The OSF webspace is administered by a Coordination Body consisting of members of CACIM and EIOS Collective and hosted and run by CACIM (Critical Action Centre in Movement), a non-profit organisation based in New Delhi, India, on behalf of the body and the EIOS Collective. The members of the Coordination Body are :
1. T B Dinesh, Servelots Technologies, Bangalore (India)
2. Emma Dowling, University of London (UK)
3. Jeff Juris, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Arizona State University, Phoenix (USA)
4. Madhuresh Kumar, CACIM, New Delhi (India)
5. Michal Osterweil, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (USA)
6. Geoffrey Pleyers, University of Liège (Belgium) and EHESS, Paris (France)
7. Subramanya Sastry, Environment Support Group, Bangalore (India)
8. Jai Sen, CACIM, New Delhi (India)
The (Explorations in/of Open Spaces) EIOS Collective
The EIOS Collective was formed on February 1 2005, immediately after the EIOS encounters held before and during the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. The meetings grew out of a successful prior initiative led by Chloe Keraghel and Jai Sen in 2003-4 to produce a special issue of the International Social Science Journal published by UNESCO, which attempted a deep and wide exploration of the World Social Forum and of the culture/s of politics it expresses and manifests. This led to the preparation of a special issue on this theme that came out in December 2004, entitled Explorations in Open Space: The World Social Forum and Cultures of Politics. The EIOS meetings also grew out of the intense interest expressed by many people during earlier editions of the World Social Forum and the European Social Forum to meet and exchange views in greater depth, while working to influence and learn from the World Social Forum as consistent with our self-perception as critical activist-scholars.
The Collective is a loose association of activists and scholars located in many different parts of the world who agreed at this meeting to work together on the problematic and potentials of ‘open space’. The goal of the EIOS Collective is to promote and carry out critical collaboration towards building and understanding new cultures of politics and towards developing and practicing new, more inclusive, and culturally sensitive ways of working within movements, parties, institutions, and everyday life. This involves collective engagement, while remaining a loose and open network, with smaller subgroups and individuals working around related activities. It also intends to help in the creation of a network of researchers as well as activists focusing on the World Social Forum and more broadly on cultures of politics, particularly within collective and global social movements fighting neoliberalism and war.
Members of the EIOS Collective come from all five continents, eight of the seventeen are women, and the majority of those listed below are young scholar-activists who plan to continue working in the field. The collective plans to build on this development, and maintain this profile as the collective grows. Among other things, this composition will allow us to build a sustainable project that will continue to have positive specific outcomes over the next five to ten years.
About CACIM : India Institute For Critical Action
CACIM, which has grown out of Critical Action (CA), an experiment since about 2001 to critically support emerging movements, is an experimental initiative towards an informal association between individuals and organisations located in different parts of India and the world. Its goals are to encourage a culture of critical reflexivity in public work, through fundamental research and critical reflection, exploration, and action in the field of motion and movement. We hope to encourage learning across disciplines and across culture, and to support and encourage all those involved in different ways with 'movement' - activists, researchers, professionals, artistes, and thinkers, both the more mature and young, and both from 'civil' and 'incivil' worlds - in our respective work as individuals and organisations and also in networks. Our present focus is on cultures of politics in movement, the exploration of open space as a political-cultural concept, and by exploring this through actions, the exploration of cyberspace as open space. CACIM sees itself not as an independent organisation but interlinked and interdependent, plugged into and learning from the world around us. With this vision, we presently conceive CACIM as evolving into a hub within networks among individuals and organisations located in different parts of India and the world.
Profiles of the Members of the EIOS Collective
Vanessa Andreotti, The author is a Brazilian educator presently living in Britain. She coordinated the Other Worlds project at MUNDI, an NGO based in the University of Nottingham, UK, in 2004, and is involved in various international projects in the areas of citizenship education and North-South? relations. She is presently the coordinator of the educational and outreach programme of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham. Her interests include postcolonial theory, transnational, political, and critical literacies, and planetary/cosmopolitan citizenship.
Isabelle Biagiotti, who has a PhD in political science from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France, has been Editor of Courrier de la planète since 1995. She publishes regularly on issues of governance, international negotiations and civil society. She put together in 2001 an issue of Courrier de la planète on the first World Social Forum (“La société civile mondiale : la montée en puissance”), published with the support of the UNESCO MOST programme. Isabelle Biagiotti is a member of the European research network on Sustainable Trade (SUSTRA), based in Montpellier (France), and of the Strategy Commission of the International Council of the World Social Forum.
