ABSTRACT
The first edition of the Quebec Social Forum (QSF) took place on August 23–26, 2007, in Montreal on the campus of Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). It attracted about 5,000 people from across Quebec around the slogan, “It’s our turn to think another Quebec” in the largest assembly of progressives in Quebec’s history. In this chapter, we go back to this historic gathering and situate the Social Forum, both as event and process, within the history of alterglobalization mobilization in Quebec. 1 Historicizing the Social Forum in this way helps us to interpret its internal tensions and its larger significance in terms of what it reveals about collective actors in Quebec, their present orientations, capacities, limitations, and conflicts, as well as their contributions to the global movement against neoliberal globalization. We argue that the first QSF makes visible a politico-cultural struggle and transition in social movement politics that has been underway in Quebec and more globally for the last decade.
