Transcending the Local: World Shops and the Politics of Place, 1969–1988

The action model which became known as the ‘world shop’ was developed by the movement promoting ‘fair trade’ since the late 1960s. As local hubs for activism, these unusual shops rendered global inequality visible in a quotidian environment. This chapter takes world shops as a starting point to rethink how social movements relate to space in urban settings. World shops have been uniquely local phenomena, deploying a diverse range of activities depending on the composition of the local group supporting the shop as well as the limitations and opportunities presented by their local settings. However, activists establishing world shops also attempted to transcend the places where they were based. The chapter demonstrates that this interplay between claiming distinct places and gaining visibility beyond these places is fundamental to an understanding of social movements’ politics of place. Social movement’s politics of place transcend place in two significant ways: they conjoin different spatial frames of reference from the local to the global, and they constitute attempts to transcend a specific place to obtain publicity for their messages.