This book is the culmination of several years of partnership between social movements, social justice organizations and academics in Ghana, South Africa, Guatemala and Canada. Called the Translocal Learning Network, this partnership has generated a space for those facing the multiple and overlapping crises of our time to come together and share knowledge and mutually solidarize with each other’s struggles. This knowledge exchange and mutual solidarity has been non-hierarchical and collaborative in nature, and has taken the form of sharing and commenting on complex stories through a participatory research methodology known as narrative restorying. As such, this book will focus on the stories each partner has shared, along with engagement with these stories by other members of the network. This interplay of knowledge sharing will provide a window into the social movement learning of network members.
The central argument of the book was best captured by Thapelo Mohapi in our recent presentation at the Development Studies Association conference at SOAS in London, UK: “It is always assumed that when you are poor, when you are living in a shack, when you live in a rural area, when you are marginalized, that you cannot think for yourself, that you cannot be involved in development, because you are poor”; instead of this “People must make decisions and must be consulted, and they must have a voice to speak about their own development. It must be initiated and completed with the people.” This book is literally a space where those on the front line of struggles against land dispossession, livelihood dispossession, violent resource exploitation, forced marginal living, climate fueled emergencies, and the denigration of cultural and traditional indigenous knowledge share their experiences, learning, successes, and defeats, with those facing similar and related struggles. In addition to these front-line voices, scholars working alongside these struggles, share some of their learnings and ideas that have emerged from the partnership, and these reflections are also brought into dialogue with front-line activists. In other words, this book provides a window into a rich, ongoing dialogue of mutual learning and support that will speak to audiences in the activist and critical academic communities.
To that point, this translocal network uses the notion of translocality to push back on the capitalist, colonial, and neo-liberal agenda of a)maintaining divisions between people struggling against oppression in different parts of the world (through border controls, language divisions, and colonial racialized othering); and, b)maintaining a knowledge hierarchy that states, international institutions, intellectual institutions, and corporations are those best able to contend with the many crises we face, and even within activists, it is those movements and organizations with broad, multinational reach that can best speak for the affected. Translocality rather argues that it is those with local knowledge of crises and context that are best positioned to speak to what needs to change, and that local struggles meeting each other as equals, translocally, is the best way to learn from one another without imposing new forms of knowledge hierarchies.