Social movements and activism as sites of knowledge production

Assoc Prof Aziz Choudry, McGill University

School of Education Seminar: University of Cape Town

Thursday, November 6^th 2014, 12.30 – 2.00pm

Venue: Seminar Room 3A, Humanities Building, Upper Campus, UCT

The role of social movements and social and political activism as educative processes and milieus is often overlooked by scholars of social movements and those working in the field of adult education. Yet social movements are not only significant sites of struggle for social and political change but also important – albeit contested and contradictory- terrains of knowledge production and research.  Grounded in insights from my involvement in multi-scalar social movement organizing, education and research, this seminar will also draw from my current research on activist research practice in social movements and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which work closely with them.

Aziz Choudryis associate professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University, Montreal, Canada and research associate affiliated with the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, University of Johannesburg. He is co-author of Fight Back: Workplace Justice for Immigrants (Fernwood, 2009), and co-editor of Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010),  Organize! Building from the local for Global Justice, (PM Press/Between the Lines, 2012), and NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects (Zed Books, 2013). A longtime activist, he currently serves on the boards of the Immigrant Workers Centre, Montreal and the Global Justice Ecology Project. He is also a co-initiator and part of the editorial team of www.bilaterals.org, a website supporting resistance against bilateral free trade and investment agreements.