Conway & Alvarez - final - June 22 18


Correspondence Address: Janet Conway, Department of Sociology, Brock University, St. 
Catharines, ON, L2S 3A1; Email: jconway@brocku.ca 

ISSN: 1911-4788 

Volume 12, Issue 1, 20, 2018 

Video Presentation 

Assemblage Thinking and Transnational/ 
Translocal Social Movements of the 2010s 

JANET M. CONWAY 
Brock University, Canada 

SONIA E. ALVAREZ 
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA 

“Assemblage Thinking and Transnational/Translocal Social Movements of 
the 2010s” presents keynote addresses by feminist social movement scholars, 
Janet Conway and Sonia Alvarez. Conway introduces assemblage thinking as 
an alternative approach to making sense of the post-2010 global movement 
ensemble. Using the example of Occupy Wall Street, she proposes combining 
assemblage thinking with decolonial critique to re-read Occupy through its 
Indigenous interlocutors as occupying Indigenous land. Alvarez considers the 
utility of assemblage to think about activism, protest, and participation in 
contemporary forms of transnational and translocal feminism. She proposes 
the concept “discursive fields of action” as an alternative to “social 
movement” in light of Afro-Brazilian feminism and the Brazilian Slutwalk. 
This video compilation concludes with a series of short interventions by 
Alvarez, Rinaldo Walcott, Öznur Karakas, Lee Cormie and Glen Coulthard 
assessing the utility of assemblage thinking. 

The video may be downloaded from: 

http://hdl.handle.net/10464/13528 

or viewed on YouTube at: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UKptIiVVGA