Marc Becker and Jackie Smith

The North American chapter of NIGD held its first advisory board meeting by telephone in late April. The group began the meeting by discussing what this group aims to do. What “niche” can and should this network fill? The mandate of the international NIGD provided some preliminary guidance to our conversation: “The aim of NIGD is to contribute to worldwide democratisation. To promote global democratisation, NIGD works to strengthen global civil society by producing and developing emanicipatory knowledges for democratic movements, organisations, and states.”

There seemed to be consensus on the following organizing principles:

-NIGD seeks to promote global democratisation by producing and developing emanicipatory knowledges. NIGD members work to make visible those "other knowledges" that have been silenced by dominant epistemologies and to help articulate shared visions of the society and world for which we are struggling;

-To achieve this first goal, NIGD works to support and expansion of ties between academic and activist/ social movement communities;

-While global democratization is the broad goal of the network, the World Social Forum process should be a principal focal point for our efforts at this particular historical moment.

-The network should be North American in focus, including Canada, the United States and Mexico. We will help link this region to the wider NIGD network;

Towards this end, we decided to facilitate further dialogues among scholar-activists and activists to determine how best to structure this network. Theorizing, emancipatory knowledge-production, and transformative practice are occurring in both academic/ scholar activist spaces and grassroots activist/ social movement spaces. We will need to clarify what is our division of labor, what are our special skill sets. How do we dialogue, cooperate, coordinate, and converge in the social movement process in a way that reflects this understanding?

The board is currently investigating possibilities for hosting activist-scholar dialogues on these questions, through face-to-face meetings and through electronic communications. We hope to find ways to make transnational networking more accessible, feasible, and sustainable. The group aims to organize some sort of open space/ dialogue/ or meeting during the fall of 2008 or very early in 2009 with the aim of bringing organizers together to consider the agenda of the incoming U.S. administration. We will focus in particular on activist communities in North America who have been active in the World Social Forum process.