XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

JS-87

Global Youth in the Move: Alteractivism and Post-2011 Social Movements

RC34 Sociology of Youth (host committee)
RC47 Social Classes and Social Movements

Language: English

Global Youth in the Move: Alteractivism and post-2011 social movements

 

Geoffrey Pleyers, University of Louvain, Belgium

Carles Feixa, University of Lleida, Spain

Oscar Aguilera, Universidad de Chile, Chile

 

Abstract

The year 2011 marks a watershed in the history of social movements. From the Arab Spring to the Chilean Autumn, passing through the Portuguese generation “a rasca”, the indignant Spaniards, the British riots, the protest for housing in Israel, the Colombian Mane, Acampa Sampa in Brazil, and of course Occupy Wall Street, a new Global generation occupied the center of the public scene, both in the squares and in social networks. Whether it is a "movement" or a "moment", these collective processes have their foreword in the alterglobalization mobilization that emerged in Seattle ten years earlier, and its epilogue in later alter-activist mobilization in places such as Hong Kong, Ankara or Paris, with a recent xenophobic and neoconservative drift.

The present proposal invites to reflect on research carried out on these spaces and times, not so much on the movements themselves, but on the latent or evident subjectivation processes built around these collective processes, especially those related to the construction and deconstruction of personal or collective youth identities. In particular, we propose to focus on the following aspects:

a)    The need to integrate subjectivation and self-construction as a person and as an actor of these young activists.

b)    The other visions of the politics of the alter-activists, their scope and their limits.

c)     Experiences of young alter-activists in representative politics.