Social Movement Learning Project

We are seeking support for a timely study of how social movements learn, create and disseminate knowledge. The Social Movement Learning Project has the potential to enrich educational programs and civil society in a global perspective. This is a unique, collaborative study among three sets of actors: social movements; universities and educational research institutions; and global policy networks.

Each set of actors will do reflective studies, within their own sectors, of their own knowledge creating and learning dimensions and assess the political implications of their own activities upon civil society. In addition, the leadership in the three sectors will facilitate an on-going exchange and dialogue among the three sectors.

Hitherto, formal knowledge has been largely organized and disseminated through government, universities and corporations. They financed the production and dissemination of knowledge, legitimizing it with formal curriculum structures and welfare / development programs at the periphery. Economic globalization has placed the use and control of knowledge at the centre of contestation. Communities are fighting against this in effective and organized ways, such as Indian peasants battle to own and market seeds, indigenous peoples' regeneration of their languages, images, symbols and meanings. There are different knowledge producers and different modes of producing it. There must be a correlating 'knowledge democracy'.

The Social Movement Learning Project proposes to create Social Movement Learning Working Groups in up to ten Bio-regional locations in the world. Within each of the bio-regions there will be a self-study, action and reflection process initiated amongst the leadership (activist/ intellectuals) of social movements, the academy and global or other policy networks. A particular emphasis is on social movements as knowers and learners. Knowledge produced by these groups reverberates throughout the lifeworld: informal markets, networks for self-governance, cooperatives, rituals, festivals, and struggles to save sacred spaces and ancient seeds. Our goal is to learn what these new formations of knowledge from social movements represent and signify.

Social Movement Learning means two simultaneous processes: 1. what social movement actors experience through participation in their activities which redefines their own self, interpreting their reality, creating a vision and making 'residual' cultural knowledge and memories into an emergent practice and; 2. how that created knowledge could be brought into formal and non formal educational settings.

The richness of these processes must be documented, fostered and recognized in a comprehensive research space that can be translated into concrete policies. The Social Movement Learning Project will give much needed stimulus, coordination and the political will to implement changes in formal and informal curriculum as well as research and policy priorities for universities and policy networks. From the study will come concrete steps towards knowledge democracy and capacity building of grassroots communities and civil society, for greater participation and visibility in civic life.

Anticipated outcomes:
• strengthen the learning and pedagogical work of specific social movements involved and thus increase their effectiveness and offer them a comparative sense of their own work. Participation in this study should benefit all the actors by sharing learning and inspiring everyone to explore new areas of knowledge and social learning.

• increase visibility and legitimacy of local learning and knowledge creating activities that can be demonstrated in appropriate fora such as academic conferences, global network settings and policy activities.

• development of new courses and programs at universities and research centres in the local eco-regions of the participants including; new theoretical and methodological courses on social movements and social learning; new spaces for collaborative learning opportunities with outreach to the local communities; collaborations with social movements in the locality and; new curricula designs.

• publication of a series entitled Social Movement Learning (Zed Press: London), assisted by a team that provides an umbrella and coherence of themes throughout this dynamic process over the course of the collective deliberations. Specific consideration will be given to the sensitive needs for pedagogical materials in local languages and literature useful to local participants who will be encouraged to publish in the series.

• increasing the speed of social policy development and implementation in specific sectors and the bio-regions of the study.

B. Background of the Social Movement Learning Project

1. Change in the Political Ecology of Knowledge

The need for comprehensive collaborative research at this point in social time, emanates from overlapping trends we have observed within social movements, the knowledge industry such as universities and research centres and civil society. Some examples of these trends are:

