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Dialogues Across Difference at the World Social Forum

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Dialogues Across Difference at the World Social Forum JANET CONWAY DIALOGUES ACROSS DIFFERENCE AT THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM Decolonizing ‘Open Space’ 1 INTRODUCTION Struggles over hegemonic knowledges and the production of critical, oppositional knowledges are central to both the field of critical pedagogy and the politics of emancipatory social movements. Despite such convergence, consideration of social movements as spaces and agents of knowledge production is largely absent from critical scholarship. A book such as this, addressed to social justice educators, which seeks to explore the relations among power, pedagogy and praxis in globalized contexts, provides an opportunity to examine the knowledge practices of contemporary global justice movements and explore their relevance to critical pedagogy. Since its appearance in 2001, the World Social Forum has become an increasingly significant site for the agglomeration, encounter and transformation of movement knowledges arising from subaltern struggles rooted in specific social and geographical locations/identities. The World Social Forum (WSF) is itself an innovation, or a product of the knowledges of the anti-globalization movement (Leite, 2005). This chapter will examine the World Social Forum as a praxis that is remaking the manner in which social movements from around the world recognize and interact with each other and, in so doing, is transforming the political culture of anti/alter-globalization movements worldwide. In the discussion that follows, I propose that the Social Forum is a pedagogical and political space that is enabling the emergence of communicative practices across previously unbridged, indeed largely unrecognized, differences. In particular, I will analyze the methodology of “open space” as central to the dynamics of recognition and dialogue across difference at the WSF. The WSF’s practice and theory of open space is itself a significant movement-based political innovation, or a knowledge practice. However, this putatively horizontal and utopian space is also marked by unequal power relations and, in particular, legacies of colonialism. The praxis of open space is itself contested and conflictual, but also reflexive and giving rise to further knowledge and, in some time-places of the WSF, a deepened praxis of decolonization. In conclusion, I will consider the emergent knowledge claims embodied in and through the evolving praxis of the WSF and their relevance to emancipatory politics and pedagogy. S.A. Moore and R.C. Mitchell (eds.), Power, Pedagogy and Praxis: Social Justice in the Globalized Classroom, 73–89. ©2008 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. JANET CONWAY THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: CONCEPT AND HISTORY Originally conceived as an alternative to the World Economic Forum held annually in Davos, Switzerland, the World Social Forum (WSF) was initiated at the height of the anti-globalization mobilizations to convene groups and movements of insurgent civil society from around the world. The idea was to create a forum for the free and horizontal exchange of ideas, experiences and strategies oriented to enacting and generating alternatives to neoliberalism. The gathering would be thoroughly international but anchored geographically and experientially in the global South. The first WSF, held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January 2001, attracted 15,000 participants. Its astounding success led organizers to commit to the WSF as a permanent process. Each January since then, the event has taken place, growing exponentially in size, diversity, complexity, and importance so that it is now regularly attracting over 100,000 people annually. After three years in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the WSF moved to Mumbai, India in 2004 and in 2007, to Nairobi, Kenya. Brazil remains the homeplace of the WSF but there is a widespread commitment to moving the world event geographically to other sites in the global South. This is a strategy for expanding and deepening the Forum’s inter-continental and cross-cultural character. In a related move, at the second WSF in Porto Alegre in 2002, organizers called on participants to organize similar processes in their own places, defined by their own priorities, and at whatever scale made sense to them. Social forums have proliferated inspired by the world event and organized in accordance with the WSF’s Charter of Principles, with regional scale processes emerging with particular vigour and importance. Central to the functioning of the WSF to date has been the understanding that the WSF is not a deliberative process. The WSF qua WSF does not make decisions, issue statements, nor embark on common actions. Rather, the WSF is best understood as an open, autonomous, and civil society “space” in which participants are invited to self-organize, to advance their campaigns, and to mount activities for one another, aimed building broad political convergence across difference. The WSF is not a unitary entity. No one can therefore ‘represent’ the WSF. This understanding is becoming increasingly contentious in and beyond the WSF’s International Council1 but it has been definitive of the WSF thus far. The civil society entities present at the World Social Forum vary considerably depending on the location of the event but are in every case amazingly diverse in their demographic make-up, organizational forms, cultural expressions, geographic roots and reach, strategies, tactics, and discourses.1 In any analytical discussion about the WSF, it is critical to maintain a distinction between the World Social Forum and its constituent social movements and networks. The latter act in and beyond the WSF but also help constitute the WSF as event and space. The WSF is both more than and different from the sum of these movements; and the movements are more than and different from the sum of their practices vis-a-vis the WSF. The WSF and its constituent movements all have their own particular and evolving praxes. The development of the World Social Forum, understood as an annual event, is central to most discussions, but it is critical to recognize that the WSF is more 74 .
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