Writing
My dissertation and current book project examines 20th and 21st century occupations and encampments as a distintive form of political struggle. While protest camps are often seen as a tactic of disruption, I turn my attention to the camps as transformations of social space and experiments with alternative forms of life. Analyzing the protest spaces within their historical and spatial contexts, and paying particular attention to participants’ experience within them, I show how localized protests have paradoxically—yet consistently—been used to levy ambitious critiques of deeply entrenched political paradigms. When occupations transform public space, they grapple with how the infrastructure of our lives—such as the built environment—shapes our social relations, values, dispositions, and imagination. Thus, public space becomes an important arena through which movements elevate the social infrastructure of our political world to a subject of political judgment. In other words, spatial protests often struggle over political conditions rather than for political power. My research contributes to debates on the theory of social movements, embodied politics, and political imagination.
Manuscript submitted
Protest encampments are understudied social movement tactics. When they are discussed, they are primarily treated as speech acts, territorial contestations, or spaces of appearance. These frameworks are poorly suited to understanding the tactic’s internal orientation, focused on creating transformed landscapes of social life in miniature. I argue that protest encampments pursue these prefigurative activities as part of an underappreciated epistemic goal of protest: to critique the political present and reimagine political futures. This article reads the material, relational, and symbolic features of several encampment spaces alongside activists’ statements about their aims. I show that protesters use the encampment for its socially-constructive features, transforming these features usually associated with top-down control into a tool of grassroots struggle. By emphasizing the epistemic negotiations native to public protest, the article also corrects new social movement theory’s bias toward protest’s discursive and expressive ends.
Book Review
Book Review of The Common Camp: Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel-Palestine, by Irit Katz
Camps are a recurring architectural form across the history of Israel and modern Palestine, from refugee camps to settler camps to immigration camps. Can we make sense of these very different architectures of encampmentas as not just situationally but conceptually related? I review Irit Katz’s timely genealogy of camps as the biopolitical technology of choice in Israel-Palestine and their ambiguous role in service of and in resistance to Israeli nation-building. While Katz is right to point to camps as outlets for grassroots agency, I consider what the political nature of this agency is.
Book Review
Book Review of Recoding Power: Tactics for Mobilizing Tech Workers, by Sidney A. Rothstein
Tech workers tend to hold pro-market worldviews and believe in their own market exceptionalism. But these myths renders them more vulnerable to market crashes, because they do not pursue unionization or other formal protections against job loss in the boom-bust hiring cycle which tech relies on. In reviewing Rothstein’s book, I consider the promises of his proposal that workers may reappropriate pro-market discourse for labor organizing, and reflect on the limitations of such an approach in an era of precaritization and Silicon Valley’s increasing ideological closure.
trans. Miha Poredoš
Our filmic experiences have been yoked to the specific architectural form and economic model of the black box movie theater for too long. Considering pandemic-era public viewing experiments through media history and democratic theory, we argue for greater attention on the filmic situation as a whole: the relationship between spectacle, assembly, and environment. We provocatively emphasize the often productive relationship between spectacle and assembly, and call for more public screening experiments which dethrone the sanctity of the image.