effort to create an alternative space, we approached the editors of Millennium: Journal of International Relations and suggested dedicating a special section to the topic of activism and pedagogy. This idea was well received and we are now in the process of researching our contribution for the special section. Our article will offer a critical reflection on our own approach to teaching in light of what we have learned from the discourses and practices of feminist activists. More specifically, the article asks: How can we take social movements seriously as sources of knowledge about global politics? To what extent and in what ways can scholarship committed to the goals of particular social movements shape the academic curriculum? What are the appropriate teaching methods to deliver such material? 3. Methods Methodologically, our research has been shaped by social movement scholarship, and in particular, constructivist theory, which presents us with an eclectic mix of tools to help collect and interpret data. More fundamentally, though, we have been influenced by feminist insights and imperatives. First, concerned that both the dominant theory and practice of the anti-globalisation movement has thus far served to marginalise women and feminists, the starting point for our research has been women’s lives, experiences and struggles. Second, striving to treat women as sources of knowledge

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rather than simply objects of enquiry, we have prioritised activist self-representations and understandings. Finally, we have taken seriously the feminist imperative to critically reflect on the power relations between researcher and interviewee and on the role that researchers play in mediating interviewee self-representations and in constructing interpretations of them. In this context, we have deployed the following methods of data collection:

• Participant observation – attending and taking part in activist workshops and demonstrations, taping dialogues and public speeches, recording impressions in extensive fieldwork diaries;

• Collecting activist-produced literature such as manifestos, declarations, newsletters, pamphlets and books;

• Conducting semi-structured interviews. A pre-prepared ‘interview guide’ of open-ended questions on specific topics helped shape the interviews, but we had to be flexible in responding to the demands of the busy and noisy WSF context, and in responding to interviewee priorities. Our interviewees were chosen in large part because we identified them as ‘key informants’, i.e., coordinators of groups with an active and important role on site. We also used the ‘snowball’ technique, soliciting suggestions for people to talk to from our interviewees, thus widening our pool of subjects whilst recognising that interviewees tended to recommend people similar in identity and affiliation to themselves. We were pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get activists to speak to us, even when under great time pressure, although it was often difficult to find an appropriate and quiet space for the interviews. After our experiences in Paris and Mumbai, we took the good decision to extend the time put aside for interviews during subsequent fieldtrips. Thus we returned to London after the ESF there and also went to the Netherlands to conduct follow up interviews with activists we had met on site. We also went two weeks early to Brazil to conduct interviews in Rio and São Paulo before the WSF began. Selecting our interviewees presented us with some difficulties. The size and status of our sample has remained a thought-provoking dilemma. We should stress here that we are not attempting to offer a comprehensive, bird’s eye view of feminist anti-globalisation activism at the WSF, as we believe this to require an impossible and methodologically problematic level of detachment and oversight. Thus we did not seek during our fieldwork to obtain a ‘representative sample’ i.e., a selection of interviewees that would be representative of the entirety of feminist activists on site. This left us with no clear guidelines as to the number of interviews we should conduct and with whom. Nor were we helped by methodological imperatives such as ‘replicability’ or ‘saturation point’. Given the diversity of activists on site, and the personal and reflective nature of some of our questions, it was very unlikely that we were ever going to reach the point where no new information would be provided during interviews and no further suggestions made for new interviewees. We have always been interested in each activist’s story for its own sake and, arguably, even one interview may provide a valid starting point for theoretical reflection on certain questions such as political motivation. In the end, we would stress that our sample is limited, and that we can make empirical generalisations about only the particular set of people to whom we talked.

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As discussed in the Form accompanying this Report, translating and transcribing our interviews also presented us with some challenges. The politics of language became very apparent to us in Brazil where we were almost entirely dependent on our translators. Although they worked very hard, they sometimes had difficulty understanding some of the concepts we were using, at points they changed our wordings and once in a while they provided a synopsis of what was being said rather than verbatim translation. Given that some of our interviewees spoke some English and/or Spanish, we sometimes had interviews being conducted in two or three languages. All of this, of course, made it more difficult and time consuming to transcribe the interviews. Finally, most of our interviewees wanted to verify and edit their interviews before we used them. Although we would defend this practice as important to partially redress the hierarchy in knowledge production, it should be noted that the time it took to get all the final edits significantly delayed our work schedule. In terms of our experience of ‘participant observation’, we grappled with at least two practical issues. The first relates to the sheer enormity, fluidity and unpredictability of the WSF and ESF sites and the impossibility of achieving exhaustive coverage with only two people. We are striving to be extremely careful when writing up both our fieldwork and our interviewees to specify the fact that our resulting view of feminist anti-globalisation activism is a situated, partial and limited one. Secondly, we would point to the difficulties of trying to ‘participate’ and ‘observe’ simultaneously. The former demanded political conviction, agency and a sense of belonging, in contrast to the critical distance, the capacity to make analytical judgements and the sense of being an outsider typical of the latter. Participating actively also changed the way activists related to us and carried with it the danger of being identified as ‘taking sides’ in a fractured political field. For these reasons we limited our active participation. Nonetheless, we remain convinced that some participation was not only unavoidable but also helpful overall in reminding us of the concrete dilemmas faced by our interviewees when doing political work. Overall, we would stress that the knowledge acquired through ‘participant observation’ has been crucial to our project and could not have been obtained in any other way. Turning now to our methods of analysis, we have prioritised qualitative and interpretative techniques, although the specific methods used have depended on the questions raised in individual chapters. For example, our analysis of the origins of feminist anti-globalisation utilises a historical and comparative approach in which we pay particular attention to macro-structural relations of power, micro political factors, contingency and context specificity. In contrast, our analysis of the core groups involved and their interrelationships (supplied with this Report), offers a synchronic view of the actors involved and is based on the systematic coding of interviews as well as network analysis. The chapter on practices and strategies offers a more selective and speculative typology of feminist anti-globalisation practices found on site and in the documents and interviews. And the chapter on ideologies and identities makes some use of the framing theory which has recently emerged in social movement studies, and of discourse analysis, broadly defined. It is important to point out that we have not used discourse analysis in a more rigorous sense, as we indicated in our original grant application. Our decision that it was not appropriate to use discourse analysis in this way came only after we had refined our

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research questions and after one of us attended an all-day workshop on its applications. In our view, while discourse analysis allows one to answer questions about how certain concepts or words are presented and deployed in a given written or oral text, it is less suitable for explaining the origins of such concepts, why they have acquired a certain status or influential power or who gets invested with the power to speak. 4. Results Below we will offer a selective summary of the theoretical and empirical arguments explored in our co-authored book. I. Theoretical Arguments At this point, we tentatively suggest that there are at least three contributions that a feminist reading of feminist anti-globalisation activism can make to a re-conceptualisation of the anti-globalisation movement. The first concerns how we conceptualise the nature or ontological status of feminist anti-globalisation activism. What exactly is it that we are talking about here? Feminist insights into the politics of social movements warn us not to take solidarity for granted but to see social movements as mobile, discursively constructed and fraught with internal power dynamics. In other words, social movements are continually being re-made, a process which involves exclusion, hierarchy and the construction of hegemonic identities and truths. Furthermore, feminists remind us that coalitions within and between movements do not emerge naturally, but are built painstakingly, piece by piece, from the ground up. Finally, they prompt us to see these movements as not only social, but also as political and ethical collective agents who seek to resist and overturn oppressive power relations. Given this perspective, feminist anti-globalisation activism has to be understood as having a complex relationship to the anti-globalisation movement. Contrary to prevailing representations of the movement, which depict it as a fundamentally unified, albeit polycephalous actor, this vision requires us to go beyond acknowledging multiplicity and investigate power relations that divide activists from each other and which give rise to specific forms of resistance. In this context, feminist anti-globalisation activism must be understood as a form of resistance not only to current global power configurations, as depicted in the prevailing anti-globalisation movement literature, but also to gendered and racialised hierarchies reproduced within the movement itself. Thus, it must be seen as resisting on two fronts and against multiple, overlapping power relations.

