In the Breath of Learning: Place-based social movements, Learning, and Prefiguration of Other Worlds

Social movements have been and continue to be an integral part of the lifeworld as they create and promote conditions for the transformation of micro and macro aspects of socio-ecological relationships. From the vantage point of the present, we can argue that it is through the work and agitation of feminist, civil rights, LGBTQ, anti-colonial, socialist and environmentalist social movements (among others) that we have experienced socially just changes around the world. The study of social movements is therefore critical for learning about the knowledge-practices necessary to achieve socially just change. This project sought to explore, understand and conceptualize the epistemic ecologies of place-based social movements whose work centers the construction of urgently needed life-affirming human knowledge-practices. Specifically, it sought to illuminate on the scarcely studied connections among learning, knowledge, and society, by examining the social construction of reality in the context of social movement action. The flesh and blood of the project come from the work of social actors in Kufunda Learning Movement and my organizing with Ubuntu Learning Village. The study found that in these contexts, social movement actors are learning and constructing emancipatory knowledge-practices through their engagement with place-based social action. By means of learning through practice, reflection and embodiment, the actors produce and develop practices, skills, and processes that address ecological, political, social and economic relationships. In doing so, they produce subjectivities and critical capacities that enable Other social and political ecologies and societies to emerge. Beyond the learning by movement actors and people that interact with the movement, the study argues that these movements are proposals of counterhegemonic life-affirming realities. Ultimately, Kufunda and Ubuntu knowledge-practices are useful for the movements, the society within which the movements are doing work and the global community, to the extent that their knowledge-practices have analytic validity for social theory.Ph.D