[act-ma] 6/30 [Saturday @ e5] SOCIAL MOVEMENTS & ELECTORAL POLITICS @ e5, 6:00 p.m. Saturday

[Suren Moodliar]

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS & ELECTORAL POLITICS
A Roundtable Connecting #Occupy, Global Movements, the World Social Forum,
and Elections

Saturday, June 30, 2012, 6:00 p.m. at encuentro 5 (33 Harrison Ave, 5th
floor, Boston, MA 02111)

featuring: Sarah Francis, Jeff Juris, Suren Moodliar, Thomas
Ponniah, Monica Poole, and (chair) Heike Schotten (bios below)

The Arab Spring signaled a global wave of social movements challenging
inequality, repression, austerity, war, & corporate power. Whatever their
strengths, these movements have all had to give serious consideration to
how they relate to electoral politics. This timely conversation brings
together a diverse group of thoughtful activists and engaged scholars who
have connections to the #Occupy movement, the World Social Forum,
solidarity movements and grassroots organizing.

NOTE: encuentro 5 is NOT wheelchair accessible, call 888-400-1225 to join
the conversation via
Skype or conference call. Visit website for speaker bios, background
information and selected articles.

Speaker bios follow below; light refreshments provided. More details at
http://www.encuentro5.org. See flyer here:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1042836/flyer-2012-06-30.pdf

Biographies

A proud native of the People's Republic of Cantabrigia, *Sarah Francis* has
always pursued projects and worked with organizations affiliated with the
arts and social justice, from Espresso Theater in Boston to Spitfire
Pictures in NYC. She is current working in Film/TV production in the
Boston/NYC area and dabbling in the art of building a radio station with
Occupy Boston Radio.

*Jeffrey S. Juris* is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University. He
received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California
Berkeley, and is the author of Networking Futures: the Movements against
Corporate Globalization (Duke University Press, 2008), Global Democracy and
the World Social Forums (co-author, Paradigm Press, 2008), as well as
numerous articles on social movements, transnational networks, new media,
and political protest in Spain/Catalonia, Mexico, and the U.S. His
co-edited volume, Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism,
Ethnography, and the Political, is forthcoming with Duke University Press,
and he is currently working on a new book about free media and autonomy in
Mexico. He is also conducting collaborative research on Occupy Boston, and
has a recent article in American Ethnologist called "Reflections on #Occupy
Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation.

*Suren Moodliar* founded and helps coordinate encuentro 5--a
“movement-building space” in Boston. He is also a coordinator of
Massachusetts Global Action and several of its projects including the
Majority Agenda Project, the Color of Water, and the Du Bois Forum.
Previously he was a coordinator of the North American Alliance for Fair
Employment and served as the program coordinator of the Boston Social
Forum. He has a background in union and immigrant organizing. His writing
has focused on the World Social Forum and networks as agencies and spaces
for social change.

*Thomas Ponniah* is a member of the Network Institute for Global
Democratization - one of the founding organizations of the International
Council of the World Social Forum. Ponniah is also the co-editor of Another
World is Possible: popular alternatives to globalization at the World
Social Forum (Zed 2003) and of The Revolution in Venezuela: social and
political change under Chávez (Harvard University Press 2011)

Since 2000, *Monica Poole* has been developing programs using education and
the arts to create spaces for children, youth, and young adults to resist
oppression, grow as individuals, and invest in their communities.
Currently, she serves as Assistant Professor of History and Social Sciences
at Bunker Hill Community College, where she teaches history, philosophy,
and ethical hacking, and directs a program in the performing arts. As an
academic she has studied, written on, and taught a wide range of topics,
from utopian constitutions to Enlightenment coffeehouses and from 14th
century social movements to 21st century campaign rhetoric. Most recently
she undertook study for a Ph.D. at Harvard University specializing in
political thought, history, and performance in the English Revolution. She
is one of the founders of The Boston Cooperative, a startup formed in
Occupy Boston that aims to create a hub for arts and education to build the
movement for social and economic justice.

*Heike Schotten*, our event chairperson, has been a Palestine solidarity
activist since 2006, when she first laid eyes and hands on the Apartheid
Wall as a participant in a Birthright Unplugged travel program. She is now
the Outreach and Communications Director for Birthright Unplugged and
engages in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) work at the local and
national levels. She brings her commitments to rigorous, feminist,
anti-racist, radical queer politics to her work as Associate Professor of
Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she sits
on the Executive Committee of the Faculty Staff Union and has participated
in organizing, advocacy, and campaign work supporting affordable,
accessible public higher education in Massachusetts.
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