Collected Work

A Right to Housing?

In the fight for housing, we are caught between the world we know and the world we want. A Right to Housing? offers both a roadmap and a reckoning. Drawing from his own experiences of on-the-ground organizing, Stein lays out practical policies for enacting a right to shelter, a right to a home, and a right to the city itself. With unflinching honesty, he then explores why these visions continuously crash against the rocks of political reality. From the power of real estate capital to the inadequacy of our institutions, he reveals the forces blocking our path—and summons the complex feelings of a Left that has lost faith in the future. Written in the heady weeks surrounding Zohran Mamdani's historic election for New York City mayor, Stein frames the book around the stirring possibilities and structural constraints of a socialist administration in the financial center of a sputtering empire. He opens a space for action in the absence of hope. This is an examination of life and politics at the intersection of optimism and pessimism, nihilism and naivety, faith and doubt—an essential book for activists, planners, and anyone who refuses to accept the housing crisis as inevitable or immutable.

Debt and Refuge: Syrian Farmworkers and the Politics of Displacement in Lebanon

Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, including up to 1.5 million displaced Syrians. Many are Syrian farmworkers, who for decades have sustained Lebanon's agricultural system through their seasonal labor. Debt and Refuge traces how the lives of these farmworkers-turned-refugees were transformed by the war in Syria and Lebanon's devastating financial collapse, revealing the slow economic violence that can push people off their land, into waged work, and into cycles of debt. Drawing on fieldwork centered in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, China Sajadian documents how Syrian farmworkers' debts—to labor brokers, landlords, and relatives—bound them to networks that exploited their labor and also sustained them in the face of profound uncertainty. In contrast to humanitarian portrayals of refugees as uprooted victims awaiting asylum or return, Sajadian locates their predicaments within a longer history of rural migration and familial division across the Lebanese–Syrian border. Linking together the politics of mass displacement, mass indebtedness, and our global food system, she makes a case for radically rethinking forced migration as an agrarian question of labor and feminist question of social reproduction. Written with both ethnographic intimacy and analytical depth, Debt and Refuge offers a deeply human portrait of the gendered politics of displacement and why they matter to the future of our agricultural systems and human mobility—in Lebanon, Syria, and beyond.

“Developing an Instrument to Measure Autonomy: Urban Middle-Class Women in Delhi”

This article develops an instrument to measure women’s autonomy in India, specifically focusing on urban women from households that have access to economic resources. It points toward the importance of understanding and measuring the autonomy of women among India’s rapidly growing middle classes. The article develops two kinds of measures based on a primary survey of women in Delhi. First, a Relative Autonomy Index (RAI), which is an adaptation of the RAI developed by Ana Vaz et al. (2013, “Measuring Autonomy: Evidence from Bangladesh.” OPHI Working Papers 38a. Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, Oxford University) that asks questions designed to understand specific characteristics and circumstances of life for middle-class women in North India. The second is an ambient measure that indexes important aspects of family, peer group, and resource use. The adapted RAI is then examined in relation to the ambient measure, as well as to measures of psychological well-being and self-efficacy, in addition to being tested for validity and reliability.

“Mobile Work: Handcart and Bicycle Workers Across the Urban Economy of Greater Accra Region”

This article explores the role of handcart and bicycle workers—mobile workers—in the urban economy of Accra and Tema, Ghana. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, it shows how their practices of food vending, e-waste collection and mobile trade exemplify a form of relational infrastructure that sustains urban life through improvisation, cooperation and mobility. By engaging AbdouMaliq Simone's concept of people as infrastructure and Milton Santos's theory of urban economic circuits, the paper highlights how these workers articulate local practices with broader flows of capital in African cities.

Anti-Eviction: The Fight against Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco

In the early 2010s, San Francisco experienced a tech boom that created both great wealth and great inequality. The city became known for runaway gentrification, a major housing crisis, and an "eviction epidemic" of long-term tenants. This book tells the story of how residents built a powerful anti-eviction movement and how they fought—and sometimes won—a right to their homes and their city. Focusing on the stories of tenants facing eviction, Maharawal describes the different strategies for resistance that emerged as well as lessons for the broader national housing crisis, beyond California.

Seriality and Social Change

From Karl Marx’s decision to publish Capital in serial form to contemporary adaptations in manga and graphic novels, this book examines how serialization both democratizes knowledge and shapes the very process of social transformation. This book delves into the paradox of the serial: while it can expand access to radical thought, it can also impose structural limits, slowing or containing the revolutionary potential it seeks to unleash. Does seriality mirror the mechanics of capitalism, or can it be a tool for subverting them? Engaging with this question across genres and forms, Seriality and Social Change invites readers to rethink how revolution is told and imagined over time.

“Feeding the Enclave: Special Economic Zones, Street Food Vendors, and the Dynamics of Urban Economy in Tema, Ghana”

This article investigates the everyday interactions between highly capitalized firms operating within the Tema Free Zone (TFZ) in Ghana and low-capital street food vendors working in and around the enclave. Drawing on Milton Santos’s theory of the two circuits of the urban economy, it examines how industrial production and informal food vending are dialectically articulated – functionally interdependent yet structurally asymmetrical. While formal firms in the TFZ operate within export-oriented global circuits, popular food vendors sustain the daily reproduction of industrial labour by providing affordable meals and services under precarious conditions. Based on qualitative fieldwork (interviews and systematic observation), and cartographic documentation, the analysis highlights the vendors’ supply networks, spatial practices, and capacity to mobilize local and regional scales. The study demonstrates that SEZs are not isolated enclaves but hybrid and porous urban formations whose productivity depends on the everyday economies that surround them. By foregrounding these relational dynamics, the article contributes to a non-dualist understanding of urban economies, capturing the intertwined arrangements between economic actors that operate under different forms of organization, and access to capital, labour, and technology within the city.

The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions

Drawing on two decades of political analysis, Ghamari explore the history of US intervention in the Middle East, focusing on the enduring sanctions imposed on Iran and the persistent perception of the Islamic Republic as a major obstacle to American power. Despite the repressive policies of the state, Iran has remained a vibrant society with active intellectual, cultural, and social justice movements. The book examines these internal changes and shifts in Iranian politics. At a critical moment when US policy is being reshaped, The Long War on Iran is a timely reminder that, if the US fails to acknowledge Iran’s transformations, both nations will continue to face new events―and the same old questions.

Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World

In this book, Miriam Ticktin explores how a concept that consistently appears as a moral good actually ends up creating harm for so many. Ticktin shows how innocence structures political relationships, focusing on individual victims and saviors, while foreclosing forms of collective responsibility. Ultimately, she wants to understand what makes the discourse around innocence so powerful and compelling, while showing that alternative political forms already exist.

Political Ecologies of Futurity: Storytelling Plantation Afterlives, Climate Erasures, and Socioecological Justice

This co-edited collection examines the entanglements of memory, place, and nature in the face of global socioecological transformation. Speaking from a range of disciplinary perspectives and drawing on different epistemological and methodological approaches, the chapters examine the plurality of climate change geographies.

“Beyond the Anthropocene Ark Ecology of Climate Havens and Spaceships”

This discussion of Malcom Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2022) argues that Ferdinand maps the double fracture constituting modernity haunting its socioecologies—one fracture characterized by racialized social inequality, the other by intersecting ecological crises. 

Petroforms: Oil and the Shaping of Nigerian Aesthetics

With Petroforms, Helen Kapstein undertakes close readings of a range of Nigerian aesthetic forms: short stories, romance novels, documentary film, the “Nollywood” film industry, fine art sculpture, and poetry. She uses these forms to argue that the demands of paying attention to petroleum extraction, production, consumption, and distribution in the creation of resource fictions must necessarily alter and affect conventional forms and structures. What results is a new set of genre-bending forms, like documentary film that we can read as horror, in response to the forceful and fluid demands of the petroleum industry and its master narrative.

