Aziz Choudry – Learning from the ground up: informal and non-formal education and action in social movements

What can we learn from a deeper engagement with the intellectual work of activists who organize for social, political, and ecological justice? Combining experiential knowledge from his own activism and a variety of social movements, Aziz Choudry suggests that such struggles are best understood if we engage with the learning, knowledge, debates, and theorizing that goes on within them. Drawing on anti-colonial, Marxist, feminist, and anti-racist perspectives on knowledge and power, his work highlights how activists and organizers learn through doing, and addresses the gap between organizing/social movement practice on the ground, critical adult education scholarship, and social movement theorizing. Examples include anti-colonial currents within global justice organizing in the Asia-Pacific, activist research and education in social movements and people’s organizations in the Philippines, migrant and immigrant worker struggles in Canada, and the 2012 Quebec student strike.

Aziz Choudry is a sociologist, activist, researcher and writer, and a professor at McGill University in Montreal. He has worked on social and activist movements and is the author of Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and editor of Just Work? Migrant Workers’ Struggles Today (Pluto Press, 2015), which examines the exploitation of migrant workers around the world and summarizes some examples of their collective resistance. His activism includes a wide range of actions and research against transnational corporate power, imperialism and the commodification of life.

The lecture will be held in English 

Free entry