CONSTRUCTION AND FUNCTIONS OF MOBILIZATION AND ACTIVISM IN THE AMERICAS

Wednesday, September 22nd, from 5pm to 6:30pm

Centre de colloques, Large Auditorium

Dana R. Fisher is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on studying democracy, civic participation, activism and environmental policymaking. Recent studies focus on the youth climate movement, the movement against systemic racism, and the American Resistance.

Isabelle Hillenkamp is a socio-economist, in charge of the research for the IRD and a researcher at the Center of Social Sciences Studies on African, American and Asiatic Worlds (CESSMA). Isabelle Hillenkamp’s research focuses on social economy and agroecology from a gender perspective. Through partnerships with academic institutions and civil society organizations in Bolivia and Brazil, it aims to strengthen local initiatives as well as to contribute to the construction of a global critical theory.

Since Donald Trump’s first day in office in 2017, a large and energetic grassroots “Resistance” took to the streets to protest his administration’s plans for the United States. Millions marched in pussy hats on the day after the inauguration; outraged citizens flocked to airports to declare that America must be open to immigrants; masses of demonstrators circled the White House to demand action on climate change; and that was only the beginning. This presentation will summarize the findings for a multi-year project studying the American Resistance to understand who are the millions of people who marched against the Trump administration, how they are connected to the more recent climate strikes and protests against systemic racism in the US and what it all means for the future of American democracy?

«Without feminism, there is no agroecology»: through this slogan, Brazilian women, peasants, feminist activists active in NGOs, public or university programs have made themselves known in national mobilizations, international summits and symposiums that have brought together tens of thousands of them. For four decades of building a movement combining feminism and sustainability through agroecology, they have developed a double critique of the socially excluding and ecologically unsustainable effects of the dominant agricultural model, on the one hand, and of gender inequalities in family farming, on the other. They opposed it to a model of socio-environmental care that aimed to re-signify and amplify the agricultural practices of women farmers. This presentation will retrace the genesis of this movement through the major historical stages it has gone through – from Brazilian re-democratization, to neoliberalism, then to the neo-developmentalism of the Workers’ Party and finally to Bolsonarism – and will question its relationship with agricultural practices through local examples.

With the support of the LADYSS UMR 7533
Debate moderated by Nathalie Blanc (LADYSS - Université de Paris)