“Net Zero and Settler Futurity”

Net Zero ideology promises that current and ongoing emissions can be partially offset by 'negative emissions' strategies such as carbon capture and sequestration, allowing carbon intensive firms to narrate themselves as agents that are solving—not causing—the climate crisis. This represents a shift in liberal and corporate environmentalism away from both denial and delay, towards a new strategy acknowledging the need to end fossil fuel use while urgently deferring transformations to a future made possible by not-yet developed technological innovations. Supporters see this as a sign that industry and governments are meaningfully considering the need to decarbonise, yet for detractors there is little faith in these narratives. This paper argues that a through-line of settler futurity provides affective infrastructure potent enough to transect opposing positions in minority world eco-politics, from pro-market green growth champions to pro-growth, anti-market ecosocialists. Settler futurity offers visions of possible and desirable futures where the affordances of modernity persist unchanged. To show how this infrastructure settles pro-capitalist and anti-systemic thinkers alike, I examine a variety of texts, from an industry-funded docuseries and a climate solutions book published by Bill Gates, to the ecosocialist work of Matt Huber. These strangely resonant environmentalisms comfort the discomforted, offering ontological security that 'this' life need not be undone in the pursuit of a viable and just future that extends abundance to all. Accordingly, settler futurity can be seen as an affectively charged presencing of the future, mobilising feelings of purpose, hope and confidence through promises to (eventually) become green, clean and carbon neutral. This raises important questions about what it might mean to work against/despite the allure of these pervasive narratives, which eliminate space for situating alternative visions, decolonial to degrowth. Unsettling settler environmentalism may require experimenting with approaches to confronting climate crisis that do not shy away from the difficult entanglements of life making and industrialised production, and that grapple with the affective work required to allow other futurities—and therefore other ways of living well with, against and beyond the fossil-fuelled, imperial-capitalist present—to exert their orienting presence.

“Gender-Responsive Migration Governance? The Gendering of Migration and Border Control on an International Scale”

This paper analyzes the institutionalization of gender issues in the political field of migration and borders, reconstructing the production of an institutional framework, categories of intervention, and processes of subjectivation of refugee and migrant women. Through a documentary analysis of a set of reports, guides and memoirs produced in the context of global governance institutions between the 1980s and 1990s, it shows that the gender governance and migration governance have been intertwined into a novel form of control over populations in movement: the metabolization and instrumentalization of the “gender perspective” in migration and border control policies and practices.

“Pathé Baby Films of North Africa”

This essay argues the Pathé Baby home projector and its documentaries of North Africa reveal the apex of the nineteenth-century domestic dream and a twentieth-century nostalgic grasp of crumbling Empires. Moving images that were controlled by the projectionist, and which were flattened on the shell walls, emblematized the racialized time that trapped North Africans in a vague past on the screen. However, if the projection suggests that the colonized farm, weave, dance, within the colonizers’ home, the small but present ways, we find the North Africans rejecting the camera and/or performing exoticism for a financial exchange complicate the previously read passivity in their objectification, and thwart their inclusion in a colonial home collection.

“Critical Race Theory and Abolition as a Framework for Radical Analysis: Lessons from the No Police in Schools Campaign”

This article brings Critical Race Theory (CRT) and abolitionist theory into conversation, exploring their combined potential as an analytical framework for understanding reform, social change, and retrenchment. Using the Greater Manchester-based No Police in Schools campaign as a case study, I analyse Manchester City Council's reported decision to remove School-Based Police Officers – a move first celebrated by some as a victory but later found to be fraught with complexity.

Abolitionist Lessons from the Prison Belts

In a six-part series, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, Judah Schept, Craig Gilmore, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore look at how organizers can adapt lessons learned in twenty-five years of abolitionist organizing to their own political terrains, with examples from Appalachia, California, and Louisiana. Each piece considers how to face up to a different challenge of developing our understanding of a particular context: grasping the complexity of the state, forging joint consciousness with environmental justice organizers, mapping local power structures, scanning for opportunities for solidarity, following the money through changing financial mechanisms, and preparing our organizing for the next crisis

Dissident Peace: Autonomous Struggles and the State in Colombia

In 2016, the peace accords between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC–EP) and the Colombian government promised to bring an end to over fifty years of armed conflict. Yet, despite widespread international acclaim and heavy investments in the peace process, war continued. Dissident Peace provides a rigorous reassessment of the terms of peacebuilding through an ethnography of ongoing struggles for autonomy, based on over fifteen years of research and activism in Colombia.

“Partner, Not Comrade: Blackness, Cross-Racial Coalition, and Power in France”

This article investigates how Black organizations in France are navigating the space of encounter with predominantly white leftist organizations. Using interviews conducted with white leftist organizers and Black organizers, the author shows how they crafted an alternative answers to key movement questions, building upon specific ways of doing/being in the face of fraternalisme and anti-Blackness.

“Urban Housing Provision in Peripheral Capitalism: The Future of the Past in Brazil”

Housing provision has been widely studied in Brazil since the mid-20th century. These studies have been part of a specific field as well as a more general discussion on urbanization and development on the periphery of capitalism, in a country that was able to industrialize without achieving international autonomy. This research contributes to this discussion by demonstrating the broad universe of house production and circulation that is still little understood by studies on Brazilian housing, as well as the relevance of this universe for enriching an analytical model on housing provision. In order to do this, I evaluate interpretations of housing in Brazil in consonance with the structure of housing finance, to verify that the sources of housing funding shed light on processes and markets that have not been explored much in national literature. The analysis of fiscal resources, through public spending on housing and urban services and infrastructures, support a better understanding of housing and cities in contemporary Brazil. This effort is also relevant because, by analyzing specific forms of housing provision through the production of space, one can explore particularities about the way in which housing is produced and circulated, thus supporting a broader understanding of the functioning of capitalism and some specific modes of capitalist accumulation. Current specific forms of housing provision can be seen in relation to the socio-spatial product of a Brazilian past, which is last century’s industrialization.

The Keloids We Heal: Trauma, Spirituality, and Black Modernity in Literature

Drawing on intersectional analysis, this book focuses on portrayals of trauma and spirituality in works by Toni Morrison, Conceição Evaristo, Maryse Condé, Gloria Anzaldúa, the Quilombhoje poets, and María de los Reyes Castillo. Ohmer compares literature from different countries along four thematic pathways: ghosts, mirrors, naming, and motherhood. Her analysis unlocks the literature’s power to heal through gut-wrenching descriptions of wounds and thrilling passages of hope and liberation. Throughout, Ohmer weaves in her life story as a Black woman as she reflects on how colonialism, racism, sexism, and capitalism have impacted her work, traumas, and faith journey.

“You Can’t Reform Away a War: On Creative Aggression”

In this chapter, Craig Gilmore and Ruth Wilson Gilmore consider the broader global context of attempts to build “cop cities” the world over. The wide-ranging conversation touches on the relationships between forms of repression, lawfare and criminalization, crises of accumulation and legitimation, the politics of critical analysis, and adaptive and inventive simultaneous struggles across space over land access and use.

“Front Lines: Peter Weiss’s Literature of Revolt”

This review of the English translation of Weiss's modernist epic The Aesthetics of Resistance argues for its relevance for organizers thinking about the current crisis. Experimental and dialectical in form, the novel imagines the conversations of actual figures in the German anti-Nazi underground as they try to figure out what to do at each step in the catastrophe. Staging debates about politics, history, consciousness, works of art, and the functions of writing, the characters grapple with understanding each other’s motivation to act in order to orient themselves to move together politically.

How to Break an Addiction: A Method-in-a-Manifesto for Quitting Capitalism

How To Break An Addiction paints an original and dynamic portrait of the nature of the opioid crisis while offering original commentary on what the crisis portends about the present historical conjuncture. Interrogating long- and short-run, macro and micro, national and global, structural and personal factors, it takes the ongoing US opioid crisis as a jumping off point to illustrate the profound conclusion: capitalism at its core is an addiction. In a blend of memoir, historical record, original research, and theoretical and cultural analysis, critical geographer and harm reduction activist Annie Spencer argues against a dominant ‘progressive’ presumption of the need to reform (or ‘save’) capitalism, demonstrating instead the imperative to think, organize, and enact new ways of being and provisioning together on a living Earth. How To Break An Addiction renders visible the extent to which the world we inhabit today is made by addiction—in capital’s image—and against life and well-being. Spencer calls for redress of the deepening crisis of addiction and the so-called ‘epidemic’ of pain at its root; for a paradigm shift away from the dominant economic logic in favor of new kinds of ecosystemic social practice and provision. We must innovate a new way of being human together in the here and now. Spencer’s first-person narration anchors rigorous and far-reaching research and theory, making for an original and impactful tour through capital’s addiction to crisis and our ability—and need—to break from it.