• increasing recognition that social movements have achieved maturity and intellectual sophistication, creating political-cultural spaces wherein their proposals encompassing a variety of issues have been accepted by the larger society.
• social movements have successfully created a political space in which they increasingly act as intermediaries among grassroots communities, civil society, nation-states and global institutions such as GATT, World Bank and IMF, suggesting that grassroots participation in governance, in the context of globalization, is an achievable goal.
• social movements are radical, complex, visionary and inclusive of multiple, different identities, more than social movements theory has been able to capture by the existing theoretical lenses that reduce gender or race or human-nature relations.
• the new social movements construct their learning by taking advantage of their cultural tools (Cunningham and Curry 1998) and are rooted in communities and ecological identities, with influences from the global to the local, eco-regional and national.
• social movements have moved past their resistance (Manuel Castells) identities as victims of oppression, to project identities, proposing to transform society as self-reflexive actors who are filling in the disjuncture that is widening between the local and the global.
• social movements no longer merely critique dominant society but also engage in regenerative activities and offer alternatives to reshape the very grammar of life, by influencing policy direction and making positive and proactive proposals for interacting with the lifeworld.
• social movements, by addressing the texture of the relationship between culture and nature, human and non-human collectivities, are directly confronting the powerful drives of the global economic forces wanting to integrate all resources into market and management efficiencies, which violates the regenerative needs of the bio-geochemical processes of nature and the communities connected with it.
• social movements are struggling for the recovery of the knowledge commons, embedded in a local context that is useful and empowering, in the face of market efforts to commodify knowledge.
• there are numerous possible interpretations of the new knowledge claims. They may reaffirm a world view based upon human affinity to nature's economy; they could be offering a different way of life and view of human-nature relationships. There are certainly new insights into knowledge for living and concrete ideas about social relations that are produced collectively and enriched knowledge that has not yet been shared with the research community.
• social movements have diverse and dynamic modes of conducting research and creating knowledge, that has contradicted the normative wisdom and practice of corporations and governments.
• the struggle to create policy about what knowledge is imparted to the next generation is between global market forces, especially in education, seeking to influence education to offer skills for meeting modern market needs and social movements which offer knowledge claims about civic issues, history and identity, justice and survival.
• social movements bring political resiliency to households, communities, civil society, and public participation in the state by acting as mediators among those. Although there has been no study on the nature of grassroots governance and how it might redefine those sectors, social movements implicate power for sharing in governance.

We do not assume that these trends are present, to the same degree and intensity, in each social movement selected. In victory or failure, social movements have transformed the values and institutions of society (Castells 1997). Thus, we are not selecting 'good' or 'bad', successful or unsuccessful social movements, but a range of social movements distributed across time and space, themes and life cycle. This diversity will be an asset since each participating social movement has much to learn from the others and by reflection on the presence or absence of those features in its own.

2. Bridging the gap between social movements practices and policy

Much of the conceptualization of the above trends has been fragmented, partial and inadequate. Social movements are seeking political and policy resolutions and pragmatic implementation of anti-monolithic trends in politics and knowledge. Now, it is the turn of universities and civil society policy making networks to rectify the partial knowledge of this significant phenomenon.

However, social movements themselves rarely think of their work or themselves in pedagogical terms. Learning theories, which have dealt most often with issues of pedagogy in schools or more individualized forms of self-directed learning, have not until recently begun to deal with the pedagogy of social movements. The emergent civil society and grassroots communities are also not fully aware of the knowledge claims they have been making over the past several decades.

Using Williams's (1980, 1977) framework of cultural analysis, we posit that today's dominant form is the global motion of capital. The subsistence or non-market forms of peasant ecologies are residual forms, although, as one of us has argued elsewhere, social movements articulate the residual forms into emergent ones (Parajuli 1997, 1998a). Residual forms are experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be verified nor expressed in terms of the dominant culture that sees them as backwards or the residue of the previous social formation. Emergent forms are meanings, practices and experiences that are continually being created and recreated in history.

This study will pay close attention to the delicate pedagogical and cognitive shift that takes place in a transition from residual to emergent form, looking at how social movements make the shift, how they engage with their own cultural frames of reality to redefine their own identity or political practice, whether they take their own indigenous forms uncritically or reform them, what is their connection between tradition and modern, how traditions are regenerated, reconfigured, repositioned and reconstituted and if or how they simultaneously critique and regenerate.

This proposed long term (5 years) study seeks to create a space for a deep dialogue that will document, conceptualize and translate this learning for use in policy formulations and actions. Lead researchers being brought together for this project, are experienced and respected international scholar/activists with a history of common work and trust in all three of the worlds. The project is ambitious and manageable because of the contacts and networks of the lead researchers.

C. Project Overview

1. Objectives

a. key features of the study

This action research will offer a coherent mutual learning space for social movements, universities and global networks to seek policy implications around a set of issues and themes. The dialogue will discover whether these are shared or in conflict and document and deliberate on that learning. The Social Movement Learning Project will undertake a very unusual, large project on a scale that has not often been attempted among participants who are normally not brought together for sustained periods of time, to create time and space for deep dialogues internally, with self-reflection on their own learning and cross-sectorally, to share their learning and in turn, learn from others. .

