Document Type
Article
Abstract
In this article, I deal with the following questions: What qualifies it as a movement? What are its goals, potentials and resources as well as difficulties and contradictions? Why do we need a TO movement at all? I first give an auto-ethnographic account of how I experience moving in the global TO movement. My frustrations, expectations, ambitions become visible as well as the need to let go all the pressures connected to TO as a global movement. Then I deal with the organizational structure of the global TO movement using Resource Mobilization Theory (RMT), and I focus on failures of organizing the movement on a global level in recent years within a federation and reasons for this while I recognize that TO has all organizational features of a social movement (e.g. organisations, staff). In the following sub-chapter, I search for the specific political goals of the TO movement in the declaration of principles of the International Theatre of the Oppressed organization (ITO) which form its collective identity based on New Social Movement theory. While no strategic political goals for concrete political change can be found apart from the actual achievement of Human Rights, TO politics points to more than just conventional politics but to “humanizing humanity”. A political goal is also TO’s anti-expertism as a demand for radical democracy and the acceptance of every human being as political beings. Afterwards I point out how TO could develop its own power strategy in the form of organizing the many. In the last sub-chapter, using Conway’s analysis of the World Social Forum as a comparison, I track TO movement’s complicity with hegemonic masculinity and structures of coloniality, to point out the necessary collaboration of TO movements on a global level in spite of all these differences and the pluriversal potential of TO movement’s goal of humanising humanity in a global contact zone. I conclude by acknowledging everything which already exists in the TO movement. I declare being part of a TO global movement and turn my desire of what I want the TO movement to be into utopian question of what could be.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Köck, Joschka
(2020)
"Global TO Movement(s) and its Discontents,"
Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal: Vol. 5, Article 3.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ptoj/vol5/iss1/3
Included in
Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Education Commons, Theatre and Performance Studies Commons
