Interface A journal for and about social movements Vol 12 Issue 2 www.interfacejournal.net Interface: a journal for and about social movements Contents Volume 21 (2): i – iii (Dec 2020) Interface volume 12 issue 2 Open issue Interface: a journal for and about social movements Volume 12 issue 2 (December 2020) ISSN 2009 – 2431 Editorial Open issue Laurence Cox (pp. 1 – 4) Call for papers Call for papers volume 13 issue 2 (EN) Rising up against institutional racism in the Americas and beyond (pp. 5 - 11) Convocatoria vol. 13 no. 2 (ES) Los levantamientos contra el racismo institucional en las Américas (y más allá) (pp. 12 - 18) General pieces Kyoko Tominaga Protest journey: the practices of constructing activist identity to choose and define the right type of activism (peer-reviewed article, pp. 19 – 41) Márcio Bustamante and Bruno M. Fiuza Autonomist political culture in Brazil and the Peoples’ Global Action Oral History Project (peer-reviewed article, pp. 42 – 69) Jonathan Langdon, Kofi Larweh and Wilna Quarmyne “E yeo ngo” (Do they eat salt?) Learning in a movement from a 5 year PAR study of the Ada Songor Advocacy Forum, a social movement in Ghana (peer-reviewed article, pp. 70 – 86) Régis Coursin (FR) Le sommet du G7 dans Charlevoix, 2018: résistances et subalternités locales, de l’évènement à la longue durée (peer-reviewed article, pp. 87 – 120) Björn Herold and Margaux DeBarros “It’s not just an occupation, it’s our home!” The politics of everyday life in a long-term occupation in Cape Town and their effects on movement development (peer-reviewed article, pp. 121 – 156) i Interface: a journal for and about social movements Contents Volume 21 (2): i – iii (Dec 2020) Ryan A. Knight Autonomous struggles, political parties, recognition politics and state (re)production in Oaxaca, Mexico (peer-reviewed article, pp. 157 – 181) Mark Purcell The project of democracy and the 15M movement in Spain (peer-reviewed article, pp. 182 – 214) Pearly Wong Linking “local” to “global”: framing environmental justice movements through progressive contextualization (peer-reviewed article, pp. 215 – 243) Phil Hedges “It is people who make education work”: a content analysis of trade union teach-outs in leading UK universities (research note, pp. 244 – 253) Ian Miles and Brian Martin, Reflection-based activism: toward mutual recognition (peer-reviewed article, pp. 254 – 269) Reviews [single PDF] (pp. 270 - 306) Daniel Sonabend, 2019, We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-war Britain. Review author: Alex Khasnabish Susana Draper, 2018, 1968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy. Review author: Plácido Muñoz Morán Amber Day (ed.), 2017, DIY Utopia: Cultural Imagination and the Remaking of the Possible. Review Author: Evangelos Chrysagis Isabel Wilkerson, 2020, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents. New York: Random House. Review author: Isaac Oommen Brian Whitener, 2019, Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press. Review Author: Mathias Sosnowski Krabbe Touré Reed, 2020, Toward Freedom: The Case against Race Reductionism. Review Author: Jay Arena Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring (eds.) The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective: A Survey. Review Author: Tomás Mac Sheoin Miguel A. Martinez, 2020, Squatters in the Capitalist City: Housing, Justice, and Urban Politics. Review author: Ben Duke Cover art This photograph is part of an artistic research process carried out in 2019 in the surrounding areas of the Térraba Sierpe National Wetland, a protected wetland in the southern area of Costa Rica. Specifically, this photograph ii Interface: a journal for and about social movements Contents Volume 21 (2): i – iii (Dec 2020) portrays one of the members of the Association of Piangüeros, Recursos Marinos y Afines de Ajuntaderas (APREMAA). This association groups the community of Ajuntaderas, a community formed by fishermen and fisherwomen and piangüa gatherers. The piangüa lives in the barred soil of the wetland. It is a small mollusc, which is extracted in order to eat it or to sell it. The piangüa extraction has a long tradition that goes back to pre-Hispanic times, when the native peoples who lived in the area also consumed it, as it is proven in various archaeological findings.The piangüeras and piangüeros go through the mangrove at low tide looking for those small shells in the mud; some phrase the labor as going to ‘harvest’. Every time the tide goes up and down, the piangüas swim and change places, so at each tide they must find the small but visible traces inside the mud. After the gathering, the piangüas are broken, extracted and cooked. The piangüero is, according to Alberto Vargas (president of the Association), a freshwater fisher (wo)man. Their work, like the mangrove, is ambiguous, an in-between. The sea becomes their frontier, they sail, fish and harvest between fresh and saltwater, perceiving from the rivers the changes of the tides and moving through them. The tides determine their rhythms of movement, fishing and rest. In addition, APREMAA works together with the Ministry of Environment and Energy and different non-governmental organizations in the conservation and sustainable use of the species that inhabit the mangrove of the Terraba Sierpe National Wetland. The main objective of this association is to unite and fight to improve the living and working conditions of its community and the wetland which is their home. Credits: Diana Barquero Pérez, 2019 About Interface Interface: a journal for and about social movements is a peer-reviewed journal of practitioner research produced by movement participants and engaged academics. Interface is globally organised in a series of different regional collectives, and is produced as a multilingual journal. Peer-reviewed articles have been subject to double-blind review by one researcher and one movement practitioner. The views expressed in any contributions to Interface: a journal for and about social movements are those of the authors and contributors, and do not necessarily represent those of Interface, the editors, the editorial collective, or the organizations to which the authors are affiliated. Interface is committed to the free exchange of ideas in the best tradition of intellectual and activist inquiry. The Interface website is hosted by the Department of Sociology, National University of Ireland Maynooth. iii Interface: A journal for and about social movements Volume 12 (2): pp 1 – 4 (December 2020) Editorial Open issue Laurence Cox Like many radical spaces around the planet, Interface has struggled in the coronavirus pandemic. It is fundamentally a volunteer project depending on the time and energy of a changing mix of people whose lives have been in some cases hugely disrupted over the past year, like so many people around the world. As activists and/or as academics, we have struggled in solidarity with our movements, people immediately in need, students and others who have had first call on our time. Many editors have had to step back temporarily from the project for the duration of the crisis in order to attend to these things, or have not been able to do as much as they had hoped. In early 2020, Lesley Wood, Sutapa Chattopadhyay and I put out a call for stories of movement struggles around the world in Covid-19. We published those accounts week-to-week and then brought them together in an extraordinary special edition in July. Since that point, many other movement journals have started to publish comparable collections, and movements have moved on once again. This issue reflects that change: with many other spaces to publish in, both activist and academic, it is marked particularly by longer and less immediate pieces. They are none the less important for that: despite much rhetoric, there will be no “building back better” unless movements are able to win their struggles; and the bigger challenges, whether marked by the sidelining of the extraordinary popular uprisings in the US in favour of a new statist centrism or by a new wave of repression in Hong Kong, by the continued ecological crisis or femicidal violence across the planet, call for much greater dialogue and learning between movements “from below and on the left”. In this issue As Tomás MacSheoin’s recent overview of “international” social movement journals noted, Interface has always been less confined to the global North than most, while still having far to go. A key principle for our work is to have regional editors and editorial collectives, so that what is relevant, and how movements can be thought about, is not something decided by a purely metropolitan editorial board. If we genuinely want to learn from each other’s struggles, that cannot mean (as so often) projecting the interests and concerns of a US-based (or UK-based, or West European) understanding onto the wider world and selecting the movements that fit into that narrative: it has to mean creating space for the many worlds of our movements to speak, and to listen to each other directly. 1 Interface: A journal for and about social movements Volume 12 (2): pp 1 – 4 (December 2020) Editorial This issue’s table of contents underlines this: its 18 pieces (9 articles, 8 reviews and a call for papers) cover movements in Brazil (twice), Canada, Ghana, India (twice), Japan, Mexico (twice), South Africa, Spain, the UK, the US, the Americas and globally (and appear in English, French and Spanish). It starts with Kyoko Tominaga’s exploration of the “protest journeys” that global justice movement participants make in constructing their activist identities. Exploring Japanese activists’ narratives, she shows how these individual journeys connect them to movements’ collective identities. Márcio Bustamante and Bruno M Fiuza’s oral history work on Peoples’ Global Action discusses the decline of autonomist political culture in 20th century Brazil.