Bjarke Skærlund Risager
Bjarke Skærlund Risager is a PhD Candidate and Fulbright Fellow at the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Aarhus University. In his PhD project, he investigates sociospatial dimensions of movements and activism, primarily in the contemporary context of crisis and austerity in Europe. He does this from an interdisciplinary approach, where social movement theory, human geography, and political economy constitute the theoretical bedrock. He asks how the multiple geographies of crisis and social movement action intersect and how the relations between these geographies and the movement actors in question unfold. Specifically, he interrogates the sociospatial dynamics of square occupations, sociospatial imaginaries and performances of mass anti-austerity protests, the multiple relations between organization and activism, and the idea of the Right to the City in relation to contemporary anti-eviction movements in Europe. To answer these questions, he employs both qualitative analyses of textual material, participant observation and in-depth interviews.
Collected Work
“Neoliberalism Is a Political Project: An Interview with David Harvey”
In this interview, Bjarke Skærlund Risager, a PhD fellow at the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas at Aarhus University, sat down with David Harvey to discuss the political nature of neoliberalism, how it has transformed modes of resistance, and why the Left still needs to be serious about ending capitalism.
“Financialized Gentrification and Class Composition in the Post-Industrial City: A Rent Strike Against a Real Estate Investment Trust in Hamilton, Ontario”
Through a case study of a rent strike against a real estate investment trust in a working-class neighborhood in Hamilton, Ontario, this article asks how we might understand class and class struggle against financialized gentrification in a post-industrial context. While class has been central to gentrification literature, working-class experience and struggle have often been ignored or conceptualized in a way that precludes agency. New research on financialization of housing often focuses on struggles but has so far paid limited attention to class. This article draws on Italian operaismo (workerism) and its concept of class composition to contribute to the current debate by suggesting that financialized gentrification and struggles against it might contribute to a recomposition of the urban working class. Through a qualitative account of the 2018 East Hamilton rent strike, the article analyzes this struggle as two moments of class composition in the sphere of social reproduction. First, the extraction, exploitation and displacement pressure tenants experienced is analyzed through the lens of technical class composition. Second, the rent strike itself is analyzed as an expression of political class composition involving a confrontation of urban capital, a politicization of housing precarity, and the building of collective, autonomous power.