“‘¡Esto No Sale de la Nada!’: AgitArte’s Radical Infrastructures of Feeling”

Puerto Rican politics is rapidly changing, with growing opposition to colonialism reflected at the ballot box, and moments of wider acceptance of confrontational tactics on the streets—including the 2019 Uprising that unseated then-governor Ricardo Rosselló Nevares. For many, the protests seemed to “come out of nowhere”: a new, generational phenomenon, “auto-convened” if not spontaneous. Even historically-minded observers struggle to find significant precedents dating back more than ten years. In contrast, my research among veteran activists reveals a longer trajectory of sustained agitational work around many of the issues voiced during the Uprising. Drawing on my conversations with key members of AgitArte, a Santurce-based radical arts collective founded in Massachusetts in 1997, I show how, during the two decades leading to the Uprising, this and other groups reinvented and mobilized much older radical repertoires to challenge the prevailing emotional habitus. When, in the summer of 2019, the legitimacy of the colonial elite became temporarily unmoored in the wake of disaster and corruption scandals, confrontational tactics and their related emotional registers were immediately available and read as appropriate by many among the disaffected—surfacing seemingly “out of nowhere.”

Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Spirals in the Caribbean responds to key questions elicited by the human rights crisis accelerated in 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court’s Ruling 168-13, which denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s called Spiralism, Sophie Maríñez explores in this book representations of colonial, imperial, and national-era violence. She takes as evidence legislation, private and official letters, oral traditions, collective memories, Afro-indigenous spiritual and musical practices, and works of fiction, plays, and poetry produced across the island and its diasporas from 1791 to 2002.

“Reproductive Binds: The Gendered Economy of Debt in a Syrian Refugee Farmworker Camp”

Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Lebanese-Syrian border, this article analyses the gendered economy of debt among Syrian farmworkers in shawish camps, which have for decades supplied the largest and lowest paid seasonal labour force within Lebanon's food system. In turn, it traces how debt relations in these camps expanded as hundreds of thousands of Syrians sought long-term refuge in Lebanon throughout the war in Syria (2011 to present). Revisiting classic and contemporary agrarian questions of debt from a feminist social reproduction perspective, the article charts how this debt system ultimately deepened the burdens of feminized work in the fields and in the home. Emblematic of debt's “reproductive binds,” these camps offer broader insights into how debt reconfigures gendered and generational divisions of labour within displaced agricultural families—and how these conditions are negotiated, contested and reproduced in daily life.

“Everywhere in the World There Is a Chinatown; in China There Is a Khaliltown”

Throughout the West Bank over the last twenty years, there has been discussion of the link between businessmen in Hebron (Khalil) and China, and hundreds have settled or travel there annually. This study combines ethnography in the West Bank and China with documentation of the process and progress of a container moving from Yiwu to the West Bank, and uncovers intertwined and global economic and social histories. Within and beyond Palestine and China, it asks: what does governance around circulation and movement look like? How does it inflect local social life, geography, and politics?

Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement. Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families. As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won.

“New York 2140: Climate Change and Gentrification in Tomorrow’s Ruined New Yorks”

Ruins, from the perspective of capitalists, are sites where exchange value has collapsed. At the same time, the infrastructural residues of once-productive landscapes present opportunities for those who wish to live outside of the logic of the commodity society. In the latter half of the twentieth century, large swaths of New York City were ruined as sites for capital accumulation and its distinctive forms of social reproduction. Reinvestment was accompanied by a series of political clashes theorized as the “revanchist” city. As climate change proceeds, the prospect of a newly ruined New York City becomes more concrete. This article explores the prospects for ruination and reinvestment through the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, whose 2017 novel New York 2140 depicts a struggle over the regentrification of Manhattan following a series of catastrophic climate events. In the novel, Robinson posits a dialectic of social struggle that resolves into a kind of post-apocalyptic social democracy. The ending of New York 2140 reflects the impasse in which thinkers and militants who are trying to think about the problem of transition find themselves in an era without a clear revolutionary subject, where reform appears less as a confident triumph than the last-gasp effort to avert total catastrophe.

“Combined and Uneven Catastrophe”

A conversation with Joshua Craze on the shift in the Palestinian Authority’s politics away from an emphasis on acquiring sovereignty toward a focus on making markets and building up state-like institutions in the absence of statehood, examining how the current assault on Gaza and the intensification of violence in the West Bank is affecting about the combined and uneven spaces of Israeli colonization.

“Seizing the Alterity of Futures: Toward a Philosophy of History across Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism”

This article contextualizes growing interest in futurity and minoritarian futures as connected to movements in speculative fiction, particularly Afrofuturism and Indigenous futurism, and the ways in which this genre reimagines both history and futures. These developments are read through two groundbreaking anthologies—Dark Matter, a collection of speculative fiction from the African diaspora, and Walking the Clouds, a collection of Indigenous science fiction—and the social conditions of their publication. Using the work of Walter Benjamin and his writing against the notion of progress in history, the article posits the shared grounds for a philosophy of history that disrupts the singular future of speculation-driven capitalism with alternative forms of speculative imagination.

“Indigenous Geopolitics: Creating Indigenous Spaces of Community Self-Protection and Peace Amid Violent Conflict”

This article examines the social and spatial dimensions of civilian agency amid violent conflicts, specifically focusing on the daily work required from indigenous community members in the upkeep of a peace zone as a space of peace and self-protection amid insurgency and counterinsurgency. Using the concept of indigenous geopolitics as an analytical framework, it argues that indigenous spaces of self-protection require the simultaneous processes of collective refusal of state or non-state violence toward indigenous peoples and the re-inscription of indigenous sovereignty within the nation-state.

“On Israel’s Settler-Democratic Reform”

A lot of ink has been spilled during the recent months defining Netanyahu’s reform of Israel’s judiciary as an “assault on Israeli democracy” and a “judicial coup.” But a closer look at the political-legal agendas and historical development of some of the most ethno-nationalist sectors of the Israeli government reveals a more complicated relationship between the judicial overhaul, the Occupation, and Israel's settler democracy.

“Land Grabbing and Ecocide: How Bunge, TIAA, and Harvard Fuel the Destruction of the Brazilian Cerrado”

Financial speculation in land is central to the deforestation and violence unfolding in the Cerrado, where land is often violently taken from communities and then deforested in preparation for industrial soy production. The price of land used for soy production in Brazil has risen 127% on average over the past three years, fueling land speculation in areas like Santa Filomena in the state of Piauí. Such speculation by international financial institutions threatens the lives and livelihoods of Indigenous, quilombola, and rural communities who have lived on these lands for generations, have legitimate land rights, and are actively demanding collective titles to their territories under existing laws.

“The Academy for Black and Latin Education: a Pedagogy of ‘Life in a Community’”

This article transports us to New York in the 1960s and the creation of community-organized academies for Black and Latinx people.

“Treat It like a Seminar: Black Sonic Resistance to the Reagan Revolution”

Ronald Reagan’s landslide 1984 reelection isolated urban centers in the United States as sites of domestic resistance to Reagan’s ascendant conservative hegemony. Black (and Latine and queer White) artists and activists located in major cities who rejected (and were rejected by) the “Reagan Revolution” contested their symbolic erasure from the polity by establishing conceptual spaces—sonic, literary, organizational, and otherwise—where they might defy the assertions of US right-wing conservatism. Musicians Tracy Chapman and Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour) of the hip-hop group Public Enemy exemplify the choice that some Black artists made to produce politicized art that sought to refute conservative rhetoric. Chapman and Chuck D mobilize a sonic counterpolitics of nostalgia that allowed them to connect the messages embedded in their music to sounds associated with important social movements from the recent past in order to resist the conservative politics that dominated the Black 1980s.

“Geographies of Ground Rent: Periodizing Ground Rent Theory, Spatializing Ground Rent Refusal”

This article presents an overview of ground rent theories from a historical and political vantage, analyzing chronological continuities and discontinuities, and hypothesizing about the historicopolitical motivations which spur certain approaches to ground rent. It begins with “Classical Marxist” approaches to ground rent theory in the decades after Marx’s death, followed by an analysis of ground rent theory from the 1970s to 2020s. The essay then argues that ground rent-based analyses yield a unique and essential interpretation of class relations, state–capital relations, and the complexity of embodied categories of capitalist social relations. It concludes by considering Demonic Ground/Rent in which the analysis of ground rent may lead us toward ascertaining how to most deeply and fundamentally challenge, refuse, abolish, the current state of things—if we allow ourselves to follow it there.

The Political Economy of Agribusiness

What is agribusiness? When did it emerge? In answering these questions, Mendonça traces the global contours of contemporary agriculture, bringing a critical analysis of the origins of agribusiness in the United States and its subsequent international signature. This analysis sheds new light on current debates about food sovereignty, agriculture technologies, international financial markets and farmland speculation.