E-mail :
Steffen Böhm has a PhD in Philosophy and Organisation Theory from Warwick, UK. He is now a Lecturer in Management in the Management Centre at the University of Essex, UK. He is editor-in-chief of the journal 'ephemera: theory & politics in organization' (www.ephemeraweb.org), and he recently co-edited a special issue of ephemera entitled 'The Organisation and Politics of Social Forums'. He also has two books forthcoming, Repositioning Organization Theory (Palgrave) and Against Automobility (Blackwell). His main research focus is on political philosophies of organisation and social movements. Part of this is his keen interest in the organisation and politics of the social forum movement. He has also been involved with organising a number of research activism events; among them the Radical Theory Forum.
Email:
Giuseppe Caruso is a PhD researcher at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies. His thesis is on “Power Dynamics and Patterns of Domination in the World Social Forum”. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in the last two WSFs in Porto Alegre and in Mumbai, where he worked as a volunteer in the WSF office from October 2003 until January 2004.
E-mail :
Anila Daulatzai has been involved in various political and community actions for over two decades. She has done research on reproductive health among Afghan refugees and internally displaced persons in camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan between 1995-2001. Her research interests include health, economic vulnerability, and social suffering in Afghanistan and among Afghan refugees. She holds Masters degrees in public health and Islamic studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently pursuing a PhD in anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University.
E-mail :
Marcelle Dawson is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She is currently reading for a DPhil in Politics at the University of Oxford. Her thesis deals with urban social movements in South Africa and Brazil, focusing specifically on grassroots struggles that are aimed at putting an end to privatisation and at increasing access to and improving the quality of municipal services, such as water, electricity, sanitation and refuse removal. She is a member of the editorial collective of Debate, Voices from the South African Left, and is in the process of co-editing a book on globalisation and new South African identities.
E-mail :
Emma Dowling is a PhD candidate at the University of London, UK. Her interests are global political economy, ethics and power, and the role of ideas in social change. Her PhD thesis looks at the practices of autonomous social movements within the anitglobalisation movement in relation to global democracy. Emma is also a director of the Research and Education Centre, Artemis, based in London. Her publications include “Strategies for Change: The Tobin Tax” (2003), “Human Rights and the Capability Approach” (2004) and ‘”The Definition of ‘Quality of Life’ in Development” (forthcoming 2005).
E-mail :
Jeffrey S Juris is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Arizona State University, Phoenix. He was earlier a postdoctoral fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles. He received his PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, where his research examined globalization, social movements, and transnational activism. Juris is dedicated to integrating his research and political work by practicing a ‘militant ethnography’. He has thus participated in several grassroots activist networks in San Francisco and Barcelona, where he took part in and explored the cultural practice and politics of transnational networking among anti-corporate globalization movements. Most recently, he has worked with Direct Action to Stop the War in San Francisco. Previously, he worked for many years with grassroots international and community development projects in Latin America and the United States as both an organizer and consultant. He is a member of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC)’s Youth Transnational Activism Program Planning Committee and the Annenberg Research Network on Globalization & Communication.
E-mail :
Chloé Keraghel is currently affiliated to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and co-writing a book on the World Social Forum. She earlier managed projects for the UNESCO Education Sector on HIV/AIDS prevention and on the synergies between formal and non-formal education. She previously worked on drugs and globalisation, specialising in the geopolitics of drugs in South Asia. She has attended each of the World Social Forums since 2002.
E-mail :
Taran Khan is an independent filmmaker and writer currently based in Mumbai (India). She holds degrees in Communication (Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi) and Development Studies (SOAS, London). Her work includes videos on the WSF process at Porto Alegre (2003) and Mumbai (2004). Her areas of interest include issues of gender, identity and the environment. She has researched narratives of women involved with Left-associated social movements in post-Independence Mumbai and is currently writing on communal identity and gender in small town India.
E-mail :
Madhuresh Kumar, based in New Delhi, is a Fellow and Programmes Coordinator at CACIM (India Institute for Critical Action Centre in Movement) and an Associate of the Calcutta Research Group (CRG), Kolkata. Earlier he worked on issues of globalisation, socio-political rights, informal labour in Delhi, and documentation systems. He is associate editor of the book Are Other Worlds Possible ? Talking New Politics (Zubaan : Delhi, 2005) and author of Globalisation, State Policies, and Sustainability of Rights, CRG Working Paper Series vol 6. At present, and along with Kishan Kaljayee and Jai Sen, he is involved with the Hindi Heartland Project around the book World Social Forum: Challenging Empires.
