Marina Sitrin
Marina received her PhD in Global Sociology from Stony Brook University and her JD in International Women’s Human Rights from CUNY Law School. She is a movement participant, scholar and writer. Marina is the author of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, Horizontalism is an oral history of the autonomous and affective based movements that emerged in Argentina in the wake of the 2001 economic collapse. In 2012 Marina published Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism & Autonomy in Argentina , which explores in depth the challenges the movements in Argentina have faced in the creation of autonomy and self-organization. Also in 2012 she co-authored, with Dario Azzellini, Occupying Language: The Secret Rendezvous with History and the Present. Occupying Language describes some of the main areas around which the current movements organize and grounds these experiences from movements in the Americas from which we draw upon in our current movements, from assembly formations to the importance of territory and love. Marina and Dario have co-written and edited, They Can’t Represent US! Reinventing Democracy From Greece to Occupy to be released in June 2013 with Verso Press. This book is based in the voices of movement participants from Occupy, Greece, Spain, Argentina and Venezuela. It approaches democracy as a question – seeing the movements as rejecting the representational form and creating something else.
Collected Work
They Can’t Represent Us!: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy
This book asserts that mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States share an agenda—to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today. Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela, Japan, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is an expansive portrait of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, and organizational forms championed by the new movements, and an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy from ancient Athens to Athens today.