“The Drowned and the Displaced: Afterlives of Agrarian Developmentalism across the Lebanese-Syrian Border”

This article traces the layered significance of displacement for Syrians whose parents’ and grandparents’ villages were flooded after the Euphrates Dam in Tabqa was completed in 1973. Known as al-maghmurin (the drowned), many of the dam’s displaced descendants are now living as refugee farmworkers in Lebanon. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Lebanese-Syrian border, the article analyzes how these refugees grappled with the struggles, promises, and losses associated with Syria’s high modern era of agrarian reform against the backdrop of Syria’s ongoing war. Facing the uncertainty of long-term displacement, their vernacular narratives about the dam resurrected Baʿthist ideals of state-led agrarian development and expressed a yearning for stability. Such expectations of material improvement, however, sat in tension with an intergenerational history of economic insecurity, decades of rural outmigration, and their everyday predicaments as refugee farmworkers. This article shows how these histories took form in the maghmurin’s everyday talk about the dam: the servile agrarian past that Syria’s land reforms were meant to overcome, the many unintended displacements these reforms unleashed, and the ways they contended with these past displacements in the present. In doing so, it argues that the displacement of these refugees was not a singular event triggered by war but rather a fractured inheritance and ongoing afterlife of agrarian developmentalism and Syria’s long post-socialist transition.

“Exploring Feelings of Belonging and Membership of CUNY Noncitizen Students”

This study explores feelings of belonging and membership of noncitizen students and the impact on their mental well-being. Data were drawn from 137 participants across multiple undergraduate campuses across the City University of New York (CUNY) system. Initial findings of the CUNY Belonging Study indicate that, consistent with existing research, noncitizen students’ immigration status impacts their ability to form a sense of belonging, and belonging and membership is related to the level of institutional support they receive.

Periscope: Red Natural History

What if we understand natural history not simply as the study of nature, ecosystems, or premodern cultural traditions, but as a site of struggle between two incommensurate relations to the world—one governed by a logic of extraction and enclosure and another that relates to the world as a world in common that cannot be enclosed? Edited by Not An Alternative as part of the collective’s ongoing project The Natural History Museum, this Social Text dossier features texts by Indigenous historians, theorists, and ethnobotanists, as well as critical geographers, landscape architects, artists, and activists.

“Futures on Dry Ground: Anthropology and Coastal Planning”

Around the world, governments, industry, and other actors are creating plans to save coasts from environmental crisis. Louisiana is one prominent example: levees and other measures protect oil and gas infrastructure from inundation as the wetlands buffer rapidly erodes—in large part due to that same industry. This article reviews emerging literature and frames an anthropology of coastal planning around (1) novel orientations toward time and space, (2) the reproduction of power and capital in the name of protection and restoration, and (3) the elision of other forms of land loss and defense by reductive above-ground/underwater planning paradigms.

Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India

This book follows the social life of rape in rural northwest India to reveal how rape is not only a violation of the body but a language through which a range of issues—including caste and gender hierarchies, control over land and labor, and the shape of justice—are contested. Rather than focus on the laws governing rape, Oza closely examines rape charges to show how the victims and survivors of rape reclaim their autonomy by refusing to see themselves as defined entirely by the act of violation.

“A Defence of the Concept of the Landowning Class as the Third Class: Towards a Logic of Landownership”

Although Marx dubbed landowners one of the “three great classes” of modern society, the most prominent Marxian and socialist thinkers of capitalism and land over the past century—from Lefebvre to Massey to Harvey—have implicitly or explicitly argued that landowners are not capitalism’s ‘third class’, and that the social relations of land are marginal or contingent to the mode of production as a whole. Through assessing the work of Marxist geographers, political economists, value-form theorists, and others who have dismissed the class-status of landowners and blurred the line between ground rent and interest, this article argues that the theory of the landowning class is fundamental to the understanding of the totality of capitalist social relations, as well as to developing more incisive analyses of struggles around housing, land, and movement today.

“On the Auction Block: The Garment Industry and the Deindustrialization of New York City”

This article explores the roots of deindustrialization in one of New York City's most important industries, the manufacture of clothing. Capital flight, in the form of “runaway shops,” began as early as the teens, when the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILG) established itself through a series of key battles. The handmaiden to runaway shops was the reemergence of contracting, whereby the assembly of garments was disaggregated in terms of time, space, and legal identity. I trace efforts to combat these dynamics through their culmination in what I call the “New Deal settlement,” a stabilization of the industry across what contemporary analysts called the “New York Production Area.” This settlement, I argue, was at once geographical, political, cultural, and economic. As soon as the New Deal settlement emerged, manufacturers began working to collapse it, dispersing garment work to places like northeastern Pennsylvania, where manufacturers enlisted the wives and daughters of unemployed anthracite miners to sew their garments. Factory owners, sometimes linked to organized crime, sought to establish a new regulating capital rooted in relationships of domination, protected by authoritarian local governments. This account offers an alternative emphasis to that of Robert Fitch, whose influential account emphasized “a conscious policy” to deindustrialize the city, overseen by the real estate industry. Instead, I show how deindustrialization was rooted in significant ways in the dynamics of competition themselves, shaped at each stage by particular social relationships, state policy, and world politics.

The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History

Drawing upon years of archival research and interviews with former students, professors, and administrators, Brian Jones provides an in-depth account of one of the most dynamic student movements in United States history. The book takes the reader through Tuskegee students’ process of transformation and intellectual awakening as they stepped off campus to make unique contributions to southern movements for democracy and civil rights in the 1960s.

Arise!: Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution was a global event that catalyzed international radicals in unexpected sites and struggles. Tracing the paths of figures like Black American artist Elizabeth Catlett, Indian anti-colonial activist M.N. Roy, Mexican revolutionary leader Ricardo Flores Magón, Okinawan migrant organizer Paul Shinsei Kōchi, and Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai, Arise! reveals how activists around the world found inspiration and solidarity in revolutionary Mexico. From art collectives and farm worker strikes to prison "universities," Arise! reconstructs how this era's radical organizers found new ways to fight global capitalism. Drawing on prison records, surveillance data, memoirs, oral histories, visual art, and a rich trove of untapped sources, Christina Heatherton considers how disparate revolutionary traditions merged in unanticipated alliances. From her unique vantage point, she charts the remarkable impact of the Mexican Revolution as radicals in this critical era forged an anti-racist internationalism from below.

After Stories: Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador

This book follows the trajectories—geographic, temporal, storied—of several extended Salvadoran families. Traveling back and forth in time and across borders, Silber narrates the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountability in El Salvador's long postwar. Through a retrospective and intimate ethnographic method that examines archives of memories and troubles the categories that have come to stand for "El Salvador" such as alarming violent numbers, Silber considers the lives of young Salvadorans who were brought up in an everyday radical politics and then migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. She reflects on this generation of migrants—the 1.5 insurgent generation born to forgotten former rank-and-file militants—as well as their intergenerational, transnational families to unpack the assumptions and typical ways of knowing in postwar ethnography. As the 1.5 generation sustains their radical political project across borders, circulates the products of their migrant labor through remittances, and engages in collective social care for the debilitated bodies of their loved ones, they transform and depart from expectations of the wounded postwar that offer us hope for the making of more just global futures.

“Crisis and the Everyday: Global Connections, Resistance, and Solidarity”

This essay introduces a collection of articles that reflect the tension between the truncated globality of the COVID-19 pandemic and the contradictions and conflicts that are immanent within capitalism. The authors discuss the differentiated impact of the pandemic on workers. In doing that, they remind us that it is important to reflect on our own position as teacher-workers and researcher-workers even as we write about workers who may belong in a different world of work. Often exposed to far greater levels of precarity, danger, and exploitation, the experiences of migrant, factory, or agricultural laborers in the workplace are not equivalent to that of many teachers and researchers in academia. Nonetheless, it is worth asking whether there are threads that connect workers across these different worlds of work. The experience of withdrawing from the panel in solidarity with teacher workers of UK academia has taught us that these threads exist- the lives of adjuncts and tenured professors are interconnected as much as the lives of domestic workers and working women are connected or the lives of garment workers in Bangladesh and workers in the fashion world in the US are connected. As Rogaly and Schling (2022) remind us when they quote David Featherstone, solidarity emerges through collective activity – by doing things together. This collection of short essays is the record of a moment of solidarity, of striking together in the world of work called academia.

