Collected Work
For over 25 years, the CPCP has convened scholars and organizers committed to producing knowledge for collective liberation. The writings collected here showcase the breadth, rigor, and political imagination of CPCP fellows’ work, from critical analysis to strategies for social change.
Filter by seminar theme to see work developed in that year and click “more” to access each piece.
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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.
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.
“‘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.