Alf Nilsen

Visiting Scholar

Alf Gunvald Nilsen is associate professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen. His work is concentrated in the field of critical development research, with a particular focus on social movements and the politics of popular resistance in the global South. Alf is the author of Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage (Routledge, 2010) and co-author (with Laurence Cox) of We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism (Pluto, 2014). He is also the co-editor of Social Movements in the Global South: Dispossession, Development, and Resistance (Palgrave, 2011), Marxism and Social Movements (Brill, 2013) and New Subaltern Politics: Rethinking Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Participating Years

2016–2017

Consciousness and Revolution

The place of consciousness in radical theory and practice is a subject of significant dispute. Marx believed that much of what we construe as consciousness is “false,” a rationalization or an ideological reflex that stands between people and the “true material needs” of their life processes. Are consciousness and revolution mediated in the same ways today?

2012–2013

Uprisings: in History, in Process, in the Future

The last year has witnessed an extraordinary flowering of political and social protest across the globe. Each location of struggle, whether the revolutions sometimes called the “Arab Spring” or the vigorous demonstrations of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, provides important lessons in how we understand social change in the current conjuncture.What is the longue durée of such struggle? How do uprisings reconfigure the social? How are they represented and is representation itself an uprising?