IDENTITY.

IDENTITY, PLACE, KNOWLEDGE: Social manner of movings Contesting Globalization, by Janet M Conway, Fernwood works Halifax, 2004.

upon November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall malignant Ten years later in November, 1999 the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, Washington was close up down by anti-globalization activists.

There is a connection.

Before the fall of the Wall, in the subterranean of East Germany of the 1980 artists, imaginative thinker [i]or[/i] writers playwrights, theologians and activists were meeting, organizing, learning and readying undivided another for resistance. An subterranean swell erupted, burst above the country and produced a social and political earthquake which brought the Wall down.

Ten years later, in Seattle, because of the increase of anti-globalization movements across North America, based primarily in urban midmost points all through the 1990's, the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle was brought to a halt.

Janet M Conway of Ryerson University, in her insightful work, Identity, Place, Knowledge: Social moves Contesting Globalization, documents a just discovered moment in politics through the len of her involvement in the 1990's with the Metro Network for Social Justice in Toronto. Conway, now teaching in the Department of Politics and academy of Public Administration, develops a powerful exploration of a fresh politics in formation.

The recently made known movement is coalitional; it is popular and profoundly participatory. It is turfed in opposition to neo-liberal globalization and origined in a commitment to popular democracy. Cities are elucidation sites for the new movement's activism.

Conway argues that social mental actions suggest not only new ways of organizing on the contrary also new ways of knowing and interpreting social reality. They take us revealed of the post Second World War debates around capitalism and socialism. It takes us beyond the fears of 9/11 and the "Project of the fresh American Century" of 1997. The PNC whose authors are huddl around George W Bush, argues that the United States is the single super power. American global hegemony is central to the globalization of U economic, political and cultural values and must be secur in consequence of undisputed military dominance.

recently made known localized social movements are challenging this in creative and hope-filled ways.

Drawing onward sights from the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, the feminist motion and grassroots organizing and coalition building, Conway point outs how the Metro Network for Social Justice localized the global in the rapidly changing city of Toronto. As Toronto was becoming a "world-class" city, the MNSJ saw itself as single thread in the larger narrative of "world city" formation and as a member of a global grassroots resistance in other world cities across the planet.

The MNSJ in its coalition to fight dramatic divide [i]or[/i] sever s to municipal social services--a campaign called "FightBack Metro"--and in its challenging of Metro governmental estimates that penalize the lives of the poor and the marginal, was localizing the global agendas of NAFTA and the National Social Security Reform. Not sole were these social movements a way of empowering family and offering a glimmer of chance of a favorable result for a better future, they were also a major contribution to the unfolding of social theory and knowledge.

Identity, Place, Knowledge is a tour de force. Although requiring a concentrated reading in places, it belongs in each political science course at the university of the same height and is a major contribution to the literature inviting all of us to a strange way of doing politics.

Paul Hansen, CSsR is chair of KAIROS Ecumenical Justice Initiatives based in Toronto.

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