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Latest Publications
03/12/2009
Nicole Doerr: Deliberative Discussion, Language, and Efficiency in the World Social Forum Process. In: Mobilization: An International Quarterly, Volume 13, Number 4 / December 2008.
Abstract:
The World Social Forum (WSF) and European Social Forum (ESF) processes represent a new platform for experimenting with multilingual practices of "deliberative talk." Activists come together in meetings that take place at the regional level between these larger social forum events. The "European Social Forum Preparatory Assemblies" (EPA), for instance, allow activists in the ESF process to hold regular meetings in a multilingual format using simultaneous translation. I will explore how activists in such transnational meetings deal with the tension between time consuming, multilingual discussion processes and efficiency. Comparing meetings of European and South African groups within the umbrella of the ESF and WSF processes, I found the "politics of language" to be a very fragile aspect of the practice of deliberative discussion. However, some groups have developed innovative tactics or have made creative use of cognitive resources to tackle the challenge of linguistic exclusion.
KEY WORDS: Deliberation, Efficiency, Multilingualism, Inclusion
Nicole Doerr (forthcoming, May 2009). "Language and Democracy ‘in Movement’: Multilingualism and the Case of the European Social Forum Process". In: Social Movement Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, 149–165, April 2009.
Abstract:
In recent years new cross-European protests and movements have developed on global
justice and within the loose platform of the European Social Forum (ESF). One of the major
challenges for transnational communication and grassroots democracy within the Social Forums is linguistic communication problems and the new ‘work of translation’ required to create a democratic setting. In the willingness to provide open access beyond linguistic communication problems, activists and organizers involved in the ESF preparatory process therefore hold their regular European preparatory assemblies to the ESF summits within a multilingual setting. Given the potential challenges of working transnationally, and of multilingual meetings, the ESF provides a good case study to test whether such processes work effectively in practice in comparison with national social movement assemblies: to what extent is democratic discussion and decision making possible in such emerging multilingual meetings compared to national meetings in which the majority of participants speak the same language? Being interested in linking the theoretical ground of discourse and deliberative democracy to the subject of the emerging Social Forums, I have studied the extent to which democratic discussion in the sense of deliberative debate might or might not take place within the multilingual and Europe-wide preparatory assemblies in the ESF process. The findings of my comparison between Europe-wide Social Forum preparatory assemblies and those taking place at the national level in Germany and the UK show that the absence of one common language within the European assemblies, contrary to what one might intuitively suppose, does not reduce the quality of democratic deliberation as compared to the national context. Therefore, informal power structures and gatekeeping mechanisms frequently rooted at the national level of Social Forum processes, together with a lack of transparency and asymmetries of information, seem to have indirectly reduced the accessibility of European meetings.
KEY WORDS: European public sphere, multilingualism, social movements, deliberation, exclusion
Nicole Doerr with Simon Teune: "The Imagery of Power Facing the Power of Imagery. Towards a Visual Analysis of Social Movements". In: Fahlenbrach, K./Klimke, M./Scharloth, J. (eds.): The ‘Establishment’ Responds - Power and Protest During and After the Cold War, Cambridge and New York. Berghahn Books, forthcoming.
Nicole Doerr: "Exploring Cosmopolitan and Critical Europeanist Discourses in the ESF Process as a Transnational Public Space". Chapter 5 in Transnational Challengers: How Activism beyond Borders changes the Politics of Protest (Simon Teune, ed.) Cambridge and New York: Berghahn books, forthcoming.
Abstract:
While much attention has been directed towards the mass media level of the public sphere, emerging transnational public spheres’ within the internet and in face-to-face meetings of activists have been widely neglected. The paper suggests the empirical analysis of public spheres emerging within movements, which could reveal details about processes of transnational identity formation and discursive practices of transnationalization as well as citizens’ critical participation in EU politics ‘from below’. It is in exactly new types of proto cosmopolitan public spheres such as the European Social Forum process that theorists of the public sphere hope to find ‘solidarity that is built communicatively, across nation-states, linking various local events with the identification of a global system of injustice, namely neoliberal globalizing capitalism. The case study on the ESF process compares European and national social forum meetings in Italy, Germany and the UK to make these arguments. It aims at bringing together the recent critical thinking on emerging transnational public spheres as laboratories of democracy with a ‘bottom up’ approach to European integration as seen from a social movements perspective. Based on the findings on the ESF process, two aspects will be explored: the discursive constructions of ‘another Europe’ based on experiences and practices of radical democracy in European assemblies created by activists, and exclusionary moments alongside prevailing nationalist and material boundaries.
Gerhards, Jürgen & Philipp Hessel. 2008. "Das Globalisierungsskript der Europäischen Union und seine Unterstützung bei den Bürgerinnen und Bürgern in 15 Mitgliedsländern der EU" [The European Union's Script of Globalisation and its Support by Citizens in 15 Member States] Berliner Journal für Soziologie 18(4): 596-622. Abstract
Gerhards, Jürgen. 2008. "Die kulturell dominierende Klasse in Europa: Eine vergleichende Analyse der 27 Mitgliedsländer der Europäischen Union im Anschluss an die Theorie von Pierre Bourdieu" [The Culturally Dominant Class in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the 27 Member Countries of the European Union Using Bourdieu's Theory of Cultural Consumption] Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 60(4): 723-748. Abstract
