The book Occupying Language is an open conversation. Through it, we invite you to join us to explore insurgent movements that have been organizing in Latin America over the past twenty years, and to connect key concepts and language from those struggles with what is new and beautiful in the social relations being created by people’s movements in the United States today. There are of course many similarities with preceding forms of organization and mobilization, especially with the movement for global justice of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Among the concepts we explore are Territory, Assembly, Rupture, Popular Power, Horizontalism, Autogestión (self-administration), and Protagonism. Examples of each term are drawn from different Latin American communities of struggle, from the spreading of Horizontalidad with the popular rebellion in Argentina, and the concept of Territory seen in Bolivia and Mexico, to the construction of Popular Power in the Consejos Comunales in Venezuela, and the vision of interconnected human diversity articulated in the call for “one world in which many worlds fit” by the indigenous Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico.
We want to discuss global movement practices and perspectives with the audience. Scholar and activist Manissa McCleave Maharawal will discuss different issues addressed in Occupying Language and facilitate the discussion.

Moderator: Manissa McCleave Maharawal
With Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini

Marina Sitrin is a sociologist, lawyer and postdoctoral fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has both participated in, as well as has been writing about, the new global movements. She is the author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina and the co-author, with Dario Azzellini, of Occupying Language and the forthcoming They Can’t Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy.

Dario Azzellini is lecturer in Sociology at the Johannes Kepler University Linz (Austria). He is the author of several books and documentaries on movements, participative democracy, workers control, Private Military Contractors and migration. He served as Associate Editor for The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, he is part of the founders collective of the web site workerscontrol.net.

Manissa McCleave Maharawal is a writer, activist and doctoral student in the Anthropology department at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a founding member of the editorial collective In Front and Center and has been involved with various working groups of Occupy Wall Street since September 2011.