ABSTRACT
Mobilizations against world ordering often evade the concepts and categories available for comprehending them. Central to the praxis of many social movements is a challenge to ways of knowing that bolster or render invisible dominant relations of power. When, towards the end of the last century, indigenous Mayan militants of the Zapatista National Liberation Army emerged from the jungles of Southern Mexico declaring that “our word is our weapon”, they gave voice to a long-standing theme of popular resistance movements. From Antonio Gramsci’s insistence upon the importance of struggles over common sense, to the more quotidian ways in which movements challenge the politics of visibility and audibility through practices of active listening and horizontal organization, popular or ‘grassroots’ mobilizations are often – implicitly or explicitly – struggles for “worlds and knowledges otherwise” (Escobar 2004: 220). Mobilizations are often pitched not only against relations of oppression, exploitation or domination, but also against the very concepts and categories through which such relations are rendered intelligible, natural or legitimate.