It will require a logistical foundation that is to be laid by the actors themselves, in consultation with each other, internally and externally. Thereafter, they will document their own exploration over time retroactively and prospectively within their own world, before joining with the other two worlds to mutually share what they have learned about themselves.

More specifically, the research anticipates the social movement actors meeting and conducting their ethnography; the scholar/ activists meeting and conducting their ethnography; the civil society policy networks meeting and conducting their ethnography. Simultaneously, key contacts within these 'worlds' will be in touch with each other. When they decide that it is timely to have progress meetings, they will design a joint meeting of the representatives of each world, in which they can track their mutual learning and co-create the documentation that will form the written outcome of this project.

b. the approach: from rational to relational

Social movements have slowly journeyed from the margins towards the centre. It is important to learn where they have been and how they achieved their success, before it is lost. Also, it has traditionally been a lonely journey, with few resources and against the tide of dominant opinion. In the beginning support systems were few. This project at this time, is their opportunity to share their successes and learning, build support groups, increase their capacity and have access to resources that previously have been unavailable to them.

As the gap among the economic worlds widens, the need to bring those who have counter-hegemonic philosophy and economic kinship together grows also. It is within those relationships that the learning can be created and transferred, with appropriate credit and ownership, to a general population that is hearing only the voices of capital and the marketplace. The project will advance at the actors' pace in four phases drawn on grounded theory, with the ability to contribute to what is often known as middle theory:

Phase 1. preparation and preliminary discussions that identify actors, eco-regions and worlds; prepares a plan and develops tools and research questions, values, purposes and trust;

Phase 2. co-researching will begin;

Phase 3. first learnings are shared according to the methods and tools developed in the plans in phase 1. The series of publications will begin to flow;

Phase 4. deeper learnings are shared and layers of analysis are developed for the final outcomes and outputs.

2. Research Questions

a. How do social movements contribute to the creation of knowledge and learning in local to global transformation?

b. How do social movements inform policy?

c. What are the processes and linkages that social movements nurture at the level of communities, civil society, nation-states and the global policy networks?

d. In turn, how to strengthen the capacities of social movements actors and their institutions to act effectively at different levels?

e. What insights can be drawn at the global level from these diverse experiments in learning and teaching?

In the context of approaching these questions, a number of related sub-questions arise related to different levels of local and global transformation:

What kinds of knowledge emerge in specific communities; do different actors know, create and transfer the learning in social movements; is residual knowledge being transformed into emergent?

Do social movements have different ways of knowing and interpreting the world, creating and transferring knowledge according to their specific space and in what ways are they engaged in teaching and learning internally and externally, differently from the mainstream ways? Are different ways of knowing informing educational structures and what is the most effective way to bring grassroots insights into academia?

Is there an evolution of social movements learning for example, one that goes through stages; does it affect their knowledge-creating capacity?

What effect will devolving governance to the local level have upon social movements impact on positive social capital, social justice, the need for social assistance programs and the ecological crisis?

What is the best way to establish linkages and strengthen the interactions among knowers, learners, teachers and others in an eco-regional, local, formal and informal context in all three worlds in this study?

Do social movements have specific eco-regional contexts and content in the way they analyze situations, do problem-solving and chose policy options? Are traditional, historical, eco-regional and cultural contexts and content brought into pedagogical and social learning activities?

Does academia assess its own role in the creation, validation and dissemination of knowledge and, if so, is it near to or far from that of the other two worlds?

Does traditional knowledge have legitimacy in academia if and when it finds its way there in its own or another eco-region; what space is appropriate for it and how is it best integrated into curricula?

Can sustained conversations among the three worlds be a cornerstone of global knowledge policy and action that allows for diverse knowledge systems?

How might policy networks prepare for and self-reflect upon their role as co-creators and learners of knowledge with the other worlds and what innovations in teaching and learning diverse knowledge exists in their networks?

Is there a relationship between social movements, civil society and strengthened democracy at the local, eco-regional, national and global levels and if so, what role can they play in balancing the power of the market? What space do they presently occupy and what politico- cultural spaces will or ought to be created as the market grows and the state retreats? From diversity of knowledge, are there insights for higher education curriculum and larger civil society debates on democratization, local governance and citizen participation in general?

