Networking Futures

“Networking Futures is a core piece exploring movements against corporate globalization through the exploration of activist organizations as experienced by the author within a wide range of movements, witnessing riots, strikes, and works of different actors within movements. . . . The most interesting note is that the author is endowed with an abundance of facts to educate the reader. Professor Juris has both participated in and interacted with the activist movement—making himself more of an expert on his subject matter than an informer.” — Michael D. Kaluya, Globalizations

“Networking Futures is a great read. Scholars of the global justice movement will appreciate its rich accounts of movement practices, and social movement scholars more generally can use it to develop our understanding of the symbolic, spatial and cultural dimensions of organizational forms, practices and identities.” — Lesley J. Wood, Canadian Journal of Sociology

“Networking Futures is an excellent read – a good balance of personal description and author involvement, as well as substantial theoretical development. . . . Networking Futures manages to be an amazing book that will intrigue students of social movements, networks, and organizations, as well as interested scholar-activists – and perhaps may inspire more to take up the practice of militant ethnography.” — Dana M. Williams, Critical Sociology

“Networking Futures charts a map for understanding how ‘anti-corporate globalization movements are perhaps best understood as social laboratories, generating new cultural practices and political imaginaries for a digital age’ (p. 297). This is an important contribution.” — Kalman Applbaum, American Ethnologist

“Networking Futures contributes to a burgeoning literature—authored and read as much by activists as by academics—on the dynamics of the so-called ‘anti-capitalist’ and ‘anti-globalization’ movement.” — Noel Castree, Progress in Human Geography

“Networking Futures offers an engaging, comprehensive and richly participatory account of network organizing within the anti-corporate globalization movement. . . . With its commitment to militant ethnography in both method and content, Networking Futures represents an exciting contribution not only to social movement scholarship and science and technology studies, but to the development of critically engaged methodologies and the struggle against corporate globalization itself.” — Angelina I. Zontine, Journal of the Society of the Anthropology of Europe

“Networking Futures provides an engaging overview of the anti-corporate globalization movement, and expresses itself best when considering the micro-power struggles that animated the various protest networks. . . .The author does a good job in demonstrating how the political values of the movement were ‘inscribed directly into emerging network architectures’. . . . [T]he most important contribution of this book is its forward-looking perspective. While so much of anthropology is concerned with memory, history, and the past, studying groups of people brash enough to think they are ‘making history’ is a refreshing novelty.” — Eduardo Albrecht, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“[Networking Futures] has both depth and significant importance for understanding the ebb and flow of radical movements and their complex internal contests.” — Jonathan Pattenden, Journal of International Migration and Integration,

“[T]he fact that Juris engages with the contradictions of the horizontal-based networks, that he has seriously thought about the future tasks of the movement and the academic study of anti-capitalist mobilizations, makes this a welcome contribution to an important and burgeoning literature and practice. This book will surely be a major point of reference in future debates in social movement and political theory.” — Sean Purdy, Labour/Le Travail

“A self-ascribed ‘militant ethnographer,’ Juris is clearly a sympathetic and enthusiastic participant in the movements he studies; however, to his credit he does not romanticize or fetishize the networks, instead paying due attention to the limits of network forms and the contradictions of its norms. . . . However, what makes this book especially dynamic is its appeal not only across scholarly disciplines, but also beyond them; the author works to make it relevant and useful, not only to scholars, but also to activists.” — Bruno Renero-Hannan, Comparative Studies in Society and History

“In this book, the anthropologist and activist, Jeff Juris explores, in an exemplary way, the political and cultural practices involved in the construction of transnational networks by activists who oppose neoliberal globalisation. . . . Networking Futures is a book that is absolutely indispensable and that will certainly become a reference that cannot be overlooked for activists, academics and teachers. . .” — Israel Rodriguez-Giralt, Interface

“In this excellent militant ethnography, Jeffrey Juris does several key things. One, he provides a rich and detailed analysis of anticorporate globalization movements in multiple sites, from the local movements in Barcelona to its linkages with such movements in Europe and the World Social Forum. Second, he makes important theoretical and methodological interventions in the social movement literature that are informed by contemporary social and cultural theories rather than relying on social movement theories as is often the case with U.S. social movement analysis. Finally, he makes a thoughtful activist contribution.” — Manisha Desai, Mobilization

“The book displays a multiscalar sensitivity that I found very useful. . . . [T]here is much in this work that potentially bridges the interests and research perspectives of anthropology, political science, and sociology. It is also a good example of where the latter traditions might benefit from exchanges with anthropology.” — Thomas Olesen, Anthropos

“Networking Futures [is] an exciting and important book, and a contribution to sociology. . . . Juris provides us with an understanding of how activists are at the forefront of this global transformation, through their creative use of internet and other technologies, and through their comprehensively democratic and reflexive exploration of new social forms.” — Judith Blau, Contemporary Sociology

“Networking Futures is one of the very first detailed ethnographic accounts of the alternative globalisation movement. The book manages to weave together some of the key historical moments of its ineluctable rise into a single compelling narrative from the intimate perspective of someone who was there. . . . Juris’s many accounts of the vitality, creativity and innovativeness of the alternative globalisation movement will inspire activists and academics alike for many years to come.” — Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, Anthropological Forum

“As well as being an insightful and inspiring resource for activists, Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalisation, is a absorbing history of the ever-evolving contemporary resistance to corporate globalisation. I found it a refreshing antidote to the constant barrage of neo-conservative blather emanating from the mouths of free market evangelists on the pages and the airwaves of the mainstream media—especially read in the context of collapsing global markets!” — Megan Yarrow, M/C Reviews

“The view Juris offers is more in-depth than has been generally reported even by sympathetic journalists. . . . Networking Futures stands as a pioneering document of what may yet prove to be a new new world order.” — Vince Carducci, Popmatters