Geoffrey Pleyers

Geoffrey Pleyers is FNRS researcher and professor at the Université de Louvain, Belgium and associate researcher at the Collège d'Etudes Mondiales. He is the president of the Research Committee 47 "Social classes and social movements" of the International Sociological Association. He is the author of "Alter-Globalization. Becoming Actors in the Global Age" (Polity, 2011).

Geoffrey Pleyers is a Professor of sociology at Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium.

Geoffrey Pleyers holds a PhD (Sociology) from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (2006). In July 2014, he was elected as president of the Research Committee 47 "Social classes and social movements" of the International Sociological Association, for a four-year term.

His research interests include social movements, youth, food movements, and social movements in Mexico.

The underlying argument of his main book Alter-Globalization. Becoming Actors in the Global Age (Cambridge, Polity, 2010) is that current social movements develop two parallel cultures of activism in their quest for social change. One focuses on a bottom-up approach, implementing changes at the local scale and giving a prominent place to experience, subjectivity, experimentation and the local scale. The second one, the "way of reason" is based on a citizen expertise and institutional regulation.

Since 2015, Geoffrey Pleyers and Breno Bringel are the editor of the web journal "Open Movements: for a global and public sociology of social movements". This joint project by the Research Committee 47 from the ISA and the website Open Democracy aims at providing critical and empirically-based outlooks on social movements and new expressions of social and cultural transformations: the ones which make the media headlines and those which discreetly transform daily life and politics alike, at the local and global scales.

Geoffrey Pleyers regularly teaches in Latin American universities and is a member of scientific committees of numbers of journals including the Revista Mexicana de Sociología, Sociológica, Revista Colombiana de Sociología, Estudios Sociales, Revista de Ciencias Sociales (Costa Rica), Recherches Sociologiques et Anthropologiques.

Selected publications

Books

• Alter-Globalization. Becoming Actors in the Global Age. Cambridge:Polity Press, 2011 ISBN 978-0-745-64676-3
• Forums Sociaux Mondiaux et Défis de l'Altermondialisme. Brussels: Academia, 2007, ISBN 978-2-87209-887-3
• La consommation critique Paris, Desclee de Brouwer, 2011. ISBN 978-2-22006-147-4
• Movimientos sociales. De lo local a lo global. Co-edited with Sergio Zermeño & Francis Mestries. Barcelona: Anthropos & Mexico City: UAM. ISBN 978-8-47658-936-6

Edited Books

• La consommation critique Paris, Desclee de Brouwer, 2011. ISBN 978-2-22006-147-4
• Mouvements sociaux. Quand le sujet devient acteur", with B. Capitaine, Paris: Editions MSH, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7351-2100-7
• Social movements in Central and Eastern Europe, with I. Sava, Bucharest, Press of the University of Bucharest, 2015.

Articles

• Ecology and the global age. A social movement perspective, in: Bringel & Dominguez eds., Global Modernity and Social Protests, London: Sage.

External links

• Main publications
• ISA Research Committee 47 "Social classes and social movements"
• Review of "Alter-Globalization" by Henrietta L. Moore