Knowledge in Social Movements

A crucial and yet often overlooked component of social movements’ potential to produce change consists of their capability to create and disseminate alternative knowledge about the world they live in and how to transform it. While social movement studies have mainly focused on what happens in the streets, a large part of the activities of their members is devoted to collecting and processing information, elaborating new proposals, and spreading alternative knowledge, at times through innovative critical pedagogy. Typically, social movement studies tend to find sources of collectively induced change by looking at how individuals’ biographies are affected by their participation in collective endeavors; at how the overall political environment and, particularly, policy outcomes are modified in conjunction with the intervention of collective actors; but also at how widespread cultural norms, values, and systems of beliefs shift as a result of collective mobilization. To be sure, social movements themselves are often approached, albeit not always explicitly, as resilient collectivities in fieri – that is, as sociopolitical processes that unfold continuously by innovating their collective identities, action strategies, and organizational forms to respond to the ever-evolving nature of political and social contexts. Whether a multiplicity of factors have been outlined to disentangle the modes in which social movements contribute to generate internal and/or external change, only recently have collective actors’ transformative potential been explicitly tied to the systematic and constant knowledge work they engage in.