This cluster brings together scholars who engage in the study of political agency and resistance at the grassroots. [For an overview of their events click here]

VISION and SCOPE

Over the past decades, multiple critical grassroots initiatives have emerged around topics such as food, energy and housing. These initiatives reflect a widespread discontent across the globe with respect to the dominant economic and political order and the human and environmental damage it produces and aim at achieving fundamental political change. Grassroots movements against hydraulic fracturing all over the world, the platform of mortgage victims that arose in Spain  after the economic crisis in 2008 and tree sitters that oppose mining in Germany are just a few examples. The cluster ‘political agency at the grassroots’ studies and analyses such processes from below, guided by concepts such as ‘citizenship’, ‘subjectivity’, ’resistance’ and belonging. In doing so, the involved researchers often apply engaged and participatory methodologies and problematize the relation between researcher and the researched, between activism and science, and activism and academic teaching.

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