Carwil James

Student Fellow

Carwil James is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He researches strategies of grassroots autonomy and disruptive protest in Latin America, focusing on space-claiming protest and road blockades in Bolivia over the past four decades, and its role in the country’s post-2000 transformation. Evolving ideas of collective rights (including the right to strike, and the rights of peasants and indigenous peoples), strategic and tactical questions in collective mass action, and the role of urban space in reproducing and challenging racial and state power are central issues in his research. Previous teaching at New College of California’s Department of Activism and Social Change, activism with Direct Action to Stop the War, Project Underground and Greenpeace USA, and graduate research at the University of Chicago’s Harris School for Public Policy Studies have addressed links between racism, extractive industries, and environmental devastation, as well as exploring the ethical, intellectual, and strategic basis of resistance to these trends. His writing has appeared in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, the Journal of Peasant Studies, Anthropology Now, Left Turn, Fault Lines, and the book Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement.

Participating Years

2011–2012

How to Fight: Transformational Politics and Culture

In response to contemporary crises of economics and politics one often sees polemics caught between reform and revolution but this division may be false from the position of radical politics and thought. As many have shown, reform has a more radical potential, one that takes social forms seriously enough to push their limits, to create new relations, to pose, as it were, non-reformist reform. Are there philosophical, literary, and aesthetic expressions of possibility that give us some purchase on rethinking how we do what we do?