A second contribution concerns how we conceptualise movement origins. Accounts of the anti-globalisation movement do not give us much to work with here, but if we turn to more general scholarship on movements and the politics of resistance, we find an emphasis on shifting ‘political opportunity structures’ and changing economic power relations. Our research points to an alternative, more complex picture. As feminist social movement scholars tell us, any mapping of power structures requires a context specific analysis of how multiple relations of oppression overlap in complex and contradictory ways. Such an intersectional approach involves, at a minimum,

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taking gender, race and class seriously as part of the fabric of oppression and as essential reference points for any narrative of origins. Furthermore, a feminist reading of movement emergence requires us to move beyond structural accounts and pay more attention to the role of historical movement antecedents and the influence of contemporary social movements, as well as to contingency in the form of unpredictable events which either open or close political space. Last but not least, a feminist story of the birth of the anti-globalisation movement, or any movement, requires us to pay closer attention to the personal, ‘private’ sources of political engagement (friendships, family life, personal experiences) as well as to the informal and formal connections made between activists which serve to sustain it.

Thirdly, we argue that an empirical study of feminist anti-globalisation activism can help us to conceptualise the meaning and scope of political activism more generally. More specifically, our study of feminist anti-globalisation activism undermines two dominant dichotomies (‘new’/‘old’ social movements and ‘instrumental’/‘expressive’ behaviour) relied on to characterise social movements in the political process literature. Indeed, feminists engage in a range of diverse practices - from lobbying and networking to direct action and dramatisation - that reflect both ‘old’ and ‘new’ movements and embody both logics of action. In addition, we have found that the same group can enact several kinds of behaviour simultaneously. II. Empirical Arguments When, where and why did feminist anti-globalisation activism emerge? In some agreement with the prevailing literature on the origins of the anti-globalisation movement, we argue that feminists have begun to self-identify with this movement only relatively recently in the context of the World Social Forum process. However, we also found evidence to suggest that the problematisation of the global economy as a gendered, racialised and imperial system has to be traced much further back to the mid-century, if one’s starts one’s analysis with Southern women’s movements, and to the mid-1980’s, if one chooses to privilege transnational feminist activism. Either way feminist critiques of global capitalism predate 1999, posited by much of the prevailing literature as the starting point for anti-globalisation activism. Furthermore, we have discovered that this critique has been spearheaded by women from the South who became politicised in the context of anti-imperialist and anti-authoritarian struggles and who in the 1970’s were the first to feel the impact of neo-liberal policies. Finally, we argue that feminist anti-globalisation activism emerged within a complex matrix of power relations and processes which include the impact of the Cold War and its end, the launching of the UN Decade for Women, the development debates of the 1970’s, the ascendancy of neo-liberalism in the 1980s, the increasing importance of International Financial Institutions, the rise of a transnational feminist movement, nation-state building and authoritarianism in the South and the victory of neo-liberal policies and welfare state reform in the North. Any narrative of the emergence of feminist anti-globalisation activism, and by extension, the anti-globalisation movement more generally, must take these complex contextual factors into account, and also the role of context specific and contingent forces.

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We also want to draw attention to the institutional, political and personal reasons why particular feminist anti-globalisation groups were formed. First, at the institutional level and as social movement scholarship would suggest, pre-existing transnational and national feminist networks have played a key role in the formation of our groups. An important additional factor, though, is the catalytic role played by prevailing power hierarchies in social networks of activists and in mixed male and female groups. Gendered relations of exclusion, for example, have acted as a spur in the formation of many of our feminist groups. We also suggest that there is an important role here for emotions and, in particular, for personal friendships. Indeed, our research suggests that social movement scholarship tends to overemphasise the rational dimensions of activist motivations and that more attention needs to be paid to the personal, emotional and contingent factors that lead to group formation.

Who are the main actors in feminist anti-globalisation activism and what links have they developed with each other? Please see the detailed elaboration of our arguments here in the first nominated output accompanying this Report. Here we will make only a few key points. We identify no less than sixty core groups from our research, ranging from tiny informal mobilisations to enormous, institutionalised organisations. The sheer extent and diversity of our sample is indicative of the vitality of feminist anti-globalisation movement more generally and reinforces the need to take it seriously as a constitutive part of the anti-globalisation movement. As social movement theory would predict, most of the activists within these groups come from relatively materially affluent, well educated sectors of society and are highly socially integrated. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that this class privilege cuts across Northern and Southern groups and both white dominated groups and those formed around other ethnic/racial identities. There is less conformity with the expectations of social movement theory, however, when it comes to the extent to which individuals participate in their groups. While there is a predictably high proportion of professional staff based groups, there are a surprisingly large number of informal and drop-in groups. Interestingly, all our groups have strong expectations of active participation from their members. In terms of the degree of interconnections that these groups have forged with each other, the picture we have mapped is one of extensive, but highly uneven and geopolitically and economically segmented, relations between feminist anti-globalisation groups. In this context, European and particularly Indian groups find themselves marginal to a core of transnational networks linked together in a relatively powerful central position. It should be noted that Brazilian groups are extensively connected, even when the groups themselves are not particularly large or wealthy. Of the four most prominent transnational networks two - Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era and Articulacion Feminista Marcosur – are from the South disrupting simplistic dichotomies about North-South hierarchies. Finally, we want to emphasise our argument that feminist anti-globalisation activism, taken as a whole, is not a unitary actor but rather a highly complex, contested terrain of political action. We insist at the outset of the book that the groups observed during our fieldwork are clearly engaged in a common struggle in terms of trying to integrate women and gender equality into the World Social Forum process and, by extension, into the anti-globalisation movement. Having said this, our research findings warn

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against reifying dominant representations and assuming internal unity. Disagreements abound among our groups over the salience and relevance of different campaigns, e.g., Articulacion Feminista Marcosur’s campaign against fundamentalism; over organising strategies, e.g., the clash between self-proclaimed grassroots women’s groups and the so-called ‘verticals’ associated with Trade Unions and the organised Left at the London ESF; and finally over perceived power hierarchies around class, sexuality and race. We are not saying that such disagreements mean feminist anti-globalisation activism is exceptionally conflictual; rather we are arguing that fractious diversity and faultlines of power are typical of the anti-globalisation movement and of social movements more generally. What are the main practices/strategies for change of feminist anti-globalisation activists? In our detailed account of the history of feminist involvement in the WSF given at the outset of the book, we argue that feminist activists have engaged in several forms of resistance against the gendered hierarchies prevalent at the site. They have sought to contest elite male dominance of the organisation process by fighting for a larger presence on the International Council. They have challenged the masculine format of large plenary talks, replete with male ‘stars’, by organising alternative spaces, such as Planeta Femea in 2002 or the Feminist Dialogues in 2004 and 5. They have also sought to feminise the discourses circulating in and emanating from the Forum by insisting on a gendered and intersectional analysis of power relations in plenaries, in their own workshops and in campaigns and declarations. Finally, feminists have challenged the limited but demoralising incidences of overt sexist or violent behaviour at some of the WSF events by organising highly visible protests against it. Later in the book, we open out our analysis of practices beyond the WSF site to include those in other contexts. At this point, we develop a typology of seven feminist anti-globalisation practices: advocacy, education, networking, facilitation, service provision, mutual support and direct action. Rather than going into detail of the individual practices here, we want instead to make a couple of more general points. First, contrary to expectations generated by the anti-globalisation movement literature, direct action is not the only or even the most important practice. One of our most interesting findings is the extent to which feminists engage in educational practices, with much of their political work taking place in a workshop or classroom. It is from their innovations in this area that we seek inspiration for our article on pedagogy and teaching global politics. Second, we would stress that feminist anti-globalisation groups typically deploy a range of practices. While a few have become specialised in lobby tactics or in taking a leadership role in international conferences, most ‘multi-task’ and even the more specialised groups often try to enhance their impact by working with groups using different strategies. What are their central beliefs/ideologies? We would argue that there is little evidence from our fieldwork that the adherence to a particular ideological belief system or identity claim has a significant impact on the practices of a group. It would seem rather that context-specific movement trajectories, political opportunities and contingent strategic considerations are much more significant. This challenges the dominant impression in accounts of the anti-

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globalisation movement that ideological differences are the key differentiating factor between groups in the movement, manifested in the widespread analytical strategy of categorising the movement solely in terms of these differences. As we are currently working on our analysis of the ideological debates amongst our feminist anti-globalisation activists, at this stage we can only tentatively suggest that while ideology seems to be important in terms of rhetoric and representation, it does not seem to play a determining role in terms of who works with whom. Thus, a fuller account of the anti-globalisation movement will have to offer a more complex categorisation of differences, one which is not reliant solely on ideology but also includes contexts and histories, group affiliation and structure, and practices or strategies for change. 5. Activities Academic conferences and workshops

• European Committee on Political Research, Joint Session of Workshops, Granada, 14-17 April 2005, workshop entitled 'Environmental Movements North and South', in which Catherine presented our book proposal: 'Making Feminist Sense of '"The Anti-Globalization Movement"'.