“New York’s Housing Justice Movement: Facing the COVID Eviction Cliff Edge”

The coronavirus pandemic highlighted the deep-rooted links between poor housing and poor health, particularly for working class communities of colour, for whom the right to the city is systemically undermined by unaffordable, precarious and sub-standard housing. This paper examines these issues against the background of a grassroots movement against evictions in New York during 2021. It describes and discusses the organisation, tactics and strategies of that movement as it attempted to challenge the dominance and norms of the real estate industry. It suggests that the pandemic engendered a radical shift in the demands of tenant and housing justice organisations, which led to New York being virtually eviction free for 22 months.

“Disaster Fraud Prevention by Exclusion: Property, Homeownership, and Individual Housing Repair Aid in Puerto Rico”

Drawing on ethnographic research in Puerto Rico from 2018 to 2019, government documents, media, legal advocacy sources, and a comparative lens with post-Katrina New Orleans, the essay argues that institutional valuations around property and ownership produced eligibility exclusions and foreclosed access to recovery for some. The federal government's strict requirements around proving homeownership for individual home repair aid ultimately undermined the local organization and lived experiences of property owners in Puerto Rico, delegitimized ownership claims, and created barriers to accessing aid.

“Frantz Fanon: Postcoloniality and New Humanism”

Frantz Fanon’s ethical injunction to imagine a “new humanism” in the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth has engendered intense debate in the last 40 years among postcolonial scholars over the character of Fanonian humanism. Some argue that it is “residual humanism” rehearsing pieties of the European form, while others exult in Fanon’s “emergent humanism” that radically breaks with Western humanism. This chapter argues that his humanism is neither residual nor emergent. It contends that Fanon conceptualizes decolonization as an antonymous process, a “humanism without humanism,” that ruptures with the Eurocentric humanist episteme, while also fashioning a liberatory project of Bildung for the postcolonial people, leading to the advancement of their consciousness to the nation-people, thereupon ushering in a new humanity, a decolonizing project ironically modeled on the narrative of self-development of bourgeois subjectivity. Fanon is a profoundly revolutionary thinker and a thoroughly Europeanist one at that.

“Towards a Theory of Red Natural History”

As a perspective and a praxis, Red Natural History urges those of us who take the side of the common to see ourselves as part of the storm that arrives from the past, not to produce chaos, but to rupture the status quo, draw capitalism’s structural violence and injustices into the open, and orient our struggles for a livable and egalitarian future for all.

“Coming Out the Other Side: Notes on an Eight-Year Expedition into Natural History”

Not An Alternative is working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous theorists, historians, ethnobotanists, geographers, landscape architects, artists, and activists to define and organize around a counter-tradition of natural history, a Red Natural History, which sees the world not as a wealth of natural resources available for possession or profit, but as a world in common that cannot be enclosed. This first text situates this inquiry within NAA’s history of practice, telling the story of how we came to believe it is necessary to name and organize around an alternate tradition of natural history. The second delves into the question at hand, sketching out our collective’s provisional definition of Red Natural History.

“Afrofuturism: Race, Erasure, and COVID”

An introduction to an issue of Radical Teacher co-edited by Belinda Deneen Wallace and Jesse Schwartz on teaching Afrofuturism during a global pandemic. It serves in part as an acknowledgement of the radical transformations taking place within distinct kinds of classrooms, not simply those located within the walls of academia.

“Who Belongs to the Land?”

“If the land is not given back, it will soon be the sea.” An essay on camps, blockades, and Indigenous models of remaking the world in the face of climate collapse, for Triple Canopy.

“Homeless Shelters and the Blues”

This article analyzes the emergence of New York City’s infrastructure of homeless shelters dialectically, relationally, and historically. The members of Boogie Down Productions met in an incipient New York City homeless shelter in the mid-1980s. Their relationship and music is a window into a critical political consciousness of men living in homeless shelters because the artists gave expression to an emergent structure of feeling of resistance taking hold during intense changes to New York’s political economy and its institutions.

The Condition of the Working Class in Turkey: Labour Under Neoliberal Authoritarianism

Decades of neoliberal authoritarianism have propelled Turkey into crisis. Regime change, economic disaster and Erdogan’s ambition to impose ‘one-man rule’ have shaken the foundations of Turkish political life, but what does this mean for workers? Moving beyond the headlines and personalities, this book uncovers the real condition of the working class in modern Turkey. Combining field research and in-depth interviews, it offers cutting-edge analyses of workplace struggles, trade unionism, the AKP’s relationship with neoliberalism, migration, gender, agrarian change and precarity, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on workers. Bringing together Turkish activists and scholars, this book is an inside look at the dynamics and contradictions of working-class resistance against Turkey’s neoliberal authoritarian regime; from worker self-management to organized labour and rural struggles.

“Touch and Tech: Labor and the Work of the Pandemic”

The pandemic has changed the meaning of both touch and tech. It has drawn a line across occupations, work processes, and industries. It is a specific moment where production is separated not into the production of services and goods, but ones that are touch-based and tech-based.

“The Housing Question, Ground Rent Theory, and Differentiation vs. Homogenization”

This essay takes Engels’ The Housing Question as a provocation to (1) apply ground rent theory to housing (something which Engels neglected to do) and (2) investigate Engels’ conflation of housing struggles with the concerns of a “backwards” peasantry. The author shows that applying Marx’s ground rent theory to housing illuminates aspects of the housing question heretofore unexamined—in particular, the significance of the relationship between landowner and capitalist in housing. The essay then shows that Engels’s dismissal of housing struggles and land-based struggles more broadly is rooted in the specious belief that proletarianization homogenizes people. Engels’s spurious logic nonetheless sets in relief an important connection: that only through grasping what Cedric Robinson has called racialization or differentiation and what Sylvia Wynter has named nonhomogeneity can we recognize the theoretical and practical centrality of housing and other land-based struggles to revolution and abolition.

“Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Literary Humanism and the Question of Human Dignity”

This essay celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apartby returning to a cliché that the novel remakes African humanity. While the presumption of Achebe’s humanism has congealed into academic common sense, he does not belong to some of the brands of literary humanism developed since the ascendancy of High Theory. Examining Achebe’s literary humanism in the wake of anti-humanist French theory, which engendered defenses of literary humanism from aesthetic philosophers and postcolonial scholars, the essay argues that Achebe ascribes neither to propositional nor non-propositional literary humanism, but to the Saidean text-and-language-bound literary humanism by virtue of which he remakes African humanity after Europe in Things Fall Apart. It contends further that as a postcolonial writer his relationship to humanism remains nevertheless ambivalent. Achebe’s humanism in the novel is of aporetic form, “anti-humanistic humanism,” engendering an impassable paradox; qua Said, he is critical of humanism in the name of humanism. Whereas Achebe refashions the precolonial Okonkwo to humanist measure in Things Fall Apart, the figure of Okonkwo is paradoxically molded in the principle of Cartesian individualism of classical realism.

“Beneath the Museum, the Specter” 

This chapter discusses the political theory for institutional liberation in the terminal crisis of climate change. Museums are in crisis, facing escalating pressure to drop fossil fuel sponsors, remove robber barons and war criminals from their boards, repatriate stolen objects, and topple racist monuments, dioramas, and displays. Ecology offers a framework to interpret relations between capitalism and nature, allowing us to make sense of climate change as a project of capital. The problem is that while ecology can picture the capitalist world, it also participates in the active repression of the gap. Toscano’s account of the dialectic of extinction and resurrection latent in the labor process presents a key for thinking about what it might mean to conjure the specter that haunts the natural history museum. The museum is constituted through the same dialectics of extinction and resurrection as is the commodity.

“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.

Nature Swapped and Nature Lost: Biodiversity Offsetting, Urbanization and Social Justice

This book unravels the profound implications of biodiversity offsetting for nature-society relationships and its links to environmental and social inequality. Drawing on people’s resistance against its implementation in several urban and rural places across England, it explores how the production of equivalent natures, the core promise of offsetting, reframes socionatures both discursively and materially transforming places and livelihoods. By shedding light on offsetting’s contested geographies, it offers a fundamental retheorization of offsetting capable of demonstrating how offsetting, and more broadly revanchist neoliberal policies, are increasingly used to support capitalist urban growth producing socially, environmentally and geographically uneven outcomes. Nature Swapped and Nature Lost brings forward an understanding of environmental politics as class politics and sees environmental justice as inextricably linked to social justice. It effectively challenges the dystopia of offsetting’s ahistorical and asocial non-places and proposes a radically different pathway for gaining social control over the production of nature by linking struggles for the right to the city with struggles for the right to nature for all.

