The perils of promoting pluralism: how translocal tension frames knowledge production in rethinking economics

ABSTRACTThrough an analysis of translocal digital spaces of learning, training and mentoring in the student-led international movement organisation Rethinking Economics, this article theoretically expands the concept of Social Movement School (SMS) by incorporating new empirical data that reflect contemporary movements’ use of digital media. Rethinking Economics pushes for methodological, theoretical and representational pluralism in economics. Employing a Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD), I conduct deep readings of the textual data from the movement’s digital depository (‘Members’ resources’), that stores educational material, online courses in organisation and leadership, and key information about the movement. The article demonstrates how translocal tensions between core–periphery and theoria-phronesis frame knowledge production within the movement and maintain eschewed power relations between student activists and the organisation’s central office. I develop the concept of plug and play activism to describe the digital schooling as a dispositive; displaying how educational material and online courses are diffused to ensure easy data retrievability and protest replicability in translocal student activism.KEYWORDS: Rethinking Economicstranslocalitystudent activismdigital social movement schoolactivist trainingsocial movement organisation AcknowledgementsI extend my gratitude to the two anonymous referees for their insightful and constructive comments and suggestions. Furthermore, I am grateful to Mikkel Thorup, Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Casper Andersen for their feedback on an early draft of this work, and the special issue editors for their very useful remarks.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Rethinking Economics grew out of a transnational student movement, which originates in pleas put forth by French economics students in 2000. Since then, multiple groups and initiatives have emerged, connected and collaborated to push for a pluralist economics. For more information on the early movement (including pleas and open letters) see Fullbrook (Citation2003, Citation2008).2 Examples of ‘other helpful resources’ are branding colours, film suggestions, lists of academics sympathetic to the cause.3 Table 2 illustrates the different forms and levels of didactics.4 While the google.drive’s entire content informs my analysis and understanding of the movement, I decided to limit my thorough coding to documents from Guides for Organisers and Local group training. The majority of guides stored in the google.drive explain smaller, more basic tasks such as ‘how to pick a great film’ or ‘how to create great video content’ (Rethinking Economics, Citationn.d.-c). While these guides surely create the basis for other interesting investigations in movement culture, the elaborate guides offered through the school, and the school in itself, provide sufficient data to inform the questions posed in this article.5 The SKAD approach is based on and inspired by grounded theory that practice an incremental, sequential analytical approach to one’s data, and contrary to other discourse-approaches, SKAD does not look for coherence or consistency per se in discourse. Rather, the variety of data sources and manifestations of discourse are considered as mosaics or patchworks of heterogenous elements of discourse(s). SKAD proposes theoretical sampling and minimal and maximal contrasting as a way to progress through complex fields of discursive data. This means starting analysis early and contrasting findings to get a fuller grasp of the field. Theoretically, the approach employs Foucault’s notion of discourse and rests on the foundation of the interpretive paradigm, inspired by Peirce, Dewey and Mead, while drawing on theoretical tenants from Alfred Schütz’ social phenomenology. The approach is deeply influenced by Berger and Luckmann’s The social construction of reality (Citation1967). Within social movement studies, the approach is related to the cognitive approach developed by Eyerman and Jamison (Citation1991).6 Both Hoyer and Almeida volunteer at Interference Archive, a community archive of social movement ephemera in Brooklyn, New York, a physical archive that ‘explore[s] the relationship between cultural production and social movements’ by animating and disseminating histories through podcasts and exhibitions. Their book is grounded in material from the Interference Archive.7 This process is especially visible in the movement’s series of larger publication, in which the same group of authors appear repeatedly. This implies that the big visions and research output is generated by actors centrally located in the movement, and not, in turn, by local groups. The power of designing the curriculum, structuring the courses and setting the didactic agenda is thus placed with the support team; maintaining a central diffusion.8 The movement does tackle more profound theoretical and methodological questions in economics. They do so, however, in other, larger publications such as Earle, Moran, and Ward-Perkins (Citation2017); Ambler et al. (Citation2022); Fischer et al. (Citation2018).9 Earle, Moran, and Ward-Perkins (Citation2017, 7) define the econocracy as ‘a society in which political goals are defined in terms of their effect on the economy, which is believed to be a distinct system with its own logic that requires experts to manage it.’ Among other points, the book critiques the dominant school of thought in economics, deeming its influence too great as it smothers other bourgeoning schools of thought. The three axioms of neoclassical thought often disputed are methodological individualism, instrumentalism and equilibration (Arnsperger and Varoufakis Citation2006, 8–10).