Social movements as sites of knowledge production: precarious work, the fate of care and activist research in a globalizing Spain

This dissertation examines the practice of activist research as a growing tendency within contemporary social movements. European struggles working on the current transformations in labor --its increasing precarization in general, and its effects on care practices in particular-- constitute one of the most active sites of struggle at present within the restructuring spaces of the European Union. I investigate the intellectual and political implications of activist research in relation to these socially pressing problematics. I do so through archival research and ethnographic engagement with social movements' networks targeting and analyzing the emerging precarity-care complex. The explicit turn to knowledge production practices by social movements speak to the transformative potential of research embedded in processes of collective action and social struggle. I highlight the theoretical and political contributions made by a particular feminist project based in Madrid whose work focuses on the conflicting transformations afoot among youth and migrant women in Spain under the current reconfigurations of the European Union