Globalization, New Media, and Social Movements ➜
/Over the past two decades, my research has explored the complex relationship between globalization, social movements, and new digital media. Questions I have addressed include: How do activists build social movement networks that are locally rooted, yet globally coordinated? What are the connections between new technologies and emerging forms of organization? What are the links between street protest and transnational networking? Based on an innovative model of place-based, yet multi-sited, ethnographic research, I sought to answer these questions by exploring the transnational networking practices and protest activities of anti-corporate globalization activists based in Barcelona, Spain.
My book Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization develops a novel practice-based approach to the study of networks, employing the concept “cultural logic of networking” to characterize the broad guiding principles, shaped by informational capitalism, that are internalized by activists and generate concrete networking practices. I argue that anti-corporate globalization movements involve an increasing confluence among network technologies, organizational forms, and political norms, mediated by concrete activist practice. Beyond social morphology, the network has also become a powerful cultural ideal, a guiding logic that provides a model of and model for emerging forms of radical, directly democratic politics at local, regional, and global scales.
Through Networking Futures, several high-profile articles, and my co-edited volume Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political, my work has become a primary reference point in the study of globalization, social movements, and the links between new digital media, transnational networks, and emerging political visions. Most recently, I have examined how dynamics of political mobilization have shifted in relation to social media platforms, such as Twitter, giving rise to a tension between logics of networking and logics of aggregation in movements such as Occupy, the Spanish Indignados, and the Arab Spring.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS
☛ The Cultural Politics of Free Software and Technology within the Social Forum Process (PDF)
Jeffrey S. Juris, Giuseppe Caruso, Stéphane Couture, and Lorenzo Mosca (2013). Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political, Jeffrey S. Juris and Alex Khasnabish (Eds.). Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, pp. 342-365.
☛ Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation (PDF)
Jeffrey S. Juris (2012). American Ethnologist 39 (2): 259-279.
☛ Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization
Jeffrey S. Juris (2008). Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
☛ The New Digital Media and Activist Networking within Anti-Corporate Globalization Movements (PDF)
Jeffrey S. Juris (2005). The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597: 189-208.
☛ Networked Social Movements: Global Movements for Global Justice (PDF)
Jeffrey S. Juris (2004). The Network Society: a Cross-Cultural Perspective, Manuel Castells (Ed.). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 341-362.
Jeffrey S. Juris, Erica G. Bushell, Meghan Doran, J. Matthew Judge, Amy Lubitow, Bryan Maccormack, and Christopher Prener (2014). Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 13(3): 328-348.