3. Timelines

December 1998 - February 1999 Identify Social Movement Learning Group partners
February 14, 1999 Meeting of North American groups in Tucson

February - May 99 Develop working plans in bio-regions and by sector
August 1999 presentation to International Conference on participatory development in Ottawa and project planning meeting
September 1999 - September 2000 participatory action research among and between the social movements, academics and policy networks
September 2000 - 2001 implementation of phase one findings

4. Processes
a. institutional arrangements

The participating institutions, organizations, networks and people are not seeking abstract theory but interactions which can actually contribute to the current transformative moment. Spaces and links that already exist, where local voices have frameworks with direct benefits to the people will be strengthened. This study will build relationships in eco-regions through a flexible process that is diverse and recognizes the linguistic, ethnographic sensitivities and distinct personalities of the institutions, organizations, networks and people who will participate.

A unique feature of this research is the emphasis on participatory action research. The participating scholar/activists will research with the actors and not 'for' or 'on behalf of' them. This is engaged research, which has values orientations, is action-oriented and respectful of the knowledge creation of others. The actors participating will assess their own activities and contributions to knowledge and learning, in partnership with key researchers, keeping in mind the central questions. Social movements are more than capable of self-assessment and the old methodology of 'expert' researchers does not respect the level of maturity and sophistication that social movements have achieved.

Another unique feature is the grouping of actors on the basis of eco-regions, which is how they locate themselves and their work, rather than political boundaries. Thus, they can continue their collaboration even after the tenure of this project. Their activities will be both planned and spontaneous, both built in deliberately and achieved accidentally or unintentionally.

This unique stance will go beyond the 'poetics of representation' of those who cannot speak for themselves (Clifford and Marcus eds. 1986) or the 'politics of advocacy' (Bodley 1996). It will explore the very notion of knowledge and of the social organization of its production.

b. participating organizations

The actors were chosen for their geographic and thematic diversity; they are spread across the globe (South America, North America, Africa, Europe, South Asia and Oceania) and represent urban renewal and revival, social justice, sustainability, biodiversity, food and agriculture, gender, body and health, sexuality, land and autonomy, culture language and identity, peace, human rights, science and technology. There are many overlaps yet each adds its own distinct dimension to the collective deliberation. Each has had a connection of at least one year with one of the scholar/ activists and is known to have the capacity to act as the stimulus for an eco-regional dialogue with the other worlds. Such close collaboration is indispensable for the creation of trust, the possibility of mutuality and long-term follow-up of the findings and avoidance of appropriation.

For example, the Social Movement Learning Group in the Toronto, Ontario area (the Oak Ridges bio-region) will include key activists-intellectuals from each of the three sectors which are the focus of this project. It is anticipated that the Group will include leadership from: the Transformative Learning Centre (University of Toronto); Faculty of Environmental Studies (York University); The Anglican Primate's Fund (Aboriginal Program), Toronto Coalition for the Homeless, Canadian Network Against Cuts in Social Spending, International Council for Adult Education, Growing Jobs for Living Coalition (Belleville, Ontario), and the Kurdish Women's Network. This group will grow and change as the project unfolds.

The identified bio-regions that have partners participating in the Social Movement Learning Group are:
North East United States of America
Himalayas - South Asia
Middle India
Andes
Northern Europe
Rio Plata Delta
West Africa
Southern Africa
Midwest - Great Lakes
Oak Ridges (Toronto and region)
Cascadia

c. the research team and partners

Lead researchers include scholar/ activists Pramod Parajuli and Budd Hall, Co-Directors of the Social Movement Learning Project, Rajesh Tandon and Namrata Jaitli, Coordinators for Global Civil Society and Policy Networks Sector and India and Asia, and Phyllis Cunningham and Regina Curry, Coordinators of Midwest - Great Lakes (Chicago area). Social Movement Learning Group, policy networks and academic sectors include Werner Mauch and Paul Belanger, Bremen, Germany and United Nations networking. Phyllis Robinson, Coordinator, New England Social Movement Learning Group and Jose Zarate, Coordinator, Aboriginal Movements of the Americas.

Potential university and research partners include R & T Center University of Bremen, Association of Schools of Social Work, Center for International Education, University of Massachusetts, Center for Mutual Learning, Smith College, Transformative Learning Centre University of Toronto, University of Technology Sydney, University of Western Capes, University of Botswana, Northern Illinois University, Lewis and Clark College,

Potential Social Movement Organization partners include H.A.R.C., AIDS/HIV, Kurdish Women, WAINEMATE, Growing Jobs for Living, Buddhism for Development, Act Up, COC Amsterdam, Celeta Eckar's. Potential policy networks partners include UNESCO Institute for Education, International Centre for Adult Education, North American Alliance for Popular and Adult Education, CIVICUS, Participatory Action Research Network, Participatory Research in Asia.