• World International Studies Committee, First Global International Studies Conference, Istanbul, 24-27 August 2005. Catherine presented a paper entitled 'Who's who in Feminist “Anti-Globalisation” Activism? A Situated Mapping of Groups and their Interconnections'; and Bice presented a paper entitled ‘Plotting Feminist Practices in the “Anti-Globalisation Movement”’.

• British International Studies Association Annual Conference, St. Andrews, 18-21 December 2005. Catherine presented a paper entitled 'Feminist Struggles for Visibility and Influence in the Anti-Globalisation Movement: The Case of the World Social Forum 2000-3'.

• International Studies Association Annual Conference, San Diego, 22-25 March 2006. Catherine presented a paper entitled ‘Uncovering Complexity in Feminist Anti-Globalisation Activism: Fieldwork at the World Social Forum 2003-5’.

• Joint European Research Program on Civil Society workshop, part of EU

funded Sixth Framework GARNET network, Exeter University, March 10-12 2006, Bice presented a discussion paper on feminist methodology.

Activist workshops

• Catherine and Bice organised and ran a feminist workshop as part of the Radical Theory Forum, held at London ESF, 14 October 2004.

• Catherine invited to speak at a workshop on ‘Feminism and the Anti-

Globalisation Movement’ organized by the World March of Women at the World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, 28 January 2005.

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• Catherine presented a paper entitled 'What do Feminists have to say about (Anti)Globalisation?', at the Engender Dialogues, series of talks organised by Engender, a Scottish feminist NGO, 27 February 2006.

6. Outputs The primary output of this project will be a co-authored book entitled Making Feminist Sense of the ‘Anti-Globalisation Movement’. Work on this book is continuing and we are aiming for publication in Autumn 2007. See Annex 2 for chapter outline of book. In addition, we will complete two academic articles: see 2A on EOA Form.

Three shorter pieces have already been solicited by and published in activist outlets: see 2B on EOA Form.

As already stated on the EOA Form, we have further plans for dissemination in activist outlets and will prepare several short pieces in non-technical language on key findings and supply them to those of our interviewees’ groups that have online newsletters.

7. Impacts While our research results are potentially applicable outside of the project e.g. in education realm, they are not relevant for commercial purposes. We have had extensive interest shown by ‘users’ of the research. In terms of academic users, we have received several invitations to present related papers at academic workshops and conferences. Those we were able to attend are listed above. So far we have also been invited to contribute to three journal issues; the two we accepted are listed on the EOA Form. Further, we have received informal emails and invitations to swap work from several academics working on related topics, from as far afield as Canada and the USA. We have also been asked twice by the Canadian equivalent of the ESRC to comment on parallel research proposals by other academics. In terms of activist users, it should be noted that the publications in activist outlets were solicited by interviewees. The workshop we organised at the London ESF on feminism and the anti-globalisation movement was very well attended and feedback was positive. After her presentation at the World March for Women session at the Porto Alegre WSF, which attracted hundreds of participants, Catherine received half a dozen requests for follow-up information from interested activists. 8. Future Research Priorities We foresee four ways in which this research could be developed:

• Linking teaching of global politics to scholarship which is committed to furthering social movement goals. While we are in the process of beginning to think through some of the dilemmas involved here, more research and reflection will clearly be needed, particularly in terms of making the links with existing work on feminist pedagogy.

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• Feminist anti-globalisation activism and its relationship to other social

movements. We are particularly fascinated by the complex and fraught connections currently being forged between the Left and certain anti-racist currents within the anti-globalisation movement, especially those galvanised by politicised Muslim identities. How do feminists situate themselves within this context? As anti-racist? As anti-fundamentalist? What are the costs of these positions? This line of inquiry could lend itself to a comparative analysis of ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ women’s groups with anti-globalisation activism.

• Feminist and Social Movement Methodology. We will take the opportunity

after completing the book to write up further reflections on the methodological dilemmas we encountered in our interviewing and fieldwork, as these are of much wider relevance.

• Social movements and resistance politics in IR. The book is generating a

number of theoretical conclusions about movements and resistance politics based on feminist analysis and insights which demand further conceptual exploration and which also could inform new empirical work about other forms of activism.

Non-Technical Summary

MAKING FEMINIST SENSE OF THE ‘ANTI-GLOBALISATION MOVEMENT’

AIMS This research project had three central objectives, each giving rise to its own set of questions.

Aim 1: to conceptualise ‘the anti-globalisation movement’ from a feminist perspective. Here we ask: in what ways can feminist theory and practice help us to construct an alternative understanding of it? Aims 2: to empirically map feminist anti-globalisation activism and, thereby, generate a more comprehensive, nuanced story of the movement as a whole. The central questions guiding this empirical analysis include: when did feminist anti-globalisation activism emerge?; who are its protagonists?; what are their main practices and central beliefs? Aim 3: to draw out and reflect on the pedagogical lessons of our feminist research. How can we teach global politics in ways that take seriously social movements as source of knowledge about global politics? What changes to the curriculum are needed and what teaching methods are appropriate?

RESULTS

1) Theoretical Arguments Feminist approaches into the politics of social movements require us to see them as mobile, discursively constructed, heterogeneous actors which are shaped by both external and internal power relations. To this extent, feminist anti-globalisation activism must be understood as a form of resistance not only to current global power configurations, as depicted in the prevailing ‘anti-globalisation movement’ literature, but also to gendered and racialised hierarchies reproduced within the anti-globalisation movement itself. Furthermore, feminist approaches to movement emergence entreat us not to take resistance for granted nor to reduce it to one logic or source, but rather to see it as a contingent social process that has multiple points of origin, stemming from both the public and private realm. Finally, we argue that our empirical study of feminist practices challenges prevailing dichotomies (e.g. ‘old/new’ movements or ‘instrumental/expressive’ behaviour) relied on in the political process literature to characterise social movements and suggests alternative conceptualisations.

2) Empirical Arguments

Our research has yielded a range of empirical insights into feminist anti-globalisation activism. Due to the restricted space here, we shall offer a selective summary of our central arguments referring the reader to the EOA Report for further details.

Origins of feminist anti-globalisation activism

We found that while explicit self-identification with this movement has taken place largely post-1999 and, in particular, in the context of the World Social Forum (WSF) process, the problematisation of the global economy as a gendered, racialised and imperial system has to be traced much further back to the mid-century, if one’s starts one’s analysis with Southern women’s movements, and to the mid-1980’s if one chooses to privilege transnational feminist activism. Either way feminist critiques of global capitalism predate Seattle, posited by much of the prevailing literature as the starting point for anti-globalisation activism. Furthermore, we contend that this critique has been spearheaded by women from the South who became politicised in the context of anti-imperialist and anti-authoritarian struggles and who in the 1970’s were the first to feel the impact of neo-liberal policies.

Composition of feminist anti-globalisation activism

Most of the activists within our groups come from materially affluent, well educated sectors of society, a class privilege which cuts across Northern and Southern groups. Furthermore, while there are a predictably high proportion of professional staff based groups, there are also a surprising number of informal and drop in groups. Interestingly, all our groups have strong expectations of active participation from their members. Mapping the interconnections between these groups has produced a picture of extensive, but highly uneven, and geopolitically and economically segmented, relations in which transnational networks are linked together in a relatively powerful central position. Of the four most prominent transnational networks, two are from the South disrupting simplistic dichotomies about North/South hierarchies. Finally, we want to highlight, that feminist anti-globalisation activism is by no means a unified actor, but rather a highly complex, contested terrain, the contours of which are shaped by power relations and defined by differences.

For more detail see first nominated output accompanying the EOA Report.

Practices

Contrary to expectations generated by the anti-globalisation literature, direct action is not the most important or prevalent practice, with most feminist groups ‘multi-tasking’. Indeed, we have developed a typology of seven feminist anti-globalisation practices: advocacy, education, networking, facilitation, service provision, mutual support and direct action. Of all these practices, educational work stands out as one of the most important. In addition, there are at least four ways in which feminist activists have sought to resist gender hierarchies within the WSF context: establish a strong presence on the International Council; organise autonomous feminist spaces; feminise the discourses emanating from the Forum; and demonstrate against overt sexist or violent behaviour.

