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In this paper we examine Canadian engagement with the World Social Forum (WSF) through case studies of Social Forums (SF) in cities in Ontario and Quebec, efforts to organize a Quebec-wide SF, and the aborted 2003 effort to hold a “pan-Canadian Social Forum.” We ask why social forums emerge first in Toronto, where activists networks were weaker, while in Quebec, where networks of social movements were very strong, local social forum building was slow and chaotic ? Quebec-based participation in the world-scale WSF event is much more robust than that of the rest of Canada, yet the localization of the SF in Quebec has been slower and more conflictual? We examine both the effects of sub-national SFs in strengthening social movements and enabling activists to build new alliances between movements, cities or nations and the conditions under which SFs reinforce dominant power positions and patterns of exclusion among activists. Finally we look at how the local forums connect to the WSF process and ask can the global be localized? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration has become a central issue for global social movements seeking alternatives to neoliberal globalization. Many critics of globalization argue that neoliberal capitalist relations contribute to the displacement of millions of people, especially in the Global South. At the same time, Western states have opted to securitize migration, implementing risk profiling technologies in order to further exclude and marginalize migrants. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that many campaigns on behalf of migrants subsume the experience of migration within a discourse of victimage, and fail to take into account migrants’ agency in the migration process. Recent developments, ranging from the refugee protests in Australia to the Migrants Assembly at the European Social Forum in Florence, suggest the emergence of a complex politics where migrants are positioning themselves as key players in global/local political activism. By challenging the state’s prerogative to distinguish between insiders and outsiders, political movements by and in support of undocumented migrants force the matter of sovereignty to the forefront of their political strategy. This paper examines the activism of politicized migrants and their relationship with the sovereign state system. Focusing in particular on the emerging movement of undocumented migrants in Canada, this paper assesses the implications of this activism in terms of how it is reshaping the possibilities for global political identity and practice today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concered with how the application of narrative analysis and participatory policy analysis can broaden our understanding of social movement activism in the field of health. Drawing on comparative case studies of citizen contestation in the health field in Canada and the United States, I examine how health social movement actors have sought to influence policy and discourse in the health field using, in part, their "situated knowledge" of living with a disease. Three case studies are being explored: (1) multiple chemical sensitivity; (2) asthma; (3) autism. While cross-national studies in comparative health policy have taught us much about the shape of the health care system (public or private), the role of institutions in shaping policy outcomes, and the influence of elite interests such as physicians, these approaches have paid less attention to the role of non-state actors, other than elites. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with social movement activists in a number of Canadian and American cities, I am interested in how the boundaries demarcating experts from non experts are increasingly being disrupted, as patients acquire and exchange information, and contest, perhaps unwittingly, medical and scientific authority. An approach centered on eliciting the narratives constructed by health social movements allows us to explore how such actors advance their own expert knowledges in the face of biomedicine. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Configurations of social actors networks engaged in the fight for an alternate globalization continue to vary across places. Even if global mobilisations, such as the World Social Forum, facilitate the production of transnational mobilisations and some convergences between social movements across the world, marked differences still exist between them. By analysing networks of social actors engaged against neo liberal globalisation in two countries (France and Canada) and four places (Paris, Marseille in France, Ontario and Quebec in Canada), we show that these differences are linked with key factors such as the genealogy of alter- globalization movement in each context and the way it was embedded in local political dynamics; the nature of the relationships between actors and different level of governance (local; national or supranational or international). Building on the notion of political space and the recent literature in geography, the first part of the paper will expose the three political spaces of alter-globalization movements found in Canada and France and the specific relationships each of these spaces has with global events and mobilisations. In the second part of the paper we will analyse in more details the political dynamics that explained most of these differences, considering both the history of social movements building processes till the middle of the eighties and more recent contexts of mobilizations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]