Geoffrey Pleyers is an F.R.S.–FNRS researcher and professor of sociology at Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium., and a researcher at the Collège d'Etudes Mondiales where he chairs the program "Social Movements in the Global Age". He is the author of the book . He is the current vice-president for research of the and the past-president of the Research Committee 47 "Social classes and social movements" of the ISA.
From 2014 to 2018, he was the president of the of the International Sociological Association. During this period, he organizes conferences on social movements in different countries including Mexico, Romania, Hong Kong, France, Belgium and Palestine. In July 2018, he was elected Vice-President for Research of the International Sociological Association, for a four-year term.
A global sociologist
Geoffrey Pleyers is a member of scientific committees of numbers of journals including the Revista Mexicana de Sociología, Sociológica, Bajo el Volcán, Revista Colombiana de Sociología, Revista de Estudios Sociales, Revista de Ciencias Sociales, Temas Sociológicos, Revista de Academia Crítica, Agora/Débats Jeunesse, Observatorio: Journal of communication studies, Metamorfosis. Revista sobre Adolescencia y Juventud, Recherches Sociologiques et Anthropologiques, Politique et société. Along his career, Geoffrey Pleyers has held visiting appointments at the London School Economics, New York University, Graduate Centre City University of New York, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Universidad de Chile, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, FLACSO Ecuador... Since 2015, Geoffrey Pleyers and Breno Bringel are the editors of the web journal "". 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.
Research interests
His research interests include social movements, youth, food movements, and social movements in Mexico. The underlying argument of his main book 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.
Selected publications
Books
Alter-Globalization. Becoming Actors in the Global Age. Cambridge:Polity Press, 2011
. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2018
Forums Sociaux Mondiaux et Défis de l'Altermondialisme. Brussels: Academia, 2007,
Edited books
, with Breno Bringel, Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2018.
, with Manuel Garza, México: Porrúa, 2018.
, with JL Laville, E. Bucolo, Corragio, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2017.