Ideologies

Although we are still in the early stages of our analysis, we can make two observations at this point that challenge prevailing wisdom on the anti-globalisation movement. First, there is little evidence from our field work to suggest that adherence to ideological beliefs has a significant impact on the practices of the group which instead seem to depend more on context specific movement trajectories, political opportunities and contingent strategic factors. Second, ideology does not seem to play a determining role in shaping feminist coalitions. In other words, a fuller account of the anti-globalisation movement will have to offer a more nuanced and complex categorisation of the differences shaping this ‘movement of movements’ and a more sophisticated analysis of the role that pragmatism plays in determining its direction.

3) Pedagogical Lessons We have not completed our analysis and, therefore, it is too early to posit findings.

DISSEMINATION ACTIVITIES AND POTENTIAL IMPACT

The main output from our research will be a book entitled Making Feminist Sense of ‘the Anti-Globalisation Movement’. In addition to the monograph, we will complete two academic articles developing different aspects of our research. See 2A below for details.

For dissemination already undertaken (five academic conference presentations, three activist workshop presentations, three activist-outlet publications) please see 2B below and the accompanying Research Report.

Our research results, while potentially applicable outside of the specific project, e.g. in the realm of education and teaching practices, are not relevant for commercial purposes. In terms of our activist users, it should be noted that all three of our activist publications were solicited by interviewees.

RES-000-22-0902 - Making Feminist Sense of ‘the Anti-Globalisation Movement’ This research develops a feminist perspective on the so-called ‘global justice’ or ‘anti-globalisation’ movement through an empirical study of feminist ‘anti-globalisation’ activism. Contrary to images of a recent movement manifested in spontaneous protests and direct action in Northern cities, focusing on feminist anti-globalisation activism reveals: a longer, more complex history in which Southern groups play a key role; extensive but highly uneven movement interconnections around the world; a more determining role for pragmatism than ideology; and very diverse movement practices. This challenges us to rethink the origins, structure, ideology and practices of ‘the anti-globalisation movement’ more generally. Key Findings

• Feminist anti-globalisation activism is a form of resistance, not only to global

neo-liberalism, but also to the gendered and racialised hierarchies reproduced within the anti-globalisation movement itself.

• The origins of feminist anti-globalisation activism stretch back to anti-colonial struggles in Southern contexts and, more recently, to transnational feminist organising around the United Nations in which critiques of development and trade have become increasingly central. Also, feminist anti-globalisation activism has emerged in different forms in different national contexts, in response to contingent political factors, the trajectories of local feminist organising and localised gendered hierarchies.

• Activist groups are structured in a wide variety of different ways. Relations between groups are extensive but highly uneven, geopolitically and economically segmented, and characterised by the key role of transnational networks. Of the four most prominent groups in the study, two are based in developing countries, a finding which challenges assumptions about Northern dominance.

• Ideological affiliations are not as crucial in shaping the practices or alliances of feminist anti-globalisation activism as might be expected, with ‘principled pragmatism’ playing a key role.

• Feminist anti-globalisation practices can be grouped into seven categories: advocacy, education, networking or articulation, facilitation, service provision, mutual support and direct action. Direct action is thus only one small part of feminist anti-globalisation activities.

For academics

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• Understanding the origins of the anti-globalisation movement is less a matter of investigating political opportunity structures, more of analysing how multiple relations of oppression overlap in complex and contradictory ways. Attention also needs to be paid to contingent and micro-level factors.

• Gender, class and race need to be taken seriously as relations of power and oppression shaping movement development

• Many of the dichotomies widely used in social movement analysis – for example, between ‘new’ and ‘old’ social movements, and ‘instrumental’ and ‘expressive’ orientations – are disrupted by contemporary activism and need to be re-thought.

• For further research: the emphasis on education in feminist anti-globalisation activism point to ways in which academics can rethink their own teaching practice.

For policymakers or activists

• Participants in the anti-globalisation movement needs to move beyond acknowledging diversity and face up to the power relations that divide activists from each other

• Feminist participation in the movement need to be more widely recognised, and feminist critical engagements with movement ideology and practices taken on board, if that movement is to be fully inclusive and truly emancipatory in its search for ‘other possible worlds’.

About the Study The study was carried out by Catherine Eschle from the University of Strathclyde, and Bice Maiguashca from the University of Exeter. Influenced by critical international relations theory and social movement scholarship, as well as by feminist concerns and debates, the researchers conducted fieldwork at various events associated with the World Social Forum, 2003-5. They used participant observation techniques, gathered activist-produced documentation and conducted interviews with activists from over 80 groups. Key words Globalisation, globalization, anti-globalisation, movement of movements, global justice movement, feminism, women’s groups, networks, activism, direct action, education, neo-liberalism, capitalism, power relations, World Social Forum, European Social Forum

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Intersections between Feminism and the anti-globalisation movementTalk at World March for Women workshop on ‘feminism and the anti-globalisationmovement’, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Friday 28 March 2005.

Catherine Eschle

I am a lecturer and researcher, based at a university in Scotland and currentlyengaged with a friend in research for a book which strives to make sense of the feminismand the so-called ‘anti-globalisation movement’. We are here at the World Social Forum totry to map the women’s and feminist groups present and also to interview activists to hearabout their politics, their identities and their priorities. I would like to use this opportunityto talk to you briefly about our research, with the aim of getting your feedback on somequestions we are currently struggling with.

I will begin by explaining why we think a book like ours is needed. I think thatmany of us here would agree that, despite widespread interest in anti-globalisation politicsamong both activists and academics, little attention has thus far been paid in publishedaccounts of the movement to women’s and feminist anti-globalisation activism within it.This has resulted in the near-absence of feminism and feminists from authoritativerepresentations of ‘the anti-globalisation movement’. Possible reasons for this includeactive resistance to feminism by people writing from other perspectives, or their lack ofunderstanding of feminism, or their claim to be gender neutral. We would argue that all ofthese function to mask and reproduce gendered hierarchies. We also note that there is agrowing academic feminist literature on women’s activism in the context of globalisation.This has yet paid little attention to the interconnection of feminism with ‘the anti-globalisation movement’ as such, perhaps because of a fear of erasing the particular – ofhomogenising what can seem very diverse, context-specific activisms. Perhaps also it iseasier to study more obviously distinct, autonomous feminist or women’s groups, ratherthan having to think about the messy boundaries and interconnections between movements.Although this may be understandable, in our view it has also reinforced the evacuation offeminism from dominant representations of the ‘anti-globalisation movement’. Feministacademics seem to lag behind feminist activists on this issue: as I am sure you realise, thereis a large feminist activist literature on the movement, produced by the World March andother groups, in the form of web documents and newsletters. However, this is not availablein book form or translated into academic contexts.

As this activist-produced documentation indicates, the impression given bydominant representations of the movement that feminists are absent is simply wrong. Ourfieldwork has confirmed that there are many feminist activists and groups who stronglyidentify with ‘the anti-globalisation movement’ and who are a vibrant and creative presencewithin it. Look at all of us gathered here this evening! What is more, the erasure offeminists from dominant representations is highly politically problematic. It feeds off andinto processes of marginalisation in movement practice, the product of sexist attitudes andpatriarchal power structures, apparent even at supposedly progressive sites like the WorldSocial Forum.

Our book is thus an effort to support the struggle by feminist anti-globalisationactivists for visibility and voice. Further, we believe that paying attention to feminist anti-globalisation activism will help build a much fuller picture of ‘the anti-globalisationmovement’ more generally, and contribute to the construction of more inclusive movementnarratives and practices in the pursuit of other possible worlds.

It is still too early for me to talk to you about ‘findings’ – anyway, it is not reallythat sort of project. We will only be able to offer very partial and situated interpretationswhich we expect and hope will be contested by others. So I have no answers to give younow. Rather I want to use this opportunity to raise some questions on issues that arecurrently causing us some difficulty in our research. I hope you may find them interesting

questions to reflect upon for yourself, but I would also, from a self-interested point of view,welcome any feedback you could give me.