D. Historical and Theoretical Contexts of the Social Movement Learning Project

1. the social movement trajectory

a. the knowledge crunch in the context of globalization

The resilience of social movement learning can be attributed to several features within social movement: first, there has been a knowledge crunch and steep learning curve under the globalization of the economy; second, social movement have moved from a phase of protest to a phase of making proposals; third, social movement actors are not merely advocacy groups but are knowers, learners and teachers leading to diversification of knowledge.

Social movements have embedded views of culture-nature interactions and humanity's modest participation in the natural order of the universe. If it is true that for all oral collectivities the world speaks without the mediation of humans, it is time to rethink how research is representing the fact and attributing human authorship into it. There are serious limits to representational thinking thus social movements analysis and indigenous traditions of knowledge provide depth and context.

Clarification of social movements is required because the literature focuses on social movements as political or social action phenomena with goals of capturing or sharing power with the state (Darnovsky et al 1995; Touraine 1988; Melucci 1988 for critique). Even social movements oriented towards social justice are interpreted as if they are seeking a just and equitable share of the same economic pie or more benefits of development for the marginalized. The 'environmentalism of the poor' is just beginning to be recognized (Guha and Martinex-Alier 1997; Parajuli 1998a; 1998b; Kothari and Parajuli 1993). In fact, social movements explore the potential of the most disadvantaged to create alternative forms of governance, social relations, technology and redefine human-nature relations.

This project dovetails with Eyerman and Jamison's (1991) theory that social movements are 'like a cognitive praxis'. They suggest that is "through tensions between different groups and organizations over defining and acting in that conceptual space that the [temporary] identity of a social movements is formed". They emphasize the creative role of consciousness and cognition in all human action, individual and collective. They look at social movements through the complex lens of social theory of knowledge that is both historically and politically informed.

They focus simultaneously on the process of articulating a movement identity (cognitive praxis), the actors taking part in the process (movement intellectuals), and the context of articulation (politics, cultures and institutions). Eyerman and Jamison emphasize that social movements are not merely social dramas, they are the social action where, from new knowledge, worldviews, ideologies, religions and scientific theories originate. This study examines the phenomena in an eco-regional context.

b. from protest to proposal

The outcomes of this study will not merely critique the dominant society but will engage in regenerative activities and offer alternatives to the destruction of the environment and economies of local grassroots that accompanies globalized capital expansion and colonization.

The majority of the world is left out of the drive of the globalizing economy because of the speed of change and velocity of production/ extraction that the regime of globalization heralds. This accelerated pace violates the bio-geochemical cycles of nature necessary to allow regeneration and renewal. In other words, 'economic time outdoes biological time" (Altvater 1994; Parajuli 1998a) causing unevenness in many areas of life. Globalization is a phase in which if capital is nature, nature is also capital. "Saving nature then becomes equivalent to ensuring the reproduction of capital requiring careful management" (O'Connor 1994: 133). Social movements see the wisdom and value of sharing their insights with the dominant culture in order to preserve the future for both perspectives.

The people participating in 'nature's economy' (Worster 1993) are no longer silent; they have made their voices heard and academia and policy makers must not ignore them. This study will recognize and include these voices and expand their range through co-authored stories, publications, courses, classes, discourses and practices.

c. social movement actors as knowers, learners and teachers

New social movements are neither single issue pressure groups, limited to seeking their place in the state/ market power sharing, nor enveloped in the narratives of nationalist struggles. They have a sophisticated, inter-disciplinary, watershed level view of multi-issues with multi-actors. While each actor is embedded in pragmatic action and symbolic meaning, there are also convergences and alliances across a diversity of actors and groups. There are alliances among ecologists, women and social justice activists (Kothari and Parajuli 1993); Clover 1995a; Gadgil and Guha 1995; Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997), between analysts of peasant traditions and green revolutionaries (Esteva 1996; Marglin 1996; Scott 1998) and bio-technology (Moser and Shiva eds. 1995; Visvanathan 1997).

The phenomenon is not taking place in isolation nor is it limited to a narrow social movement organization nor single issue or actor. There are a variety of overlapping issues and trends being simultaneously addressed in a way that is foreign to the marketplace and the state. Social movement organizations that are regenerating women's healing and herbal knowledge have found linkages with redefinition of gender roles and the pharmaceutical industry, while being at the forefront of protecting forests, reforming land ownership and inheritance rights for women.