“Policing Gentrification: Stops and Low-Level Arrests during Demographic Change and Real Estate Reinvestment”

Does low-level policing increase during gentrification? If so, are police responding to increased crime, increased demand by new residents, or are they attempting to “clean up” neighborhoods marked for economic redevelopment? To address these questions, this article constructs a longitudinal dataset of New York City neighborhoods from 2009 to 2015. I compile data on neighborhoods’ demographics, street stops, low–level arrests, crimes, 311 calls to the police, and—using a novel measure—property values. Maps, spatiotemporal modeling, and fixed effects regressions compare changes in stops and low-level arrests to changes in several measures of gentrification.

“Book Review: Mallika Shakya. 2018. Death of an Industry: The Cultural Politics of Garment Manufacturing during the Maoist Revolution in Nepal”

This review evaluates an important addition to the anthropology of industrial growth and decline in South Asia. Mallika Shakya's ethnography of the garment industry in Nepal is as much a close look at entrepreneurship, labor practices, and trade unions as it is a commentary on US trade policy, uneven development, and Maoist revolutionary politics.

What’s Race Got To Do With It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality, 2nd Ed.

The first edition of What’s Race Got to Do With It (2015) addressed a moment when those working on the ground—activists, educators, young people, and families—were trying to understand and fight back against neoliberal education reforms (e.g., high stakes testing, school closings, and charter schools), while uncovering what race had to do with it all in the context of a supposedly post-racial United States. In the years since, the steady and grounded work of social movements has increased the visibility and critique of privatization, market-based reforms, and segregation; demonstrating the interlocking connections between racism and capitalism. In this period we have also seen an intensified attack on public education (alongside other public infrastructures) and a return to a more overt "racism as we knew it." This new edition of What’s Race continues the examination of neoliberal education reforms as they are being rolled back (or reworked) to track the changes and continuities of recent years—revealing the ways in which market-driven education reforms work with and through race—and share grassroots stories of resistance to these reforms. It is hoped that this new edition will continue to sharpen readers’ analyses concerning what we are working to defend and what we are working to transform, and provides a guide to action that emboldens the collective struggle for justice.

“‘A More Colorful Picture of my Own Vision’: Expansive Learning in Puerto Rico’s Student Anti-Austerity Movement”

Social movement scholars have long been aware of leadership competition or ‘factionalism’ as one of the mechanisms within the longer process of polarization. As such, competition is often discussed as a harbinger of demobilization, and rarely in the context of movement emergence or growth. In turn, education scholars have examined social movement learning primarily as a cognitive process of identity formation, with rare and oblique references to the literature on movement dynamics. The first phase of the 2010–2011 student strike at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) is a useful counterintuitive case for re-examining these conventional wisdoms, as existing studies and first-hand accounts suggest a pattern of intimate connections between factional competition and movement learning. In this article, I propose Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as an alternative framework for analyzing that sequence. By recasting competition and other movement dynamics as aspects of the internal contradictions of nested activity systems, themselves crucial to the emergent process of expansive learning, CHAT may help bridge the gap between fields and approaches.

“Transportation Justice: From Civil Rights to the Right to the City”

This essay argues for a change of approach toward thinking through transportation equity, particularly in terms of the Right to the City. To see transit in these terms is to spend less time ferreting out the racists and more time challenging the political economy of cities themselves. As the legacy of the Montgomery bus boycott suggests, where the demand is for civil rights alone, we risk simply winning the front seat on a sinking ship. Instead, we might take a more radical tack and make more capacious anti-racist demands for robust public services.

Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America

Prison Land offers a geographic excavation of the prison as a set of social relations—including property, work, gender, and race—enacted across various landscapes of American life. Prisons, Brett Story shows, are more than just buildings of incarceration bound to cycles of crime and punishment. Instead, she investigates the production of carceral power at a range of sites, from buses to coalfields and from blighted cities to urban financial hubs, to demonstrate how the organization of carceral space is ideologically and materially grounded in racial capitalism.

“‘Dynamite Talk’: William Dean Howells, Racial Socialism, and a Legal Theory of Literary Complicity”

This essay returns to the transcript of the Haymarket trial in order to identify the catalyst behind William Dean Howells’s unlikely conversion from hidebound “Dean of American Letters” into an ardent—if provisional—activist. By linking the defendants’ tracts and speeches with subsequent political acts allegedly committed by their sympathizers, the prosecution had manufactured a juridical reconciliation that successfully collapsed all conceptual space between word and deed, thereby leaving every writer potentially liable for the social lives of their texts.

Rights in Transit: Public Transportation and the Right to the City in California’s East Bay

Is public transportation a right? Should it be? For those reliant on public transit, the answer is invariably “yes” to both. Indeed, when city officials propose slashing service or raising fares, it is these riders who are often the first to appear at that officials’ door demanding their “right” to more service. This book starts from the presumption that such riders are justified. For those who lack other means of mobility, transit is a lifeline. It offers access to many of the entitlements we take as essential: food, employment, and democratic public life itself. Drawing on a detailed case study of the various struggles that have come to define public transportation in California’s East Bay, the book offers a direct challenge to contemporary scholarship on transportation equity.

The Right to Nature: Social Movements, Environmental Justice and Neoliberal Natures

The Right to Nature explores the differing experiences of a number of environmental-social movements and struggles from the point of view of both activists and academics. This collection attempts to both document the social-ecological impacts of neoliberal attempts to exploit non-human nature in the post-crisis context and to analyse the opposition of emerging environmental movements and their demands for a radically different production of nature based on social needs and environmental justice. It also provides a necessary space for the exchange of ideas and experiences between academics and activists and aims to motivate further academic-activist collaborations around alternative and counter-hegemonic re-thinking of environmental politics.

Adivasis and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in India’s Bhil Heartland

The book unravels the historical processes that subordinated Bhil Adivasi communities to the everyday tyranny of the state and investigates how social movements have mobilized to reclaim citizenship, revealing how collective action from below transform the meanings of governmental categories, legal frameworks, and universalizing vocabularies of democracy. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India. Towards this end, Adivasis and the State contributes a sustained and nuanced Gramscian analysis of hegemony in order to interrogate the possibilities and limits of subaltern political engagement with state structures.

“‘Dead Addicts Don’t Recover’: ACT UP’s Needle Exchange and the Subjects of Queer Activist History”

At the start of the 1990s the New York chapter of the activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was essential to the continuation of needle exchanges, which provide clean syringes to injection drug users without disapprobation or discipline and have been shown to reduce rates of HIV transmission. ACT UP’s participation in needle exchange was part of an effort to build connections between political actors, especially across race and class lines, as the group sought a more expansive understanding of who was affected by HIV/AIDS. These efforts have been largely overlooked in the recent attention to ACT UP’s legacy. This article asks what the history of ACT UP’s needle exchange might tell us not only about the history of HIV/AIDS and public health but also about the ideals of health and recovery in defining the subjects, forms, and historiography of queer activist history.

“Biodiversity Offsetting and the Production of ‘Equivalent Natures’: A Marxist Critique”

In this paper we explore the logic of biodiversity offsetting, focusing on its core promise: the production of ‘equivalent natures’. We show how the construction of equivalence unravels the environmental contradictions of capitalism by exploring how and why it is achieved, and its profound implications for nature-society dialectics. We focus on the construction of an ecological equivalence between ecosystems, the construction of ecological credits that are considered equivalent in monetary terms, and, finally, the construction of an equivalence between places. The existing critical literature, in some cases implicitly and unwittingly, assumes that biodiversity offsetting creates value. In contrast to this argument, we apply Marx’s labour theory of value to conclude that in the majority of instances offsetting does not create value, rather it is an instance of rent. We also draw on Marxist analyses on the production of nature and place to show that biodiversity offsetting radically rescripts nature as placeless, obscuring the fact that it facilitates the production of space, place, and nature according to the interests of capital while emphasizing that at the core of offsetting lie social struggles over rights and access to land and nature. Biodiversity offsetting’s dystopian vision for the future makes it an important focus for all critical scholars seeking to understand and challenge the contradictions of the capitalist production of nature.