The first set of questions revolves around sites of investigation. We have conductedour research at the last two European Social Forums, in Paris and London, and the last twoWorld Social Forums, in Mumbai and now here in Porto Alegre. We see the World SocialForum process as one of the most high-profile and politically significant manifestations ofanti-globalisation politics. Importantly, it attracts activists, including feminists, from allover the world. Moreover, participants are encouraged to articulate strategies andalternative worlds as well as critiques of the current world order, and they use the site tobuild networks and advertise diverse activist practices and agendas. This allows us toglimpse the wider terrain of feminist anti-globalisation activism. However, we alsorecognise that many activists choose not to or are unable to attend the World Social Forumin its various manifestations, and that it is a contested and problematic space and process inwhich some activist practices are privileged over others. So I want to ask you: whichfeminist actors and perspectives do we privilege and which are left out when we focus onthe World Social Forum? For you, what alternative sites of anti-globalisation politics wouldyou look at for feminist anti-globalisation activists – and why? Arguably, there are powerdynamics and processes of exclusion marking all other sites in which anti-globalisationactivism can be observed and mapped. What, for example, would we gain and lose if wefocused instead on street protest?

The second set of questions has to do with terminology. In the UK, you can getaway with talking about feminism and ‘the anti-globalisation movement’ – just about. Ahandful of our interviewees prefer the term ‘global justice movement’ but publishers andjournal editors have pushed us towards using the ‘anti-globalisation’ tag as the mostimmediately recognisable, and most of our interviewees use it as a shorthand whilerecognising it as problematic. Several of the British interviewees are rather moreuncomfortable with identifying directly with the label ‘feminist’… In France, in contrast,our interviewees are self-declared feminists but prefer to talk of the ‘altermondialiste’movement in which they see themselves as participants. German speakers encountered onour travels prefer ‘critical globalisation’. Indian women tend to use either anti-globalisationor anti-imperialist globalisation, depending on their relationship to particular factions of theLeft, but most are very reluctant to use the term ‘feminist’ to describe their work forwomen’s empowerment. Here in Porto Alegre, we have been amazed – and delighted – tosee the hundreds of young women proudly calling themselves ‘feministas’!

There are context-specific, political reasons why such labels are used and refused inthese different contexts. However, almost every single one of our interviewees has agreedthat there are two transnational, overlapping movements in which they are participants. Sowe are left with a dilemma about what to call these movements, one which is very difficultto resolve. This is more than just a petty academic issue. I believe that with our languagewe are not just describing movements but helping to construct them, to call them intobeing. We use labels persuasively. I also believe that we academics studying movementsneed to develop our concepts, our labels, more inductively, that is, by paying attention tothe self-understandings and language of activists. However, there is no clear agreementhere on which terminology is preferable. So my friend and I have to make a decision to useparticular labels in our work, despite the fact they may be rejected by several of theactivists we talk about and to. This may be unavoidable but it is also necessarily a kind ofpower move and we need to think through its political consequences very carefully. I wouldsuggest that there are important issues underpinning this debate that have to do with thenature of identity and its relationship to political mobilisation: who we think we are isrelated to what we do and say, and our relationship to others, in very complex ways. Manyof us have multiple and shifting identities and we may, consciously or not, deploy identitiesstrategically, to achieve political goals. So I ask: what do you think is gained and what islost by our use of the terms ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-globalisation’? What alternative labels do

you prefer, and why? Do you use different labels in different contexts and what are theconsequences of this?

Sticking with our labels for now, my third set of questions has to do with the shapeand content of feminist interventions in ‘the anti-globalisation movement’. Most of us hereare surely familiar with the argument that we can’t and shouldn’t struggle for other possibleworlds without women, and feminism, being central to that struggle. But I want to gobeyond that simple point, important though it is, to ask: what does feminism bring to theorganising, visions and strategies of ‘the anti-globalisation movement’? What isdistinctively feminist about our contribution? Perhaps it is the commitment to strugglingagainst gender hierarchies in movement organising and the ways in which they work tomarginalize and silence women, and to trap women and men into confining stereotypes androles? Perhaps it is an analysis of the patriarchal character of globalised capitalism and thegendered divisions of labour to which it gives rise? Perhaps it is a concern to re-value traitsand roles associated with women, or perhaps more specifically with mothers, and bringthem into our visions of alternative worlds? My suggestions immediately point to the factthat feminist contributions are many, diverse and even contradictory. This reminds us thatthe feminist movement is itself divided and a site of political conflict, something we need,perhaps, to be more open and reflective about.

And to further avoid romanticising feminism, I also want to ask the question theother way round: what do and should feminists learn from ‘the anti-globalisationmovement’? Personally, I suspect that there are important gains to be made from a deepengagement with the supposedly ‘new’ forms of politics being developed at the WorldSocial Forum (especially in the Youth Camp) and elsewhere. There are importantprecursors for horizontal and affinity group-based organising and a concern with‘prefigurative’ lifestyles in the history of feminism, which are sometimes lost fromdominant feminist stories and not usually acknowledged in anti-globalisation circles. Thereis scope here for a fruitful exchange. Perhaps such exchange would make us thinkdifferently about feminist histories and trajectories. Which leads me to ask, finally: are themodes of organisation, the visions and the strategies of feminists changing in the light ofthe encounter with ‘the anti-globalisation movement’? Do they need to change?

These are big questions that I do not expect to be settled definitively in thediscussion this evening - or in our research. They require much more dialogue amongstfeminists and between feminists and others. But I think we need to discuss them and I amsure that you have some interesting insights to contribute. I am more than happy to considerany suggestions and also to answer any questions you may have about our research project[please contact Catherine Eschle at the Department of Government, University ofStrathclyde, Glasgow G1 1XQ, Scotland, UK, email: [email protected]].

Making Feminist Sense of ‘the Anti-Globalisation Movement’ Catherine Eschle and Bice Maiguashca

ESRC research award RES-000-22-0902, Data Submission June 06

Description of Method In an effort to aid those accessing the data submitted for the project ‘Making Feminist Sense of “the Anti-Globalisation Movement”’, we discuss below some of the thinking behind and conduct of the empirical research for this project. Some of this material is also contained in the research proposal and end of award report. We begin by summarising the aims of the project before outlining the broad epistemological and methodological frameworks underpinning it. We then discuss the choice of fieldwork sites before moving on to give an overview of the three methods of data construction adopted. We prefer the non-naturalistic concept of ‘data construction’ to that of ‘data collection’, as indicating our belief that we as researchers actively participate in the construction of the ‘real world’ through our theoretical framing and analytical interventions. We close by focusing on interviews, given that it is specifically interview data submitted here, providing a brief discussion of the practicalities and politics of conducting and transcribing interviews. Research aims and questions Our project aims to ‘map’ the feminist presence in ‘the anti-globalisation movement’ – when, where and why did feminist anti-globalisation activism emerge? How is it structured? What are the central political ideologies and identities of participants? What are their main practices/strategies to bring about change? In the light of this mapping, as well as of feminist activist self-understandings, we also seek to develop a feminist re-conceptualisation of ‘the anti-globalisation movement’. A third aim is to draw out the implications of our feminist research on the anti-globalisation movement for the teaching of global politics. Epistemological and methodological frameworks What informed our choice of this research project and the methods through which we pursued it? We have been most influenced by three main sets of academic debates: critical theorising in International Relations (IR) on the politics of resistance, social movement studies and, most fundamentally, feminist scholarship. To take each in turn: as scholars located in the discipline of IR, we root this project in the attack by critical theory, broadly conceived, on the very constitution of the discipline, its subject of study and methods of enquiry. This attack is predicated on the notion that theory is always for someone and for some purpose, that is, the act of theorising is always political (Cox 1986). Thus critical theorists interrogate the relation between power and knowledge production; they expose and denaturalise power hierarchies and relations of domination more generally; and they seek out immanent possibilities for disruption, resistance and transformative change. It is in this context that they insist on the importance of exploring social struggles and resistances, in terms of what is often referred to as ‘the politics of