2. the myth of universal knowledge in university based research and teaching

The one-way gaze of the social scientist looking at social movements actors, their lifeworld and struggles is no longer tenable. Despite intentions to democratize knowledge, the researcher holds the right to know about other peoples' lives as experts with cognitive authority about them. This dilemma is recognized in the feminist ethnography (Wolf ed. 1996). It places them in the local sites of laboratory and field as judging observers who are themselves un-judged (Addelson 1994).

The supposedly embedded critique of modernity and scientific rationality implicit within knowledge claims, demands room for other traditions of knowledge to flourish. Historically, enclosures, conquests, colonialism, imperialism and development were the best known incarnations of modernity and they transmogrify places into homogeneous spaces ready to be quantified and commodified. Natural resources must be properly used to have value in modernity, which separates nature from culture, facts of nature from politics, facts from values.

There is a profound change in the politics of knowledge and this has implications for the ways knowledge was claimed to be created and the roles governments, corporations and higher education institutions have been playing. The relational component of the production of goods and knowledge was removed mid-nineteenth century, from communities and landscapes. This is recreated by expert professional knowledge within existing social, political and economic orders, to the benefit of the industrial separation of work from life, culture from nature, fact from value, economy from its social context(Apffel-Marglin and Addelson 1997).

Now is an appropriate moment to deeply question the hegemony of modernity, not as a fancy of isolated individuals. The other traditions of knowledge which are not disembedded from their context and are part of a different synthesis between knowledge and life, must also have space and a voice. Many of the scholar/activists in this project have worked in the Participatory Action Research tradition (Budd Hall and Rajesh Tandon are two of its founding members). However, we depart from some of its premises in order to facilitate a mutually self-reflective research by all three worlds involved.

3. from seeking to political autonomy in civil society and policy network contexts

There is a rich body of participatory research experiences to draw from and build upon. A variety of intellectuals, scholars and activists over the years have offered a new pedagogy that examines the globalization process and advocates for strengthening the local bases of an economy and culture (Mander and Goldsmith eds. 1996). During the first half of this ending century, Mahatma Gandhi turned the struggle for independence into a pedagogical tool in which he articulated a non-industrial civilization path for India, that included self-reliant production of basic necessities of life, hand-crafted by each community and a model of decentralized governance based on 'village republics' (Gandhi 1938, 1952).

Julius Nyerere implemented some of the ideas of mass education and self-reliance in Tanzania during the 1960s. Myles Horton of the Highlander Center and Paulo Freire of Brazil opened new vocabulary and experiments in pedagogy as an instrument of liberation for the oppressed. In urban Chicago the "Hull House" of Jane Adams opened a tradition for imaging the 'town-gown' relationship in a spirit of dialogue and exchange. Their models of change are now followed by the mainstream.

New models of change are possible and indeed, are probably already happening. The urgent need is to find these centres of innovation and facilitate the dialogues among them and the policy networks where they are needed to regenerate the lifeworld. This will not seize power from the state but it may influence governance and education. It will link the spaces created by social movement organizations with related concepts such as social capital, civil society and community.

4. integration and synthesis

The time is ripe to recognize the very fragile legitimacy that nation-states are experiencing after the globalization of the economy. As shown by Scott (1998), the edifice of the modern nation-state was the high-modernist planned social order. In this respect, Lenin, Nyerere and Truman were participants in the same theatre of state building albeit for different purposes and in different contexts. Scott identifies four elements of the modernist state, which have created havoc in people's lives: first, the administrative ordering of nature and society; second, the robust confidence in scientific and technical progress; third, the authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being; fourth, and most important for this study, is the disabled civil society in some parts of the world that lacks the capacity to resist the state's plans.

Yet, with the globalization of the economy, the edifice of the state is also failing. Now the contradiction between the conflicting roles of the state, regulating capital and maintaining unity and democracy, is affecting its ability to either. It must chose between its obligations under international trade treaties and its responsibilities to protect and be responsive to its populace who are expressing concern about unbridled and compulsive global capital.

Finally, we reiterate that without the aspect of mutual learning and mutually trying to name the world, self-reflect and act upon it, knowledge is created for its own sake. A one-way gaze violates reality. The researchers will be using all of themselves, in mutuality that nurtures and regenerates. Anyone who participates will be profoundly affected and should be prepared for a life-long commitment if that is what arises in the circumstances.

E. Appendices

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