“Riding the Perennial Gale: Working-Class Puerto Ricans and the Involution of Colonial Capitalism”

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017, deepening an already dire economic situation and amplifying an ongoing wave of out-migration. In the age of permanent man-made climate change, hurricanes, like extended economic crises, are “big events” produced by the capitalist despoiling of nature and labor, further exposing the dispossessed and displaced to structural violence. A colony of the USA since 1898, perhaps Puerto Rico has now once again “changed forever,” as the popular belief goes in the wake of Maria. If so, these changes will continually be experienced and enacted differently by subjects unevenly positioned in terms of unequal relationships of power and privilege. I propose an empirically informed research orientation that examines the situation of contemporary working-class Puerto Ricans in terms of their strategic responses to the involution of colonial capitalism. As a dimension of social life, working-classness is not contracting but expanding, in the context of an ongoing “debt crisis” better understood in terms of the self-consumption, or involution, of the modality of colonial capitalism established in Puerto Rico in the 1940s. In this light, strategic actions of working-class Puerto Ricans such as migration, informal labor, and subsistence/domestic production are not evidence of alternate modes of being, but part of the very conditions of working-classness today. I conclude by briefly identifying three areas for future research to flesh out the proposed orientation, focusing in the immediate term on responses to Maria by working-class communities in the island and the diaspora, in interaction with local and US elites.

“From Historical Chains to Derivative Futures: Title Registries as Time Machines”

For centuries, transferring ownership of land under common law was a slow, complex process requiring the construction of a chain of paper deeds evidencing multiple decades of prior possession. In 1858, colonist Robert Torrens developed a new system for the transfer of land in South Australia, where the land was understood by colonial powers as ‘new’ and without history. With the intention of making land a liquid asset, Torrens’ system of title registration shifted the legal basis of title from a history of prior possession to a singular act of registration. Analysing the structure and effects of title registration, engaging with interdisciplinary work on time, and taking H.G Wells’ iconic time travel novella as a point of departure, I argue that title registries can usefully be understood as time machines. Like the machine H.G Wells imagined, title registries use fiction to facilitate fantastical journeys in which the subject is radically temporally dislocated from the material constraints of history. As with time machines, it tends to be a transcendental white male subject who is most likely to survive this dislocation. While based on fiction, the impacts of title registries are very much real, facilitating humanity’s arrival at racist, dystopic landscapes in the here and now.

Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism

In Planetary Improvement, Jesse Goldstein examines the cleantech entrepreneurial community in order to understand the limitations of environmental transformation within a capitalist system. Reporting on a series of investment pitches by cleantech entrepreneurs in New York City, Goldstein describes investor-friendly visions of incremental improvements to the industrial status quo that are hardly transformational. He explores a new “green spirit of capitalism,” a discourse of planetary improvement, that aims to “save the planet” by looking for “non-disruptive disruptions,” technologies that deliver “solutions” without changing much of what causes the underlying problems in the first place. Goldstein charts the rise of business environmentalism over the last half of the twentieth century and examines cleantech's unspoken assumptions of continuing cheap and abundant energy. Recounting the sometimes conflicting motivations of cleantech entrepreneurs and investors, he argues that the cleantech innovation ecosystem and its Schumpetarian dynamic of creative destruction are built around attempts to control creativity by demanding that transformational aspirations give way to short-term financial concerns. As a result, capitalist imperatives capture and stifle visions of sociotechnical possibility and transformation. Finally, he calls for a green spirit that goes beyond capitalism, in which sociotechnical experimentation is able to break free from the narrow bonds and relative privilege of cleantech entrepreneurs and the investors that control their fate.

“Save Mary Jane Veloso: Solidarity and Global Migrant Activism in the Filipino Labor Diaspora”

On April 29, 2015, Mary Jane Veloso, a Filipina migrant worker who was sentenced to death in Indonesia for trafficking heroin into the country, was granted a stay of execution by Indonesian President Joko Widodo. In this article, Francisco-Menchavez argues that transnational networks activated by this case exemplify the power of systematic migrant worker organizing both in Filipino diasporic sites where Filipinos migrant use ongoing local campaign work against precarity to create migrant class consciousness in critique of neoliberalism and the Philippine state.

“Vik Muniz’s Pictures of Garbage and the Aesthetics of Poverty”

This essay focuses on Brazilian-American artist Vik Muniz's 2008 Pictures of Garbage and the pendant 2010 documentary on their making, Waste Land, directed by Lucy Walker. Muniz enlists a group of Brazilian garbage pickers as subjects and participants in the construction of their own portraits, using garbage picked from a landfill outside of Rio de Janeiro. The use of garbage as a material draws attention to global patterns of exploitation that produce both the waste itself and the poverty of the garbage pickers. However, this essay argues that Muniz's social aims are undermined by formal incoherences within the portraits and their subsequent recommodification on the global art market. Using Michael Fried's theories, the essay identifies a tension in Pictures of Garbage between the theatricality of the subjects' poses, drawn from canonical European paintings, and the absorptive qualities of the garbage itself. This dissonance reflects Muniz's own split position as a cosmopolitan global artist compelled to represent Brazilian identity through associations with base materiality.

“How Poor Public Transit Makes Idiots of Us All”

America’s mass transit systems are in a sorry state, and only a tiny minority of Americans makes use of them. For Kafui Attoh America’s transit is “idiotic” in two ways: in the sense that it is stupid to have not invested more in it, and in the way it isolates those unable to use cars, excluding them from urban public life.

“Black Lives Matter, Gentrification, and the Security State in the San Francisco Bay Area”

This article analyzes the San Francisco Bay Area Black Lives Matter protests of 2014 in relation to the regional political economy of the tech-industry, the real estate booms, and the attendant ‘eviction epidemic’ in the region. It analyzes the regional political economy as the context in which these protests must be understood, argues that the protests created a regional protest geography that, in turn, was met by a regionalized repressive security state, and reads the disruptive practices deployed by these protests as a series of complex and sophisticated contestations which embodied connections among policing, gentrification, and the regional political economy.

“Remeasuring Stephen Jay Gould”

Fifteen years after his death, Stephen Jay Gould’s ideas have never been more vital. In this article, Matthew Lau outlines the progressive implications of Gould’s inventions in popular science, particularly his critique of biological determinism, his reckoning with the renewal of race science in the 1980s, and his background in antiracist organizing.

“Harveyan Utopian Thought and Social Justice: Approaching Public Space”

This essay explores the idea of public space by reviewing David Harvey’s utopian thought about social justice and the future of cities. It analyses several of his writings as well as conceptual constructs, including those of “dialectical utopianism” and “territorial distributive justice,” the modified versions of Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” and of Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ “subaltern [insurgent] cosmopolitanism.” Having produced, during the last four decades, a consistent and profound critique (and corresponding theorization) of contemporary capitalist society and its urban development, Harvey finds it critical that, at some point in the future, all institutional and physical infrastructure set up by bourgeois society during the last five centuries or so be replaced by another that gives rise to an alternative, relational space and place which are born out of “philosophical reflection,” an “assessment of practical requirements and basic human needs” and the “ferment of social movements.”

The Road: An Ethnography of (Im)mobility, Space, and Cross-Border Infrastructures in the Balkans

This book is an ethnographic and historical study of the main Albania-Greece highway. Highways are part of an explicit cultural-material nexus that includes houses, urban architecture and vehicles. Complex socio-political phenomena such as EU border security, nationalist politics, post-Cold War capitalism and financial crises all leave their mark in the concrete. This book explores anew classical anthropological and sociological categories of analysis in direct reference to infrastructure, providing unique insights into the political and cultural processes that took place across Europe after the Cold War. More specifically, it sheds light on political and economic relationships in the Balkans during the socialist post-Cold War period, focusing especially on Albania, one of the most under-researched countries in the region.

“Smoke, Curtains and Mirrors: The Production of Race Through Time and Title Registration”

This article analyses the temporal effects of title registration and their relationship to race. It traces the move away from the retrospection of pre-registry common law conveyancing and toward the dynamic, future-oriented Torrens title registration system. The Torrens system, developed in early colonial Australia, enabled the production of “clean,” fresh titles that were independent of their predecessors. Through a process praised by legal commentators for “curing” titles of their pasts, this system produces indefeasible titles behind its distinctive “curtain” and “mirror,” which function similarly to magicians’ smoke and mirrors by blocking particular realities from view. In the case of title registries, those realities are particular histories of and relationships with land, which will not be protected by property law and are thus made precarious. Building on interdisciplinary work which theorises time as a social tool, I argue that Torrens title registration produces a temporal order which enables land market coordination by rendering some relationships with land temporary and making others indefeasible. This ordering of relationships with land in turn has consequences for the human subjects who have those relationships, cutting futures short for some and guaranteeing permanence to others. Engaging with Renisa Mawani and other critical race theorists, I argue that the categories produced by Torrens title registration systems materialise as race.

