De-fetishizing the analysis of spatial movement strategies: Polymorphy and trabajo territorial in Argentina

• Polymorphy opens our view for multifaceted realities and the transformative potential of social movements.
• Polymorphy is especially strong as a de-fetishizing criticism of simplifying spatialities.
• The concepts of territoriality, scale, place, and networks are especially open for different realities and empirically grounded research.
• Polymorphy reveals Argentinean neighbourhood activism as responding to dominant processes of rescaling and territorialization.

Simplified notions of spaces of contention run the risk of misjudging and silencing the multifaceted reality of social movements. Spatial concepts like scale, place, networks, and territory are valuable complements in this regard and offer supplementary insights into political action in general and social movement action in particular. Thus, adopting a polymorphic approach can help to overcome misleading simplifications and to disclose the transformative potential of diverse social movements.Nevertheless, polymorphy is very demanding as a guidance for the thorough representation of realities and difficult to close as a self-contained account. I argue that this does not represent a lack of conceptual closure but the precise strength of polymorphic frameworks based on scale, place, networks, and territory. Bringing together the de-fetishizing qualities of the four concepts, polymorphy is particularly open to different realities and empirically grounded research that gives way to path dependency.This is exemplified with the Argentinean movement strategy called “trabajo territorial”, a widespread call for neighbourhood-based community action. Following the course of one neighbourhood assembly, I show how polymorphy opens our view for multifaceted realities and the transformative potential of seemingly constricted social movements in the Global South. It is thus also a methodological tool to build a bridge between specified area studies of the Global South and the Global North as well as between postcolonial criticism and material geographies.