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MI website
merijn, 27.01.2003 20:24
Hello,
you are on the website of mobilised investigation, a project to connect people making social investigations with an activist perspective.
This website is an open-posting website which means you are invited to post presentations of projects, proposals, announcements, comments and opinions. For more info on our moderation policy, go to 'moderation'
M:I Mobilised Investigation
The idea of this project is to create a (non-physical) space for convergence on an international level and with some ongoing activities like a website and an email list. Within this space we hope an active network will start to develop, where investigators meet and initiate projects, share publications research projects, organise seminars, call out for revolution etc....
Next to exchange and convergence, one of our main interests in doing this project is to start a discussion on the relation of academia with social movements. Informed by critiques on the distant, objectifying and incomprehensible academic, we attach great importance to the development of new, more interactive and participative ways of investigating. We believe the tools of 'social science' can be used much more to the benefit of our movements, and not as present, to add more piles of paper to the inmeasurable industrial heap of theories destined for internal university consumption.
We plan to have a face to face meeting and discussion at the Manchester social movement conference, which will take place the 22-24 of April. More info on this conference at:  http://www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/sis/
We hope this website will become a site for discussion, finding out through dialogue how we can make our investigations useful for our movements and for radical social change.
Participate:
To join the MI email list for more info on this project follow the link at the top. You can also contact  merijn.o@gmx.net or lilaroja@gmx.net.
self-definition MI by one participant
31.08.2004 08:23
A Network for Research-Activism: "Mobilised Investigation"
Mobilised Investigation (MI), a research-activism network established in 2002, offers a platform for the exchange and development of investigation which confronts power relations within our societies. Its main focus is social studies and how to transform these into tools for social movements.
Whereas activist-research covers many fields, MI is a network for research in the field of social movements. It brings together social researchers from autonomous and academic spheres who study movements, while at the same time aiming at progressing the process of transforming social relations, in order to bring about societies free of oppression and inequality. This is done by offering reflections and socially embedded forms of research.
MI is a virtual tool, consisting of a website and an email list, in the hands of researchers who want to share and to develop views on social movement processes and social change. It wants to develop alternatives to conventional ideas on the relation between social-political activism and research/ "academy". Instead of sharing conventional ideas about stringent borders between social movements and researchers (as well as universities), these alternatives cross borders between "movement" and "researcher", through acknowledging that one cannot be a researcher and yet be "neutral".
Especially in times of more intensive commodification and commercialisation of research and universities, networks such as MI are necessary components for creating progressive alternative structures and a broad radical movement for a social revolution.
Further objectives of MI are to create an overview of like-minded contacts, research spaces and available finances It also intends to make information on resources for social movement study more accessible; to spread studies done from the perspective of mobilised investigation; and to share general problems, enrichments and the dilemmas specific to this perspective.
The MI network is also a platform that helps facilitating mobilisation and organisation of conferences and encounters for activist-researchers. Next to the virtual part of the network, some small-scale physical encounters took place to discuss the aims of the network. At the beginning of 2004 a
conference was held in Barcelona that shared the objectives of MI-network. This "International Conference on Social Movements and Research" (Jornades Internacionals Moviments Social i Recerca, http://www.investigaccio.org/), was organised by a local network and drew two-hundred participants.
self-definition MI by Robin, one participant within the MI network and member of Glocal, research-activism centre within Infoespài ( http://infoespai.org), Barcelona.
robin
 e-mail:: robin(at)moviments.net
 Homepage:: robin(at)moviments.net
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