Christian Siener

Student Fellow

Christian Siener is a doctoral student in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center where he studies urban political economy. His dissertation will focus on the politics, history, and infrastructure of New York City’s extensive homeless shelter system. Christian received an MA in geography at Hunter College.


Collected Work


“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.




Participating Years


2016–2017

Consciousness and Revolution

The place of consciousness in radical theory and practice is a subject of significant dispute. Marx believed that much of what we construe as consciousness is “false,” a rationalization or an ideological reflex that stands between people and the “true material needs” of their life processes. Are consciousness and revolution mediated in the same ways today?