Both institutionalization and deinstitutionalization processes are a reality for organizations and movements (Schröder 2015; Wolff 2020). Social movements can be read in their public transformation, in their emancipatory curiosity, as well as in their varied approaches to solutions, which oscillate constantly between these poles. According to this interpretation, social movements primarily portray public spaces as places that encourage people to join together in spite of their differences. In order to facilitate mutual listening, negotiation, critique, and agreement as well as working on shared issues and potential solutions, social movements offer venues for people from various origins, languages, and ages (Schröder 2018).  From such a viewpoint, it can be assumed that diversity serves as a foundation for social movements as well as a means of creating organizational and learning processes that help challenge the status quo (Simpson & den Hond, 2022). In light of this, this research project investigates the extent to which diversity, which serves as the foundation of social movements, also influences the (organizational) learning of social movements and, in addition, the degree to which diversity is utilized by social movements as a tactic to achieve their objectives.

The paper uses ethnographic data from 11 interviews with activists conducted at the World Social Forum 2022 in Mexico as its empirical foundation. The interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish. The World Social Forum was founded in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, by activists from the "global south." It began as a counter-meeting to the World Economic Forum, when the most influential individuals in the world (including politicians and businesspeople) congregate to discuss the future of the planet. The World Social Forum emerged as a venue that unites and networks civil society internationally in response to criticism that resulted from this. The "open space" is the World Social Forum's distinctive feature. The concept of an open area is to allow motions that symbolize various conceptions of "another world" to come together. We will outline the traits of enabling spaces in social movements and examine the function that diversity plays in these spaces along with the data. More specifically, it will be looked at to what extent diversity in open spaces helps to organizational learning processes.

We presum that the open confrontation with the occasionally sharply contrasting contents, processes, and structures of social movements is how learning processes are released. On the basis of unusual meetings and the diversity observed in open spaces, social movement activists can explore, challenge, and reinterpret their own hidden meaning structures and patterns as well as those of others. We assume that diversity in this sense is used by activists in open spaces as a strategy to initiate processes of organizational learning.

Lea Alt (M.A. social work) works at the University of Applied Sciences in Saarbrücken/ Germany as a research assistant in the research project "Methods of Social Transformation and Social Work" under the direction of Prof. Dr. Christian Schröder and as a practice advisor in the study program Social Work and Childhood Education.