Abstract
Have you ever had a sinking, hopeless feeling while reading a story exposing the reach of neoliberalism into yet another sphere of life? Have you struggled through a tome on capitalism in the era of globalization and felt like you understood how it all worked yet been at an utter loss as to how to bring about an alternative? And when you hear of some alternative strategy, does it already seem like a futile effort that cannot possibly compete with the all-pervasive current system?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, Gerda Roelvink’s slim volume Building Dignified Worlds: Geographies of Collective Action will nudge and cajole you away from the paralysis of critical analysis into new techniques of thinking that open up alternatives. She argues that while exposés of neoliberalism help social movements organize their struggles against key institutions or mobilize around focal events, they can do more harm than good in terms of actually creating social change. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical and empirical work, participant observation at the World Social Forum, and analysis of documentary films, Roelvink lays out a program for restructuring how we think about neoliberalism, social change, and the role of research.
Uncovering the ways in which neoliberalism pervades lives and communities can be a powerful tool for social movement groups organizing opposition. This type of research allows them to focus resistance on key institutions or mobilize around particular events. But Roelvink points a finger at the social sciences for contributing to capitalist hegemony by studying how neoliberal capitalist globalization spreads across the world as a force of oppression. She argues for changing the relationship between knowledge generation and social movements for alternatives. Instead of focusing on exposing additional manifestations of neoliberalism, scholars should create alternative narratives that show that globalization and neoliberalism are complex, impure, and constantly changing, in a way that creates openings for ethical and liberatory interventions. The alternative is what Roelvink terms a “paranoid form of knowing the world,” where research continually reaffirms that everything feeds into the totalizing system and there are no viable alternatives.
Central to this argument is the performativity of research. In other words, the idea that research itself contributes to constituting the social world should be part of the researcher’s theoretical and methodological arsenals. One of the clearest examples is the role of economics as a discipline in performing markets. David Harvey’s (2003) theory of neoliberalism is another example Roelvink uses, arguing that it confirms what is already known and turns everything new into an element of the overpowering system. More than leaving the theorizing and study of alternatives to others, Harvey’s work has its own effect on the production of these alternatives. In other words, we already know there is oppression, and we have a choice between continuing to document more and more hidden forces of oppression and moving beyond exposure and beyond performing “all-encompassing knowledge structured around a primary destructive force” (p.44).
Research is always an intervention. This book calls on researchers to gather the power of performativity inherent in research in order to reframe the economy and highlight new possibilities for social change. For instance, researchers can work to expand the framing of markets and to show the slippages and contestation in markets. Instead of feeding into the hegemony of capitalism, they can destabilize it by showing the ways in which neoliberalism is contradictory, fragile, messy, and open to change. This type of research is aided by techniques of thinking that emphasize multiplicity, heterogeneity, and participatory action research. But another key ingredient is affect: joyful possibility and hope over cynicism and despair.
The book is primarily theoretical, drawing on the scholarship of others as well as the author herself. Roelvink also includes analysis of her participant observation at the World Social Forum and analyzes two documentary films, The Take and The Gleaners and I. The book stitches together a variety of theoretical emphases in a text that is challenging but rarely obscure, grappling with Marx’s theory of species-being, relational geography, post-humanism in the face of climate change, Freirian pedagogy, the role of testimony, and the concept of dignity. There are fascinating examples from the world of trash picking and gleaning, worker-occupied factories, carbon markets, fair trade, unconventional farmers, and anti-globalization protests in Seattle. In the book’s conclusion, Roelvink lays out a program of research that participates in collective action through the politics of the performative and relational ethics.
A geographer, Roelvink does not mention Eric Olin Wright’s (2003) call to envision real utopias, but sociologists who have noted that call will be interested in Roelvink’s theoretical approach. It will also provide fodder for thought for fans of the critically acclaimed The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by anthropologist Anna Tsing, which is a prominent recent example of making visible the messiness and slippage of capitalist markets. More broadly, this is a book for anyone who likes to think on a meta level about their own research, as well as for those interested in alternatives to capitalism and resistance to neoliberalism. Building Dignified Worlds is likely too difficult for undergraduate courses but could work in theoretically intensive interdisciplinary courses on the graduate level.