Paper long abstract:

According to many specialists, current economic globalisation has provoked several global crises and mainly environmental, social, health, economic, cultural ones. Including, some of them talk about "anthropological crisis", the whole of humanity being threatened. Parallel to economic globalisation, which is often perceived as a globalisation "from above" built by political and economic elites, other types of globalisation, "from below", from people around the world, have appeared in opposition to the former.

This paper explores imaginative responses to globalisation developed within the Portuguese social movements. Drawing on an ongoing research on different Portuguese social movements related to alter-globalisation, I will analyse the ideas that seem to belong to the transnational alter-globalisation movement as well as those that are more specific of the Portuguese reality. Focusing on the movements' action, I aim to show what causes and interests provoke these dynamics of imagination and reaction against the status quo.