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resistance’ (Gill 2003; Gills 2000; Amoore 2005; Eschle and Maiguashca 2005). However, we would argue that there have been few sustained empirical studies of movements within this literature (for exceptions see Rupert 2000; Morton 2000, 2002), and little discussion of how such study should be conducted. For tools to do so, we turn in part to social movement theory. Largely developed within the discipline of Sociology, social movement theory is a highly diverse field. Arguably, a synthesis is currently occurring whereby researchers pay attention to changing state, inter-state and economic structures, the economic and cultural resources available, the structures of organisation and ideological ‘frames’ that develop, and the shared identities and orientations that emerge (see, e.g. Tarrow 1998; Guidry, Kennedy and Zald 2000; Klandermans and Staggenborg 2002). This research project speaks to all these themes and draws eclectically on different social movement traditions to study them. It has perhaps been influenced most directly by the ‘constructivist’ approach in social movement theory, with its insistence that movements not are stable actors with pre-formed interests but rather ongoing processes in which diverse actors, including academic commentators, contribute to the construction of a common identity (Melucci 1989, 1996; see also Eschle 2005). This means being explicit about the fact that the researcher helps call movements (such as ‘the anti-globalisation movement’) into existence. It also means paying close attention to activist self-understandings. This resonates strongly with feminist methodology, the key driver behind this project. We would stress that we recognise feminism does not offer a unified set of methodological prescriptions. But generally speaking, feminist research is politically committed, generating its questions from women’s lives, experiences and struggles in the context of a gendered world (Harding 1987). To put this another way, feminists insist upon factoring in gender as a key dimension of social science analysis, treating it as a power relation, one intertwined with other structures and relations of power in complex, context-specific ways (see Eschle 2004). Moreover, the best feminist work seeks not to reduce women and men to mere effects of power, but instead to pay close attention to the ways in which individual and collective subjects are constructed and can have an impact on the world around them. It does not only ‘add women in’ to our understanding of a particular social formation but challenges the way that social formation has been constituted and studied. It also takes seriously the injunction to researcher reflexivity, in which researchers situate themselves on the same critical plane as the object of study (see discussions in Ramazanoglu 2002; Young 1997; Smith 1987). As self-conscious students of and contributors to the feminist movement, feminist scholars frequently focus on the dynamics of feminist movement organising (e.g. Maiguashca 2005). Further, feminist sociologists have long insisted on crucial modifications to social movement theory, which we have striven to take on board in the construction and analysis of our data. These modifications include the study of interpersonal, informal connections between activists as well as formal organisational linkages and structural contexts; of the ‘private’ sources and impact of political engagement as well as the more obvious ‘public’ dimensions; and of the emotional and expressive dimensions of activist motivations practices as well as the more narrowly

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rational and instrumental (e.g. Taylor 1998, 1999; Roseneil 1995; Ferree and Martin 1995). Moreover, in line with the more general methodological injunctions of feminism and constructivist social movement theory, we have paid particular attention to activist self-understandings and researcher reflexivity. Concretely, this means that we have sought to treat feminist anti-globalisation activists as sources of knowledge rather than simply objects of study, foregrounding their interview testimony while paying attention to the complex relationship between experience, narration and interpretation. We have also drawn on this testimony to help us rethink what ‘the anti-globalisation movement’ is and could be. Finally, we have reflected self-critically on our own positioning as western feminist scholars, involved not only in a dialogue with other feminists but also in a relation of power over them by dint of our role in mediating their self-representations and in imposing our interpretations. Fieldwork sites Our research has centred on the World Social Forum process. The first WSF was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2001 and it spawned a rolling series of national and regional fora, feeding into an annual global event (see, e.g. Leite 2005; Sen et al. 2004). We conducted preliminary fieldwork at the Paris European Social Forum (ESF) in November 2003 and the Mumbai WSF in January 2004. The ESRC-funded part of the research involved attending the London ESF in October 2004 and the fifth WSF in Porto Alegre in January 2005. We chose the World Social Forum because we see it as one of the most high-profile and politically significant manifestations of anti-globalisation politics. Accessible to researchers, it also attracts activists, including feminists, from all over the world. Moreover, participants are encouraged to articulate strategies and alternative worlds as well as critiques of the current world order, and they use the site to build broader networks and advertise diverse activist practices and agendas. This allowed us to glimpse agendas for change as well as oppositional action, and to gain a sense of the wider terrain of feminist anti-globalisation activism. There are some important limitations with the World Social Forum as a site for our research. For example, we recognise that many activists choose not to or are unable to attend the World Social Forum in its various manifestations: it is a contested and problematic space and process in which some activist orientations and practices are privileged over others. This means that our mapping of feminist anti-globalisation activism was always likely to be skewed in particular ways. We would argue, however, that this is true of all other sites in which anti-globalisation activism can be observed and mapped and the important thing is to reflect on the precise ways in which data is likely to be skewed. We also acknowledge that that there are some significant constraints on the conduct and interpretation of fieldwork that ranges over sites that are so diverse geopolitically, and so huge and frenetic. Specifically, it is difficult to gain in-depth knowledge of a social movement field in a particular country (e.g. Ray 1998) when only visiting for a short while, or to conduct detailed and lengthy interviews and produce exhaustive participant observation diaries while on site. We strove to mitigate this

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problem to some extent by interviewing connected interviewees in each country before the event began; in addition, we were also able to conduct some interviews in London and in the Netherlands after the London ESF. While the charge of superficiality still has some force, we would argue that our approach has enabled us to offer a broad-brush map of transnational contexts and networks in ways that more in-depth ethnographic studies may miss, and that we hope will be a helpful precursor to such studies. Research methods Concretely, we deployed three main methods of data construction at the fieldwork sites:

1. participant observation: attending and taking part in activist workshops and demonstrations, taping dialogues and public speeches, recording impressions in extensive fieldwork diaries;

2. collection of activist-produced literature such as manifestos, declarations, newsletters, pamphlets and books;

3. conducting semi-structured interviews with individual activists. We would stress at this point that feminist methodological argument has long shifted from an assumption that feminist research should automatically privilege qualitative methods and particularly interviews, to a recognition that different feminist questions and purposes may require different methods (Harding 1987; Jayaratne and Stewart 1991). Thus at the same time as we have undertaken extensive interviewing, in line with our concern to document and interpret feminist self-understandings and beliefs, we have adopted these other methods in order to meet our research aim of ‘mapping’ the context and shape of feminist anti-globalisation activism. We recognise that interviews primarily serve to help us construct answers to questions about the meaning and interpretation of feminist anti-globalisation activism for the women involved; they can only tell us about the ‘facts’ of this activism, at least in the sense of reliable, widely believed data about dates, composition of groups, who was in one place or another, if they are checked against other forms of data such as group documents (see, e.g. Blee and Taylor 2002). Combining multiple methods, or what Berg (2004: 5) has called ‘lines of sight’, allows us a kind of triangulation for the project as a whole, in the loose sense of yielding a more complete picture of feminist anti-globalisation activism. It should be noted, however, that only the interview transcripts have been submitted to this database, as agreed with the ESRC in our original application. As personal aide-memoirs, our fieldnotes are not suitable for wider circulation and we did not have the capacity to convert collected documents to electronic format. We sought explicit consent from our interviewees for the submission of interviews, as can be seen on the consent form that accompanies this data. Of the total of 51 people interviewed in and around the London and Porto Alegre events, 39 agreed to have their transcripts forwarded. So it is important to recognise that these interviews constitute only part of a wider dataset; and it is important to understand both the potentials and limitations of these interviews when read on their own. What we are offering here are partial, situated narratives of interpretation about feminist anti-globalisation activism.

