Resistance Studies Network (RSN)

Description

The Resistance Studies Network (RSN) is a forum for scholars engaging with practices of resistance.

The Resistance Studies Network is a joint initiative of the Universities of Gothenburg (Sweden), Sussex (UK) and Massachusetts (Amherst, USA), and is now administered with the support of the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) at Sussex.

The network aims to further collaboration and exchange on the study not only of struggles directed against overt practices of domination, exploitation and oppression; but also against practices of freedom, which place ethical constraints on who an individual can be. Moreover, members of the network hope to encourage interaction around positive and productive aspects of struggles, including those aimed at attaining new ways of being, relating and thinking. They are also interested in exploring the entanglements of power and resistance, especially potentially problematic and contradictory patterns of reproduction of domination within resistance.

While acknowledging the significance of traditional social movement studies, the RSN aims to heuristically explore new spaces of convergence from diverse fields such as international relations, law, philosophy development, anthropology, sociology, peace research, political science, geography and urban studies around empirical issues and concerns.

RSN aims to bring together scholarship informed by empirical sensitivities to actual practices of struggle, with philosophical, theoretical and ethical interrogations of such practices.

The network is open for all interested in fostering pluralistic, critical and self-reflective exchange on diverse modes of resistance – be they organized or spontaneous, explicitly political or everyday struggles – from both historical and contemporary perspectives. It is not necessary for members to hold an academic position at a university.

The following list is an indicative, although not exhaustive, idea of the sorts of questions that might animate members’ research:

• the subjects, practices and effects of resistance, the conditions of emergence and exhaustion of struggles, as well as possibilities for undermining power, injustice and oppression and bringing about social change;
• the ontologies and epistemologies at play within, or challenged by, resistance;
• practices of neutralization and disciplining of resistance, the normative and normalizing effects of resistance practices, or how struggles may undermine certain relations of power while bolstering others along certain axes;

With the help of collaborative workshops and conferences, joint research and publication projects and thematic educational events, the RSN aspires to deepen collaboration between researchers interested in the study of resistance.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

Founding year

2006

Contact details

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University affiliation(s)

University of Sussex
Brighton