| This dissertation is about the knowledge arising from activist practice and its significance for re-imagining democratic emancipatory politics. I argue that social movements are producers of knowledge. Movement-based knowledge is largely tacit, practical and unsystematized. It is partial and situated, arising from concrete engagement in social struggle, and embedded in specific times and places. Secondly, I argue that coalitions of social movements are a particularly fertile location for the production of social movement knowledge. Thirdly, social movement knowledges are central to the renewal of emancipatory politics. However, fourth, the role and prominence of knowledge and knowledge production is contentious on the left and is an arena of ongoing challenge and conflict.; This argument is grounded in a detailed ‘ethnography’ of the Metro Network for Social Justice (MNSJ) over a five-year period (1992–97). The MNSJ is a cross-sectoral, multi-issue, permanent social justice coalition in Toronto. The ethnography represents the MNSJ as a site for political, organizational and intellectual innovation through a detailed examination of how MNSJ activists generated new practices, and the processes by which knowledge arising from these practices was articulated, systematized, and mobilized for politics.; In chapters 4, 5, and 6, I document three arenas of activist praxis: the development of democratic organization and coalition building; the emergence of a new ‘urban politics’ that, located in a world city and working at multiple scales, linked local agency to global power; and a multi-layered popular and activist education project that problematized knowledge and knowledge production for social movements and for the broader left. Through the ethnography, I illuminate and argue for the importance of coalitional, urban, and cultural politics in re-imagining emancipatory politics in the contemporary period.; I suggest in chapter 3 that MNSJ activists were drawing on older and wider activist legacies (knowledges), both urban and national, in the new political context of post-free trade Canada. They were also grappling with formal discourses about agency, power, and change in the context of concrete activist dilemmas in a new political era. These discourses included various strands of political economy, cultural studies and urban theory. I explore these discourses in chapter 2 as different approaches to the social that, in various ways, help me interpret and interrogate the agency arising from social movements like the MNSJ and its articulation to larger processes of social transformation.; The ethnography provides a starting point for considering the political implications for social movements of prioritizing knowledge production and the cultural politics it connotes. This also raises broader theoretical and political questions for progressive politics, critical theory, and scholarship on social movements. I explore some of these issues in both the introductory and concluding chapters. |