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Practicalities of interviewing and transcription Feminist critics of social science literature on interviewing (Finch 1984; Oakley 1981) have emphasised that interviews are a dialogue in which knowledge is often co-constructed. We agree with this – but only to an extent. We increasingly came to be aware of the power relation involved in our key role in structuring and interpreting the interview and strove to limit our active participation in the discussion in favour of active listening (Ramazanoglu 2002: chs. 6 and 7; Devault 1990). We would also be wary of strong claims about a shared women’s culture informing the interview situation (Finch 1984; Oakley 1981). While it is widely accepted that the gender identity of the interviewee and interviewer does make a difference to what is being said, and how, and how it is received (eg. May 2001: ch. 6), Mullings (1999) provides an important reminder of the ways in which this is complicated by race and class and geopolitics. This is particularly pertinent with regards to research like ours, which ranges across very diverse contexts. As white western academic women, we could not assume a straightforwardly shared positioning with our interviewees. More significant than any shared gender identity, in our view, was the fact that we overtly identified ourselves as feminist researchers, sympathetic to the general political struggle in which our interviewees were engaged. This necessarily shaped the interviews that followed, contributing to a constructive atmosphere, to interviewee openness and expectations about reciprocity from us, sometimes involving direct requests for information or help that had to be accommodated. It should be noted that we did not identify ourselves as a particular kind of feminist or anti-globalisation activist. Following Blee and Taylor (2002), we strove to adopt a posture of neutrality with regards to movement factions and not to pass judgement on the specific political and strategic decisions of interviewees, in order to help maintain that constructive atmosphere and to enable access to all sides of often divisive debates. Our interviewees were chosen in large part because we identified them, either beforehand or on site, as ‘key informants’, i.e. coordinators of groups with an active and important role at the WSF or ESF. In addition, we used the ‘snowball’ technique, soliciting suggestions for people to talk to from our interviewees (Berg 2004: 36). Recognising that interviewees tend to recommend people similar in identity and affiliation to themselves (May 2001: ch. 6), we also made some effort to look for activists from groups from different contexts, demographics and orientations (e.g. we sought out meetings of women from Latin American peasants unions and secured interviews with anarchist women in London and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist women at Mumbai Resistance in India). However, we acknowledge that we could not devise a systematic or complete way of undertaking this and were only partially successful in widening our pool of subjects. Further, we were not able, and did not seek, to reach ‘saturation point’ when using the snowballing techniques (cf. Blee and Taylor 2002). Given the diversity of activists on site, the fact that the site is not closed but open, and the personal and reflective nature of some of our questions, it was very unlikely that we were ever going to reach a moment where no new information would be provided during interviews and no further suggestions made for new interviewees. Finally, we would make no claims for the representative nature of our sample. In our view, this would not only be practically impossible, given the size,

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openness and diversity of the fieldwork sites and the fact we are only two researchers, but it would also be epistemologically problematic. We did not seek with these interviews to develop a comprehensive, detached, bird’s eye view of feminist anti-globalisation activism at the WSF. Rather, the WSF was the doorway through which we sought a view of the wider terrain of feminist anti-globalisation activism; interviews were only one tool amongst several through which we hoped to gain that view; and that view was always going to be partial, situated and provisional. The interviews were semi-structured (Reinharz 1992: ch.2), with some pre-specified questions but not in a pre-set order, and also with space for us to pursue particular lines of enquiry. This had the advantage of comparability but also flexibility (May 2001: ch.6). As Blee and Taylor put it (2002), semi-structured interviews are most useful when the goal of research is the exploration, discovery and interpretation of complex events; they offer access to meaning and category generation, identity construction and semantic analysis, among other things. We developed and used an interview guide (following Arksey and Knight 1999: ch.7; Lofland and Lofland 1995: 78-84), with some limited demographic questions at the end. The guide was progressively refined and the final version taken to Brazil accompanies this data submission. It should be noted that we were frequently forced to cut interviews very short or to deviate quite substantially from the interview guide, in response to interviewee priorities and to very busy and noisy WSF contexts. It is difficult to convey to those who have not been to the WSF the freneticism on site. Those interviews conducted off site, either immediately before or after the event, tended to be much longer and more detailed. All interviews were fully transcribed. For some of our Brazilian interviews, we were dependent on translators, to whom we remain eternally indebted, and it is the translators’ words that have been transcribed. The translators or we sometimes had difficulty in transferring concepts across linguistic differences and occasionally they provided a synopsis of what was being said rather than a verbatim translation. Although we have tried to verify and flesh out these translated interviews while transcribing them, the fact that they are not the interviewees’ actual words and sometimes a kind of dialogue between ourselves, the interviewee and the translator, must be borne in mind. It should also be noted that we undertook some minor editing of syntax and grammar, particularly in the case of translated interviews. In particular, we removed some hesitations, incorrect tenses and pronouns and verbal tics which were caused by difficulties with English or the process of translation rather than expressing a meaningful repetition or pause (Arksey and Knight 1999: 144-7, cf. Devault 2004). We also occasionally inserted further transcriber suggestions in square brackets. The principle of maximising clarity seemed more important to us than that of preserving precise original wording, particularly when English was not the first language of the interviewee or the words recorded were that of a translator, not the interviewee. Several interviewees argued forcefully for this approach when reading their own transcripts. We offered all our interviewees the opportunity to check and edit transcripts. This practice is widely suggested, particularly among feminist researchers, as important to partially redress the hierarchy in knowledge production. Not all interviewees requested to

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see their transcripts and not all those that did then edited them, but a handful edited their transcripts substantially or engaged in subsequent discussions with us by email or telephone to add supplementary material. Finally, some but not many of our interviewees requested anonymity, to varying extents. The consent form used for the earlier London interviews put anonymity for the ESRC submission as the only option, something we changed in later versions in the light of interviewee feedback. Again, we have worked hard to ascertain interviewee wishes about anonymity. All this means that the transcripts very quite considerably: not only in terms of their length, the order and nature of questions and whether or not they involved translation, but also in terms of how they were shaped by interviewee wishes and subsequent interaction with interviewees. Nonetheless, we think they remain a fascinating read and a useful resource, and hope they will be of wider interest beyond our own project. References Amoore, Louise (ed.) (2005) The Global Resistance Reader, London: Routledge. Arksey, Hilary and Peter Knight (1999) Interviewing for Social Scientists: An

Introductory Resource with Examples, London: Sage. Berg, Bruce (2004) Qualitative Research Methods, 5th edition, Boston: Pearson Blee, Kathleen and Verta Taylor (2002) ‘Semi-Structured Interviewing in Social

Movement Research’, in Bert Klandermans and Susan Staggenborg (eds) Methods of Social Movement Research, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 92-117.

Cox, Robert (1986) ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, in Robert O. Keohane (ed.) Neorealism and its Critics, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 204-54.

Devault, Marjorie L. (1990) ‘Talking and Listening from Women’s Standpoint: Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis’, Social Problems, 37 (1): 96-116.

Eschle, Catherine (2004) ‘Feminist Studies of Globalisation: Beyond Gender, Beyond Economism?’, Global Society 18 (2): 97-125.

Eschle, Catherine (2005) ‘Constructing the Anti-Globalisation Movement’, in Catherine Eschle and Bice Maiguashca (eds) Critical Theories, International Relations and ‘the Anti-Globalisation Movement: The Politics of Global Resistance, London: Routledge, pp. 17-35.

Eschle, Catherine and Bice Maiguashca (eds) (2005) Critical Theories, International Relations and ‘the Anti-Globalisation Movement: The Politics of Global Resistance, London: Routledge.

Ferree, Myra Marx and Patricia Yancey Martin (eds) (1995) Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Finch, Janet (1984) ‘“It’s Great to have Someone to Talk to”: The Ethics and Politics of Interviewing Women’, in Colin Bell and Helen Roberts (eds) Social Researching: Politics, Problems, Practice, London: Routledge, pp. 70-87.

Gill, Stephen (2003) Power and Resistance in the New World Order, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gills, Barry K. (ed.) (2000) Globalization and the Politics of Resistance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Guidry, John A., Michael D. Kennedy and Mayer M. Zald (eds) Globalizations and Social Movements: Culture, Power and The Transnational Public Sphere, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Harding, Sandra (1987) ‘Introduction: Is there a Feminist Method?’ in Sandra Harding (ed.) Feminism and Methodology,: Social Science Issues, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 1-14.

Jaryaratne, Toby Epstein and Abigail Steward (1991) ‘Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in the Social Sciences: Current Feminist Issues and Practical Strategies’, 85-106 in Mary Margaret Fonow and Judith A. Cook (eds) Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Klandermans, Bert and Susan Staggenborg (eds) (2002) Methods of Social Movement Research, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Leite, José Corrêa (2005) The World Social Forum: Strategies of Resistance, transl. Traci Romine, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Lofland, John and Lyn H. Lofland (1995) Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis, 3rd edition, Belmont and Albany: Wadsworth.

Maiguashca, Bice (2005) ‘Theorizing Knowledge from Women’s Political Practices: The Case of the Women’s Reproductive Rights Movement’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 7 (2): 207-32.

May, Tim (2001) Social Research: Issues, Methods and Processes, 3rd edition, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Melucci, Alberto (1989) Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs

in Contemporary Society, London; Radius. Melucci, Alberto (1996) Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morton, Adam (2000) ‘Mexico, Neoliberal Restructuring and the EZLN: A Neo-

Gramscian Analysis’, in Barry K. Gills (ed.) Globalization and the Politics of Resistance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 255-79.