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Michal Osterweil is currently a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States. She is currently working towards a PhD in the Department of Anthropology on the Italian “New Global” Movement. Her research interests include social movements, globalisation, resistance politics, feminist and post-structural theory, and the relationship between knowledge production and political change. Michal is also an active member of the editorial collective of Global Uprisings, a forthcoming Journal of Ideas + Action.
E-mail :
Geoffrey Pleyers is a junior researcher of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research and a doctoral student at the CADIS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France) and at the Liège Pole for the Study of Developing Urban Societies (University of Liège, Belgium). His thesis deals with the alternative globalisation movement, on which he conducted research at the first four World Social Forums as well as in seven European and Latin American countries. The topics of his publications include alternative globalisation, youth activism and fair trade.
E-mail:
Subramanya Sastry (Subbu) is currently a freelancer doing independent software projects that are directly relevant to the needs of NGOs and social justice organizations, as well as participating in and playing supportive roles for organizations and groups involved in social justice issues. He has a PhD in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin-Madison? (2003), and has spent considerable time in the last 6 years with several organizations in various capacities — as a volunteer, co-ordinator, webmaster, technical consultant, researcher, writer, photographer.
E-mail :
Jai Sen, an architect and urban designer by training, is an independent researcher based in New Delhi, India, working on, among other things, the globalisation of movement. He was earlier a civil activist and campaigner on dwelling, labour, and rights-related issues in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and at national and international levels. He has attended the World Social Forums since 2002, and was a member of the WSF India Working Committee and its Coordination Team during 2002-3. He co-edited World Social Forum : Challenging Empires (2004); co-organised the ‘Open Space Seminar Series’ on the World Social Forum and cultures of politics at the University of Delhi (August-December 2003); acted as Editorial Adviser, with Chloé Keraghel, for ‘Explorations in Open Space : The World Social Forum and Cultures of Politics’, special issue 182 of the International Social Science Journal (UNESCO and Blackwell’s, December 2004); and co-edited with Mayuri Saini Are Other Worlds Possible ? Talking New Politics (New Delhi : Zubaan Books, 2005), the first of three books coming out of the Open Space Seminar Series.
E-mail :
OpenSpaceForum
This web space is administered by CACIM (Critical Action : Centre in Movement) on behalf of a Coordination Body within the EIOS Collective. CACIM is a non-profit organisation based in New Delhi, India.
The World Social Forum exploded onto the world scene in 2001 as a counter-platform to the annual World Economic Forum meet in Davos and is now not merely an annual feature but has a constant presence, with WSF-related events taking place around the world, around the year.
The WSF means different things to different people. However, two strands of opinion dominate the discourse of what the WSF means, and what it should be. One strand of opinion perceives the WSF as a global social justice movement, and has attempted to cast and shape the WSF along these lines. The other strand of opinion perceives the WSF as a space, an open space where individuals, organizations, and movements come together, share, exchange, build bridges, relationships, strategize, etc. In this conception of the WSF, the WSF is more like a chowk (a public square) where people gather publicly and interact, but not as a neutral entity, but with an ideology of its own.
From the perspective of WSF as an open space, several people have expressed fears that there has been a gradual shrinkage of the spaces it originally created. In this context, there have been several efforts to challenge the WSF, to continue to keep it open, to advance the climate of opinion about the usefulness of the WSF as an open space, and to elaborate on the idea of open spaces.
This webspace is an attempt to advance these explorations in/of open spaces:
to disseminate material generated from projects, ideas, explorations, articles, and discussions happening within and outside the WSF around the concept of open spaces.
to encourage discussion around these ideas and to encourage reflection on the nature, role, and place of open spaces (or perhaps the process of opening spaces).
to act as a hub that brings together people interested in these explorations, and to facilitate interaction between them.
to also examine the role of the web and other internet technologies, not just as a tool in these explorations, but also as an integral component of global open spaces.
About OSF
The OSF webspace is administered by a Coordination Body consisting of members of CACIM and EIOS Collective and hosted and run by CACIM (Critical Action Centre in Movement), a non-profit organisation based in New Delhi, India, on behalf of the body and the EIOS Collective. The members of the Coordination Body are :
1. T B Dinesh, Servelots Technologies, Bangalore (India)
2. Emma Dowling, University of London (UK)
3. Jeff Juris, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Arizona State University, Phoenix (USA)
4. Madhuresh Kumar, CACIM, New Delhi (India)
5. Michal Osterweil, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (USA)
6. Geoffrey Pleyers, University of Liège (Belgium) and EHESS, Paris (France)
7. Subramanya Sastry, Environment Support Group, Bangalore (India)
