Insurgent Encounters

Insurgent Encounters illuminates the dynamics of contemporary transnational social movements, including those advocating for women and indigenous groups, environmental justice, and alternative—cooperative rather than exploitative—forms of globalization. The contributors are politically engaged scholars working within the social movements they analyze. Their essays are both models of and arguments for activist ethnography. They demonstrate that such a methodology has the potential to reveal empirical issues and generate theoretical insights beyond the reach of traditional social-movement research methods. Activist ethnographers not only produce new understandings of contemporary forms of collective action, but also seek to contribute to struggles for social change. The editors suggest networks and spaces of encounter as the most useful conceptual rubrics for understanding shape-shifting social movements using digital and online technologies to produce innovative forms of political organization across local, regional, national, and transnational scales. A major rethinking of the practice and purpose of ethnography, Insurgent Encounters challenges dominant understandings of social transformation, political possibility, knowledge production, and the relation between intellectual labor and sociopolitical activism.Contributors. Giuseppe Caruso, Maribel Casas-Cortés, Janet Conway, Stéphane Couture, Vinci Daro, Manisha Desai, Sylvia Escárcega, David Hess, Jeffrey S. Juris, Alex Khasnabish, Lorenzo Mosca, Michal Osterweil, Geoffrey Pleyers, Dana E. Powell, Paul Routledge, M. K. Sterpka, Tish Stringer

"Insurgent Encounters is an exciting and timely collection. It treats topics of great interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields, especially those concerned with ethnography, social movements, and activist scholarship. I am convinced that the engagement of activist ethnography with transnational social movements has the power to transform the disciplines, and ethnography, in interesting ways."—Michael Hardt, coauthor of the books Commonwealth, Multitude, and Empire, "This important collection represents the best work by anthropologists who are reshaping ethnography 'of' and 'for' social movements. No other book addresses the present-day intersection and increasingly mutual identification of anthropological research and social-movement activism as thoroughly or comprehensively as this does. What's more, one gets the sense that the essays derive from a working community of activist-scholars living up to the vision of 'network' that the volume itself exemplifies. For me, the collection as an artifact and enactment of the kinds of collaboration that it discusses is one of its most fascinating features."—George E. Marcus, coauthor of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, “The editors’ writing will capture readers’ attention and the stories, radical activist moments, and style of ethnographic writing in each subsequent case study will hold it...This collection represents an important advance in the study of social movements generally and transnational activism specifically as it is the first book to focus on the methods, perspectives and theoretical insights generated by ethnography.”, “This new collection of essays edited by Jeffrey Juris and Alex Khasnabish is a refreshing and welcome contribution to the study of social movements…. this is a theoretically sophisticated and engaging collection of essays, and a welcome contribution to our understanding of radical social movements.”, "In short, this is a bold experiment of what an activist-scholarhsip might look like, raising profound epistemological and ethical questions which only become more pressing as the ecological and social crises of this century deepen. I applaud the editors for their courage, and answer their call to bring a militant ethnography to the mainstream." 

Jeffrey S. Juris is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University. He is the author of Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization, also published by Duke University Press, and coauthor of Global Democracy and the World Social Forums.Alex Khasnabish is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University. He is the author of Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global and Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility.