Hackteria: An Example of Neomodern Activism

Transactions of the institute of British …, 2010

This article aims to broaden and deepen debates on the everyday practices of autonomous activists. To do this we present three main research findings from a recent research project that looked in detail at what we called 'autonomous geographies'. First, in terms of political identity, we highlight how participants in political projects problematise and go beyond the simple idea of the militant subject, set apart from the everyday who opposes the present condition. Second, we highlight how everyday practices are used to build hoped-for futures in the present, but that this process is experimental, messy and contingent, and necessarily so. Finally, we illuminate the contested spatialities embedded within political activism that are neither locally bounded nor easily transferable to the transnational. This exploration of everyday activism has illuminated that the participants we engaged with express identities, practices and spatial forms that are simultaneously anti-, despite-and post-capitalist. We argue that it is through its everyday rhythms that meaning is given to post-capitalism and it is this reconceptualisation that makes post-capitalist practice mundane, but at the same time also accessible, exciting, feasible and powerful. This paper draws upon material collected during a 30-month empirical research project into the everyday lives of grassroots, non-party political activists in the UK between 2005 and 2008. Three case studies were explored in detail -autonomous social centres, Low Impact Developments, and tenants' networks resisting gentrification.

Thesis, 2021

Abstract The recent wave of contemporary movements is galvanising social-change-making traction in new and complex ways. Their contribution is redefining relationships between Peoples, creating new social relations between current and future generations and with nature. The ‘how’ of this transformation is an area of immense intrigue within movements, academic and mainstream debates. In this thesis, I explore how social movements organise their collective actions, and how prefigurative and strategic dilemmas of their everyday organising are, on the one hand exposing, undermining and in some cases venturing beyond existing structures of domination; global capitalism, patriarchy/gender oppressions, racism, (neo)colonialism, (dis)ableism…. On the other hand, their experimental forms are creating alternative social forms; participatory democracies, direct/collective action, autonomy, decolonising, gender awareness, local and global networks of solidarity and voluntary association. When horizontal movements encounter difficulties, they may stifle and fold, and/or collectively, imaginatively, and in praxis transcend above and beyond issues and contentions to create new ways of being, moving beyond previously conceived parameters of possibility. I offer six London-based case studies of, globally networked social movements. Occupy London and offshoots, Reclaim the Power, anti-fracking and Climate movements, Rhythms of Resistance carnival anti-capitalism, Wretched of the Earth with decolonising critique, Defend the Right to Protest, and Stop Trump. I explore how prefigurative and strategic politics are played out within the dilemmas of everyday organising, linking the minutiae of micro-politics to the dismantling of structures of oppression. My argument is that, within movements, it is the collective-self-conscious combining of strategic refusal of systems of oppression alongside creative prefiguration of new worlds which creates multiplicities of lived experiments in organising, being, doing, relating, living and loving and dynamism for social transformation. As such, these movements are utopias in motion. My contribution is an anarcha-feminist methodology which attempts to both describe social-change-making and to contribute to it, through collective learning interventions around anarchist means–ends alignment and collective self-reflection around movement’s social-change making traction. I also contribute to the Left-anarchist-feminist- decolonising debate around social transformation.

In the past decades there has been a proliferation of protest movements that interpellate a global demos, which has been wronged by the neoliberal beast. Street politics seem to have transformed the way power, agency and resistance are being perceived and performed. By inserting new actors into the political stage, these counterpublic spheres are displacing the Habermasian idea of public sphere thereby reshaping the terms of the state-civil society relation. However, the question remains: How effective are these fantasies of radical change through “Facebook revolutions” and “Twitter insurgencies” in fundamentally transforming social, political and economic relations in the era of postcolonial late capitalism? Do current protests unwittingly reproduce processes of subalternization of marginal subjects and collectivities that have a tenuous relation to the state as well as the (international) civil society and counterpublic spheres? The continued reproduction of subalternity complicates easy notions of transnational alliances, raising troubling questions about the possibilities of post-imperial politics in the era of neoliberal globalization.

Taking Sides Theories, Practices, and Cultures of Participation in Dissent, 2021

The Article deals with the interrelations between embodied materiality and mediated resistance in translocal social movements. It develops the term "activist sense" as an analytic tool for thinking translocal and transversal forms of protest with and through media technologies and their specific aesthetics. Engaging Hannah Arendt's notion of "spaces of appearance" and Judith Butler's expansion of Arendt's work in her own writing on assemblies and "bodies in alliance" the article adds a specific affective reading of mediated forms of social protest. By doing so it asks, how to relay resistance at a distance and how to circumvent an informational abstraction in light of a materialist conception of the media aesthetics of protest.

2014

hacktivism, then, can be understood as a theory rooted in praxis; a prefigurative framework for twenty-first century anarchist organizing which offers a rich potential for experimentation and the creation of socio-technological solutions out of the immanent, irreducible social space of postanarchism. McQuillan (2012b) builds on von Busch and Palmas’ early work and articulates a ‘critical hacktivism’ to account for the ways in which radical re-organizations of existing socio-technical values, cultures and infrastructure are used to ‘prototype[e] a new society in the shell of the old’. At the heart of McQuillan’s approach is ‘an active reassembling that draws on the unexpected affordances of technology for constructing socio-technical structures’ (ibid.). McQuillan traces the outline of such prototype structures in real-world examples, such as the People Finder Interchange Format (PFIF), a digital tool and process developed to locate missing people following 2005 Hurricane Katrina tha...

THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART GREGORY SHOLETTE, 2022

* This is the introductory chapter to THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART (Lund Humphries, UK, 2022) * Since the global financial crash of 2008, artists have become increasingly engaged in a wide range of cultural activism targeted against capitalism, political authoritarianism, colonial legacies, gentrification, but also in opposition to their own exploitation. They have also absorbed and reflected forms of protest within their art practice itself. The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art maps, critiques, celebrates and historicises activist art, exploring its current urgency alongside the processes which have given rise to it. Gregory Sholette approaches his subject from the dual perspective of commentator (as scholar and writer) and insider (as activist artist), in order to propose that the narrowing gap separating forms of activist art from an aesthetics of protest is part of a broader paradigm shift constituted by the multiplying crises within contemporary capitalism and democratic governance across the globe.

2017

Democratic Crisis revisited, 2022

My article poses the question, how to narrate social protest practices to enhance their capacity to enact social change? It reflects on the relation between the narration of social practice and how its agency is perceived. It thus stresses the constitutive role of narration for the agency of social protest. The central claim of the article is that practices and their impact need to be detected, identified and named in order to appear and become seizable. The article rereads the book “Hope in the dark” by Rebecca Solnit (2016) through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s approach to social history and exemplified in the figure of the ragpicker. Most documentation of social protest follows traditional ways of historiography: isolating movements from one another, fetishizing them like a product brand, concentrating on actors (subjects behind the deeds), their intentionality, and dating the movements on a chronological timeline. Yet the power of social protest remains undetected in these reports. The article argues that this power lies in modes of functioning that counteract subject-based history telling, by deconstructing the standard link between agent and action and it also counteracts chronological time by deconstructing standard narratives. The lens of Walter Benjamin’s concept of history and his figure of the ragpicker allows us to see how a different narrative can allow for an empowering paradigm of narrating social protest practices: (1) First, by reading social movement and civic protest practices in a different unchronological time structure without dates, (2) second, by reading it from a different geographic perspective, a border transgressive and inclusive perspective (3) third, by widening the frame of the concept of the political beyond salience and the quantity of actor involvement and polarization (4) and fourth by taking into account the activism, the actual action without looking at the actors behind the acts thus without presupposing the condition of shared identities, as class, sex or race etc., as fundamental for political action. As such seemingly failed events of progressive political action - i.e. action aimed at equality and awareness for the needs of the disempowered – can be re-signified. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin, the article challenges and defies the manner in which history is transmitted as it repeats persisting power relations and understands its task to brush history against the grain.

Routledge, 2022

This chapter considers activism both as a set of practices and an identity. It critiques the contentious politics framing of activism for being too narrowly focused on protest and for treating activists as rational actors. The chapter argues that feminist and queer concepts of activism open up spaces to consider activism and activists in complex and multiple ways, engaging with cultural, affective, and transformational activist praxes. Conceptualising being an activist as a proclaimed and acknowledged identity poses questions for where the boundaries of this identity exist, what forms activism takes place in the ‘everyday’ and how activist identity can change over time and context. Drawing from case studies that intersect with race and racism, the chapter then considers the changing spaces for activism, including the web, and the challenges for researchers when engaging with regressive activism.

POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2020

Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Both the recent rise of populist leaders and the success of protest movements in the last decade have brought the study of political and social movements center stage. Questions to do with political subjectivity and agency, affect, and activism are at the heart of many recent works that have looked at mass politics, right-wing populism and movements for democracy in Europe, South Asia, and Northern Africa. Recently, for example, Walter Armbrust (2019) has provided an ethnographic account of the Egyptian revolution, focusing on activists and tricksters in the liminal phase of the revolution, and