- Help us develop this resource page. Please send your suggestions of material to writers@ussf2010.org
- About Detroit
- Meet our Hosts & our Host City
Detroit-based organizers are working hard to welcome activists from around the country and the world to their city, which is the scene of much hardship and struggle but also of beauty, hope, and resistance. An important goal of the USSF is to help participants better understand the struggles of Detroiters while we learn about and get inspired by their work to make another Detroit happen. USSF organizers want participants to help others learn about Detroit and its people, and their connections to the wider economic and political structures we're all working to change.
Here are some resources on the great city that will make history in June 2010:
- Tom Stephens, "Ghost Dancing in Detroit" --Where We're Coming From
- Steve Babson, Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town (1986, Wayne State University Press)
- Michael Chanan and George Steinmetz, "Detroit: Ruin of a City" (DVD)
- Detroit: I Do Mind Dying
- Finally Got the News (DVD)
- "Reading Rivera: Resurrection and Remembering in Post-Industrial Detroit" by Bill Wylie-Kellerman
The Detroit Local Organizing Committee (DLOC) is made up of dozens of grassroots social movement organizations and activists from across southeast Michigan. In conjunction with the five anchors organizations--Michigan Welfare Rights Organization (MWRO), East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC), Centro Obrero de Detroit, Southeast Michigan Jobs with Justice, and Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice (DWEJ)--they are responsible for logistical organizing for USSF II Detroit in June 2010.
- The United States Social Forum
- The United States Social Forum: Perspectives of a Movement Edited by the USSF Book Committee:Marina Karides, Walda Katz-Fishman, Rose M. Brewer, Jerome Scott, and Alice Lovelace
- The World and US Social Forums: A Better World Is Possible and Necessary Edited by Judity Blau and Marina Karides
- "Spaces of Intentionality: Race, Class and Horizontality in the U.S. Social Forum" Jeffrey Juris, Mobilization 13(4) 2008:353-372.
- "We are the Ones We've been Waiting For: The US Social Forum in Context" Mobilization 13(4) 2008:373-394.
- This article analyzes observations by a team of more than 20 observers (students and more senior researchers) attending the US Social Forum in 2007.
- The World Social Forum
- This primer on the World Social Forums provides an accessible overview of the first 8 World Social Forums and the accompanying regional, national, and local social forums. Note: All royalties from sales of this book go to support the work of Grassroots Global Justice and the US Social Forum.
- "Windows on the Ninth World Social Forum in Belem" Ana Velitchkova, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, and Jackie Smith Societies without Borders 4 (2009)193-208.
- This essay provides three observers perspectives on the 2009 World Social Forum, examining relations between social movements, political parties, and governments, the role of the Social Movement Assembly in helping build a global "movement of movements," and the efforts to strengthen connections between local settings and the World Social Forums through "Belem expanded," which used Skype and other technologies to connect people around the world to the happenings in Belem, Brazil.
- Observation research at the European Social Forum in 2004.
- This report analyzes evidence collected by a team of observers attending the European Social Forum in London in 2004. The team helped pioneer a strategy for doing "collaborative ethnography" at the Social Forums as a way to overcome the limitations of individual researchers to analyze and assess the many activities taking place simultaneously in the Social Forum spaces.