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Knowledge as Resistance

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Knowledge as Resistance

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Abstract

In this chapter, I return to re-evaluate Eyerman and Jamison’s cognitive praxis paradigm through the lens of shifting political consciousnesses, using its cosmological, organisational and technical categories to more deeply explore FINRRAGE’s knowledge practices and the ways in which this produced the shape of the organisation, their approach to the technologies, and the arguments and strategies they chose as ‘resistance’. I discuss some limitations to using the cognitive praxis paradigm but conclude that it has revealed the ‘FINRRAGE position’ as something more complex than ‘no’—a unique combination of underlying consciencenesses, technological focus and organisational strategies for creating knowledge for resistance, which gave the network its unique character and purpose.

I guess for me the FINRRAGE position would be the political stance opposing genetic and reproductive technologies. And it would be an activist movement to both raise awareness and analyse the relationship between science and technology and women and the feminist movement…I think it was more than just a resistance.

Lariane Fonseca, Australia

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to the group’s founder, the Japanese word for their meetings means ‘just get together and tell things that you experience’: Azumi Tsuge, Finrrage-no-kai/Japan, interviewed in Tokyo on 28 August 2010.

  2. 2.

    According to Morris and Braine (2001), construction of a group identity here may require ‘considerable education and persuasion’ as identification is wholly a matter of choice; it seems that no particular underlying consciousness is implied.

  3. 3.

    Gena Corea, USA, interviewed via Skype on 14 April 2017.

  4. 4.

    Hanisch is also credited as the originator of the rallying cry ‘the personal is political’ (a reprint of which can be found in the same volume, pp. 204–205).

  5. 5.

    The most recent being a submission to the 2016 Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into Surrogacy (Klein 2017). Rowland (2015) still considers herself to be engaged as an activist through her career as a poet; her latest book, This Intimate War: Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915, is a collection of anti-war poems in English and Turkish translation. Personal communication, 13 June 2017.

  6. 6.

    One early FINRRAGE member, Patricia Hynes, even advocated a regulatory model for NRT based on the Environmental Protection Agency, where she worked (Hynes 1987).

  7. 7.

    See Mies (2010). Akhter launched ‘Nayakrishi Andolon’, a programme to support biodiversity through a subsistence-farmer-led movement which exchanges seeds and knowledge (Akhter 2015).

  8. 8.

    Lariane Fonseca, Australia, interviewed by phone on 6 August 2010.

  9. 9.

    FINRRAGE flyer, circa 1990: FAN/FINDE 01/03.

  10. 10.

    Survey of national contacts circulated by ICG in 1990, ‘Who needs FINRRAGE and for what?’: FAN/FINDE 01/03.

  11. 11.

    Sarah Franklin, Britain. Interviewed in London on 15 December 2011.

  12. 12.

    Ibid.

  13. 13.

    Louise Vandelac, Canada, interviewed in Montreal on 22 October 2015.

  14. 14.

    Ana Regina Gomes dos Reis, Brazil, interviewed in Sao Paolo on 7 March 2015.

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  1. Institute for the Study of the Human, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Stevienna de Saille

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de Saille, S. (2017). Knowledge as Resistance. In: Knowledge as Resistance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1_6

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