The Local Fair Trade Movement: Understanding Global Discourses and Local Activism.

This article seeks to understand the local dimensions of global social movements, focusing specifically on the fair trade movement. As activists in different communities across the US and around the world continue to launch local fair trade initiatives and campaigns, how do we begin to understand this phenomenon and what it represents? How do we interpret and make sense of local fair trade movements? How are the discourses of global movements translated into collective action in local settings? And are these discourses rearticulated during this process of translation to make them more relevant to different local communities? Finally, what are the broader implications of these local processes of translation and rearticulation of global discourses? I explore these questions in a case study of the local Fair Trade City and anti-sweatshop movement in Chicago and provide a theoretically informed account of this case. I argue that local fair trade initiatives represent examples of generative practices that build alternatives and aim to promote citizen engagement, and share many of the features of new social movements. I also argue that when global ideas and discourses are translated into local organizing and activism, a process of translation, rearticulation, and recontextualization can give them new meanings and significance for specific communities. This process can expand the social base of activism as global discourses interact with local circumstances and are rearticulated by creative local change agents. This in turn can create new opportunities for alliances and coalitions between different social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]