“Carceral Conservationism: Contested Landscapes and Technologies of Dispossession at Ka‘ena Point, Hawai‘i”

This essay analytically links two fences in Hawai‘i into a genealogy of military occupation. The two fences are not linked spatially, and they differ: the US military encloses Mākua for war preparation, while the State of Hawai‘i constructed the fence at Ka‘ena for a wildlife reserve, producing a space amenable to tourism. Nevertheless, both fences interrupt, manage, and control land-based relationships to reconsolidate and legitimize state authority in the face of powerful grassroots claims to land. Carceral conservationism describes the territorial compromise between grassroots efforts for environmental self-determination and state imperatives to control land and natural resources.

“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.

“Broken Windows at Blue’s: A Queer History of Gentrification and Policing”

This essay uses the 1982 police raid of a gay bar in New York City's Time's Square to outline how LGBTQ political movements engaged with and were transformed by law-and-order politics that helped enable large projects of urban gentrification. It notes how a process of political struggle led to predominant a gay politics that abandoned police violence as an issue in favor of the fear of street violence from strangers, aligning with certain militant liberal conceptions of neighborhood safety that suited more narrowly the class interests of professional white gay men.

Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter

Combining firsthand accounts from activists with the research of scholars and reflections from artists, Policing the Planet traces the global spread of the broken-windows policing strategy, first established in New York City under Police Commissioner William Bratton. It’s a doctrine that has vastly broadened police power the world over—to deadly effect. With contributions from #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, Ferguson activist and Law Professor Justin Hansford, Director of New York–based Communities United for Police Reform Joo-Hyun Kang, poet Martín Espada, and journalist Anjali Kamat, as well as articles from leading scholars Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin D. G. Kelley, Naomi Murakawa, Vijay Prashad, and more, Policing the Planet describes ongoing struggles from New York to Baltimore to Los Angeles, London, San Juan, San Salvador, and beyond.

The Prison in Twelve Landscapes

More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself has never felt further away or more out of sight. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is a film about the prison in which we never see a penitentiary. Instead, the film unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives, from a California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires, to a Bronx warehouse full of goods destined for the state correctional system, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs. 

“Crude Fictions: How New Nigerian Short Stories Sabotage Big Oil’s Master Narrative”

New Nigerian short stories, more easily available to readers than ever before, call into question the dominant discourse around oil production nationally and internationally as they depict the complex, lived reality of a resource-rich country riven by corruption, greed, and poverty. The struggle over oil resources and rights regularly involves acts of sabotage and because of their content, their form, and their distribution, the stories themselves can be considered as small acts of sabotage. The stories’ formal qualities - or lack thereof - reflect the circumstances of their production as a tertiary by-product of sabotage. Like the material by-product, the crude oil to be distributed as part of an informal economy, these stories are unrefined. This textual output, like that commodity form, is more quickly available, less constrained by production, less costly for being raw or unprocessed, and more willfully destructive of disciplinary institutions, corporate, national, and literary.

The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labour After the Avant-Garde

The Composition of Movements to Come reconsiders the history and the practices of the avant-garde, from the Situationists to the Art Strike, revolutionary Constructivism to Laibach and Neue Slowenische Kunst, through an autonomist Marxist framework. Moving the framework beyond an overly narrow class analysis, the book explores broader questions of the changing nature of cultural labor and forms of resistance around this labor. It examines a doubly articulated process of refusal: the refusal of separating art from daily life and the re-fusing of these antagonistic energies by capitalist production and governance. This relationship opens up a new terrain for strategic thought in relation to everyday politics, where the history of the avant-garde is no longer separated from broader questions of political economy or movement, but becomes a point around which to reorient these considerations.

“Financial Markets, Developers and the Geographies of Housing in Brazil: A Supply-Side Account”

This paper looks at how financial markets influence the development industry, its business strategies, and the nature and location of its products. Adopting a supply-side account, the paper inquires into the rising role of financial markets as a source of funding for a consolidating development industry and its influence on the geography of housing in Brazilian cities. Analysing the wave of Initial Public Offerings occurring in the mid 2000s, the paper highlights that narratives of quick capital gains associated with the removal of the land banking bottleneck faced by developers supported a convention giving priority to the growth in total output, and contributed to the observed changes in the forms, scales and locations of housing projects in Brazilian cities. As discrepancies between the promises of returns for shareholders and actual financial results emerged, the growth convention unravelled, making way for other narratives and strategic moves to resonate anew and possibly change again the geographies of housing.

After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy

Why were women so prominent in the Red Army Fraction? What does the continuing cultural response to the German armed struggle tell us about the representation of violence, power, and gender today? Engaging critical theory, Charity Scribner addresses these questions and analyzes signal works that point beyond militancy and terrorism. This literature and art discloses the failures of the Far Left and registers the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited.

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.

Sex Work Politics: From Protest to Service Provision

In Sex Work Politics, Samantha Majic investigates the way nonprofit organizations negotiate their governmental obligations while maintaining their commitment to outreach and advocacy for sex workers' rights as well as broader sociopolitical change. Drawing on multimethod qualitative research, Majic outlines the strategies that two San Francisco-based organizations use to balance the conflicting demands of service and advocacy, which include treating sex work as labor with legitimate occupational health and safety concerns, empowering their clients with civic skills to advance their political commitments outside the nonprofit organization, and conducting and publishing research and analysis to inform the public and policymakers of their constituents’ needs. Challenging the assumption that activists must “sell out” and abandon radical politics to manage formal organizations, Majic comes to the surprising conclusion that it is indeed possible to maintain effective advocacy and key social movement values, beliefs, and practices, even while partnering with government agencies.

“‘If We Don’t Push Homeless People Out, We Will End Up Being Pushed Out by Them’: The Criminalization of Homelessness as State Strategy in Hungary”

In recent years, the intensity of the criminalization of homelessness in Hungary gave rise to a veritable tug-of-war between the ruling party and grassroots activists. In fact, today it is the only country in the world where the possibility of penalizing homelessness is encoded in the constitution itself. In this paper, I first provide an overview of the rise of homelessness since the late 1980s. Then, I go on to examine changing public and political attitudes towards homelessness in post-socialist Hungary and place the growing trend towards penalization in the larger context of an emerging criminal paradigm. After examining the recent authoritarian turn, I argue that the radical intensification of criminalization is a strategy not only to secure political dominance, but also to obscure the failure of the state to address the social, political and economic contradictions that became salient at the time of the regime change.

Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing

Global Unions, Local Power tells the story of the most successful and aggressive campaign ever waged by workers across national borders. It begins in the United States in 2007 as SEIU struggled to organize private security guards at G4S, a global security services company that is the second largest employer in the world. Failing in its bid, SEIU changed course and sought allies in other countries in which G4S operated. Its efforts resulted in wage gains, benefits increases, new union formations, and an end to management reprisals in many countries throughout the Global South, though close attention is focused on developments in South Africa and India. In this book, Jamie K. McCallum looks beyond these achievements to probe the meaning of some of the less visible aspects of the campaign. Based on more than two years of fieldwork in nine countries and historical research into labor movement trends since the late 1960s, McCallum's findings reveal several paradoxes. Although global unionism is typically concerned with creating parity and universal standards across borders, local context can both undermine and empower the intentions of global actors, creating varied and uneven results. At the same time, despite being generally regarded as weaker than their European counterparts, U.S. unions are in the process of remaking the global labor movement in their own image. McCallum suggests that changes in political economy have encouraged unions to develop new ways to organize workers. He calls these "governance struggles," strategies that seek not to win worker rights but to make new rules of engagement with capital in order to establish a different terrain on which to organize.

Rosa Parks Biography: A Resource for Teaching Rosa Parks

Drawn from The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and various archival sources including Rosa Parks’ newly-opened papers at the Library of Congress, this website project traces the expanse of Rosa Parks’s political work and commitments and the breadth of the Black struggle for justice across the 20th century.  At a moment when many commentators seek to draw a bright line between the good old civil rights movement and new movements for justice today, this fuller history of Rosa Parks shows how dangerous such distinctions are, revealing important continuities between movements then and now and how much her experiences and insights offer us today. This website is the product of the creative collaboration of Say Burgin, Jessica Murray, and Jeanne Theoharis and supported by the Mellon Seminar for Public Engagement and Collaborative Research at the Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center.

The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan

This book tells the story of Pakistan through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the global rise of militant Islam. Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly defined ‘political’ realm, Toor examines cultural politics to explain how the struggle between Marxists and liberal nationalists was influenced and eventually engulfed by the agenda of the religious right.