Watson Events

Marina Sitrin -- From Crisis to Horizontal Prefiguration – Argentina to Occupy

"From Crisis to Horizontal Prefiguration – Argentina to Occupy," with Marina Sitrin, postdoctoral fellow with the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Professor Sitrin will discuss how recent movements in Latin America and in many other areas of the globe have developed with the same two features: horizontal relationships and the construction of new territories in which these new social relationships are developed and expanded. This focus on direct democracy and new social relationships is central to what the new movements are about and how they organize. Sitrin’s talk will address what has been taking place with the U.S. Occupy movements, along with the movements in Greece and Spain, focusing on the new forms of horizontal social relationships. She will then contextualize these movements in post-2001 Argentina – where in the wake of an economic crisis people by the hundreds of thousands formed horizontal assemblies, recuperated workplaces, and began to rethink their relationship to work and value. The talk will also draw upon some of the challenges faced in Argentina and with the global justice movement, so as to help suggest ways in which we can together think of the possible futures for the current movements.

Marina Sitrin holds a PhD in Global Sociology and a JD in International Human Rights and is a postdoctoral fellow with the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (2012, Zed), editor of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (2006, AK Press) and co-author, with Dario Azzellini, of Occupying Language: The Secret Rendezvous with History and the Present (Adelante Alliance) and the forthcoming They Can’t Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy (Verso Press).

This event is the third in the "Global Resistance to Neoliberalism" series, which is sponsored by a Graduate International Colloquium Fund grant from the Office of International Affairs at Brown University. Cosponsored by The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Location: CIT 165, 115 Waterman Street.