Tools for Change

Laurence Cox, 09.02.2003 10:49

The Tools for Change web pages include details from various activist / academic projects: participatory research, theorising social movements, networking projects, and critiques of mainstream academic approaches to activism.

The Tools for Change pages collect material from a number of projects bringing together activism and academia. I've been doing research in Ireland from and for anti-systemic movements for the last decade or so. Some of my earlier research focussed on understanding counter culture as a movement project from below within disorganised capitalism; finished just in time for Seattle, some parts of this can be found at  http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/papers.html and an overview at  http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/phd.html.

At the same time comrades were involved in various networking projects between Irish social movements (one of these is documented at  http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/ifb.html); for a number of years we ran the Centre for Research on Environment and Community at Waterford Institute of Technology as an attempt to contribute academic resources to social movement development (some documents from the Centre are available at  http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/crec.html).

Coming out of this experiment is a programme of participatory research projects exploring movement practice (details at  http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/ma.html), with a particular strength in the area of working-class community activism. I've become involved in a range of community-based projects researching the oral history of grassroots action in working-class areas of Dublin, of which the most developed to date is the Ballymun Oral History Project (documents from the project are at  http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/ballymun.html).

On the more theoretical side is the international "social-movements" mailing list for activists and academics interested in theories from and for social movements (homepage at  http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/sm.html) and various co-written papers on the relationship between academic and activist research (to be found in  http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/papers.html).

Documents from other relevant projects are also included on the site.

e-mail:: lcox@iol.ie
Homepage:: http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/