Social Movements as Producers and Receivers of Knowledge: The Case of “Don’t Let Belgrade D(r)own”

Abstract

In this paper I am seeking to resolve a theoretical dilemma. The main argument is that the relationship between social movements and knowledge is a “two-way street”, in which knowledge both gets diffused from critical communities and gets produced by the social movements. In order to resolve this tension one should, I argue, make an analytical separation between different levels of abstraction of knowledge. The macro (conceptual) level is, according to my approach, to be understood as taken over from critical communities. The micro level as contextual intervention into macro conceptualization of reality, whereas the meso level is to be viewed as knowledge produced by social movements when conceptual and presumed / contextual knowledge gets combined. It is at the meso level, in other words, that we can see what applied theory looks like after being exposed to a given context. Knowledge occurring at this level represents the outcome of work done by what Jameson and Eyerman call “movement intellectuals” or what Antoni Gramsci calls “organic intellectuals”. This is how one may theoretically resolve the above-indicated tension and prevent excluding one approach at the expense of the other