Theorising approaches to social movement spatialities: Local and global contestations of neoliberal water services

Abstract

This paper examines different ways of studying – and thereby understanding – social movement spatialities. For more than a decade, literature on the geographies of social movements has explored the multiple spatialities of mobilisation, using concepts like scale, network, place, and territory. Drawing on existing contributions, the study provides a critical engagement that differentiates between several forms of research agendas involving contrasting epistemologies. This engagement contributes to opening up a conceptualisation of multiple analytical approaches by (1) analysing wider processes and political goals spanning different movements, characterised as ‘cross-cutting spatialities’; (2) studying the more specific and diverse spatiotemporal realities within particular movement cases, which describe their ‘complex-situated spatialities’; and (3) considering how inherent tensions arise between the different political practices of specific movements, displaying ‘contradictory spatialities’. The reading of these approaches is framed within a relational perspective that employs them in an empirical study of local and global struggles against neoliberalised urban water services. The paper explores the spatial practices of an urban place-based movement struggle in Johannesburg and a global labour union federation for public service workers – representing two vantage points in the fight for water justice and the human right to essential services. The study demonstrates how the analytical approaches inform one another through complementary but also contrasting perspectives on movement politics.