Towards a Sociology of Knowledge of Social Movements

It has become commonplace that social movements produce knowledge and struggle over basic epistemological structures and their relationship to forms of political domination. While it is hardly questioned that social movements are always also about who can speak and under what conditions, the explicit treatment of social movements as knowledge producers, in the sense of a renewed sociology of knowledge of those movements, remains to be developed. Most texts that discuss the issue stick to particular phenomena or remain on a general level without providing tools to understand other movements or to arrive at a more complex level of theoretical reflection. This is a shortcoming that hinders our understanding of other knowledges and, thus, our ability to engage in a meaningful debate on alternatives to the present polycrisis.

This session will allow for a debate over concepts of knowledge production, epistemic inclusion or exclusion, the conditions to participate in political debate, coloniality of knowledge, and similar takes grounded in concrete experiences of social movements. The focus on knowledge will allow us to overcome the persisting separations between researchers of different types of movements and take an important step towards developing conceptual tools that do not stop at the limits of one movement.