Knowledge Trajectories in Transnational Socio-Environmental Movements: Constructing Counter-Hegemonies and Alternative Globalities

Movements’ epistemic potential has long been overlooked in social movement studies. Movement actors render subaltern experiences and knowledges visible, challenge and resignify dominant discourses, elaborate alternatives, and inform critical communities and experts. Socio-environmental movements cultivate new concepts and meanings to criticize, challenge, and ultimately dismantle the systemic roots of the climate and social crises of the Capitalocene.

While recent studies have begun recognizing this transformative potential, empirical research still needs to trace the dissemination of movement knowledge across scales and contexts and its creative appropriation, remobilization, or cooptation by powerful actors. The early-stage PhD project informing this contribution investigates movement knowledge trajectories in processes of diffusion, coalition-building, and scale shift within the transnational socio-environmental movements’ field.

This contribution starts from transnational events centered on climate or environmental justice from an anti-capitalist perspective as attempts to construct alternative globalities across the diversity of socio-environmental movements. Then, I explore and map the relations and discourses of actors participating in the events as they unfold in digital spaces, which are key sites of knowledge dissemination. I illustrate a ‘digital cartography’, using social network analysis and quali-quantitative content analysis to map the evolution and recombination of these relations and discourses from 2019 to the present. I show how transversal themes underpin the building of alliances between local and transnational scales and between the Global North and South, while others reproduce old fractures and create new cleavages within socio-environmental movements.

To conclude, I use particular cases to reflect on criticalities intrinsic to theorization and transnationalization processes, as they open the gates for fragmentation, distortions, and appropriations of subaltern and critical knowledges both within the field and by external actors. Proximity to grassroots and contentious action and horizontal rather than vertical diffusion are strategies explored to preserve social movement knowledge's critical and transformative potential.