One year after the beginning of the pandemic, where do democracy and social movements stand?

This closing session of the lecture series Social movements and social change in a global pandemic will welcome to leading social scientists, Ashish Kothari, a leading scholar and activist in India and Lesley Wood, a leading social movement scholar and an activist in Toronto. In this closing session, we will also discuss the state of democracy and social movements in the past year as well as the challenges ahead.

Ashish Kothari is the founder of Kalpavriksh, an Indian non profit organisation working on environmental and social issues at local, national and global levels. He was trained at the Indian Institute of Public Administration and coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan. He served on boards of Greenpeace International. He is part of the coordination team of Vikalp Sangam, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives and Radical Ecological Democracy. He is the (co-)author of several books including Churning the Earth (2012) and a co-editor of Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary (2019).

Lesley Wood is Associate Professor and Chair in Sociology at York University in Canada. She researches and writes about social movements, diffusion and protest policing. She is active in anti-poverty, anti-capitalist and decolonizing movements in Toronto; and is one of editors of Interface: A Journal for and about social movements. She is the author of Crisis and Control (2014) and co-author of Social Movements: 1768-2018 (4th edition, 2018).

Credit photo : George Floyd protest Victoria Pickering/FlickR CC BY-NC-ND 2.0