Morton, Adam (2002) ‘”La Resurrección del Maiz”: Globalisation, Resistance and the Zapatistas’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 31 (1): 27-54.

Mullings, Barbara (1999) ‘Insider or Outsider, Both or Neither: Some Dilemmas of Interviewing in a Cross-Cultural Setting’, Geoforum, 30: 337-50.

Oakley, Ann (1981) ‘Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms’, in Helen Roberts (ed.) Doing Feminist Research, London: Routledge, pp. 30-60.

Ramazanoglu, Caroline with Janet Holland (2002) Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices, London: Sage.

Ray, Raka (1999) Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Reinharz, Shulamit (1992) Feminist Methods in Social Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Roseneil, Sasha (1995) Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Action at Greenham Common, Buckingham: Open University Press.

Rupert, Mark (2000) Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order, London: Routledge.

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Sen, Jai, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar and Peter Waterman (eds) (2004) World Social Forum: Challenging Empires, New Delhi: Viveka Press.

Smith, Dorothy (1987) ‘Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology’, in Sandra Harding (ed.) Feminism and Methodology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 84-96.

Taylor, Verta (1998) ‘Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research’, Qualitative Sociology, 21 (4): 357-379

Taylor, Verta (1999) ‘Gender and Social Movements: Gender Processes in Women’s Self-Help Movements’, Gender and Society, 13 (1): 8-33

Tarrow, Sidney (1998) Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Young, Stacey (1997) Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics and Feminist Movements, London: Routledge.

INTERVIEW GUIDE – version for the WSF, January 2005

1. PERSONAL MOTIVATIONS a) When did you join XXXX [group]? b) Why did you join this group? c) History: Have you been an activist for a while?

If yes, tell me what brought you to this kind of politics? In response to issue: How did you find out about this issue? > Why did you decide to get active on this issue? d) What challenges have you had to overcome to stay involved? e) What inspires you to keep going?

2. ORGANISATION AND COALITION a) Tell us about how your group is structured and organised.

• When was it set up? • Does it have individuals or other groups as members?

• How many members, roughly – how big is the group?

• Is membership paid? How (else) is your group funded?

• How are decisions made? How are these decisions shared with

members?

b) what are your/your group’s main political activities?

c) your group have a charter of principles/manifesto/platform? if yes: • is it written? can we get a copy? • can you give us an idea of the core principles in it?

• how were they agreed upon?

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d) coalitions: • What other groups does your group have links with ?

(local/national/regional/international)

• What kind of links? what issues do you work on together? what kind of activities do you do together? how closely do you work together?

• Why do you have links with those groups? • Have your alliances changed over time?

• Are you working with those groups at the WSF? Are you

working with other groups at the WSF?

3. THE WSF a) Have you been involved in the organising of the WSF? IF NO go on to B) If YES:

• What committees/events were you involved in? • What was your role?

• Why did you get involved?

• How did the organising/meetings go? Describe xxx meeting.

• What difficulties did you face?

b) Please tell us about your participation in the WSF

• Why are you going/why are you here? What do you hope to

get out of it? How is it going?

• Have you been to other WSFs? If so, how does it compare?

• What are the key strengths of the WSF in general?

• What are its limitations?

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4. IDEOLOGY a) We would like to know a bit more about your political world view.

• what, for you, is ‘the enemy’, the key problem that you are trying to overcome?

• the theme of the WSF is ‘another world is possible’ – for

you what would that world look like? b) How would you describe or label your political world view? c) Do you consider yourself a feminist?

if yes, any particular kind? if not, why not?

• What does the label feminist mean to you?

• What power relations are feminists resisting? (impact <> form of power)

d) what do you think of the label ‘anti-globalisation’? is there an

alternative label you prefer? why?

e) Do you think there is a XXXX movement [use their terminology]?

IF YES: • What do you mean when you describe this as a

movement?

• Who is in the movement?

• Who do you think are the key players, strongest force?

• Do you consider yourself part of this movement?

5. IDENTITY a) [if yes] What ties or holds the movement(s) together? (What do you share in common?)

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b) Do you think the movement is a force for democracy in the world? Does it have democratic goals or values or processes?

If no, why not? If yes, in what way is it pro-democracy?

c) Do you see yourself as part of any other social movement or movements? Which? d) You have said you call yourself a XXXX[feminist?]; are there any other identities that are important to your activism?

6. DEMOCRACY a) Do you think the WSF is a democratic space or process?

If no, why not? If yes, what it about it that is democratic? (example?)

b)Would you describe your own group XXXX as democratic?

If no why not? If yes, what makes it democratic for you? (example?)

7. STRATEGIES a) Moving beyond the WSF, what are the main goals that your group is trying to achieve? b) How are you trying to achieve them? What are your strategies? Can you give us some examples? c) How successful have these strategies been so far? d) How does your group cope with disagreement among members? Can

you give us an example? e) Can you give us an example of how you have resolved difficulties

building alliances with other groups?

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f) Would you say that education/ dissemination of information /consciousness raising is an important strategy for your group?

If yes:

• what methods do you use to gather information/construct your analysis

• how do you disseminate this information/analysis

g) did you go/are you going to the Feminist Dialogues?

• If not why not? • If yes: why did you go/are you going? • If after the FD: How useful did you find it? Would you support

a similar event next year?

8. EMOTIONS AND THE BODY Final part of the interview, few questions about emotions. a) Can you give us an example of when negative emotions such as anger, fear or grief have motivated you to get active or influenced how you act? b) Can you gives us an example of when positive emotions, such as empathy or love has motivated you to get active or influenced how you act? c) Can you give me an example of when friendship has played an important role in your activism? d) Can you give me an example of when illness or tiredness has

constrained your activism? e) Given all these difficulties, what inspires you to keep going [if not asked at the start]

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9. DEMOGRAPHY We need to finish by asking you some basic information so we can make comparisons across our different interview transcripts: sex male or female? a) where do you live? b) is that where you were born and grew up? c) can you tell us which age group you belong to? 16-19 20-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70+ d) do you consider yourself belonging to a particular religion?which one? e) are you currently a member of a trade union? which one? f) are you currently a member of a political party? which one? g) what is [will be, if student] your highest educational qualification? g) what is your occupation? h) do you work for your organisation on a paid or voluntary basis?

What is your role? j) are you single or do you have a partner or wife/husband? k) do you have children? If yes, how many?

Version 2/11/04

Feminism and ‘the Anti-Globalisation Movement’ – Form for Interviewees Details of Research This interview is for a book that aims to make sense of the so-called ‘anti-globalisation movement’ from a feminist perspective: what it is, how to study it, what women and feminists are doing within it, and its implications for movement politics. We may also draw on the interview in related publications on movement politics in academic journals. Contact Details For further information about the research or your interview, contact us on:

Catherine Eschle, Department of Government, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. Tel 00 44 (0) 141 548 2214, [email protected], OR Bice Maiguashca, Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK. Tel 00 44 (0) 1392 263 177, [email protected]..

If you have concerns/questions about the research you would like to discuss with someone independent of it, please contact: Wolfgang Rudig, Chair of Departmental Ethics Committee, Department of Government, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, [email protected]. Confidentiality We will keep your transcript private and secure and will not share it with anyone else except in the following circumstances:

1) If the police require us to hand over material relating to crimes. We ask you not to give us any information that could be used to implicate you or anyone else in a crime.

2) If you consent to having your transcript sent to a national research database. Other academic researchers, after vetting by ourselves, may then have access to it. If you are happy for your transcript to be included on this database, please tick here:

Anonymity If you would prefer, we can make your interview transcript anonymous, ensuring that we do not refer to your name in our research and publications or in the transcript submitted to the national database. We would still need to refer to the group(s) of which you are a member. Please tick your preference : USE MY NAME REMOVE MY NAME Interview Transcript If you would like us to send you a copy of your transcript for you to read, edit and send back to us before we use it in our research, please tick here: Contact Details: PLEASE PRINT IN CAPITAL LETTERS Name:............................................................................................................................ Member of which group (s) .......................................................................................... Email Address/Phone:..................................................................................................

Postal address:..............................................................................................................

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......................................................................................................................... Consent Please sign here to indicate that we have explained the research and that you have voluntarily consented to participate in this interview: SIGNATURE.......................................................... DATE ........................................

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