Manissa Maharawal

Student Fellow

Manissa Maharawal is a doctoral student in the Anthropology Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a co-chair of Women of Color Network at CUNY and an editor of the “Findings” column in Anthropology Now. Her PhD research focuses on struggles over urban space, gentrification and contemporary youth social movements in the United States. She is broadly interested in historical and contemporary struggles for social justice and understanding dynamics of race, class, and gender in formation of political subjectivities. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, The Guardian, N+1, AlterNet, The Indypendent, Racialicious, Counterpunch,Waging Nonviolence, among other online and print periodicals, as well as in a number of edited books and anthologies.

Participating Years

2015–2016

Dialectics of Autonomy and Dependence

Self-determination had a heady run in the 20th century, instanced by both revolutionary assertion and homogenizing mimicry. But what is autonomy now? What is dependence? How are these conditions of existence necessarily related – as contradictory rather than contrasting ideologies, representations, relations, outcomes? What forms reveal the dialectic at work? What forms disguise or displace the dynamic?