Publications
Grassroots Autonomous Media Practices: A Diversity of Tactics Journal of Media Practice 15(1): 21-38. (2014)
A participatory action research study of anti-authoritarian activist media practices in Quebec, Canada was carried out by the Collectif de Recherche surl Autonomie Collective (CRAC). Analyzing interviews from 117 participants in nine activist groups and networks, we have found that grassroots anti-authoritarian and anarchist activists engage in a diversity of media tactics, choosing tools consistent with their desired goals and audiences. These goals can be grouped into four categories: developing affinity, creating social movement spaces, mass mobilizations and global solidarity. These communicative tactics in the activist repertoire of communication are informed by several important commitments to alternative content and processes, including collective self-representation, prefigurative politics, and accessibility. We conclude that grassroots autonomous activists sometimes limit the reach of their media to create safer spaces or to deepen and extend their political analysis and they sometimes produce media for wider audiences, for local mass mobilizations or to develop global relationships of solidarity. This deepens our understanding of the specific diversity of tactics developed by grassroots autonomous media activists in their repetoires of communicative action challenging received notions that anarchist or anti-authoritarian media only ever reach a limited audience.
Grassroots Autonomous Media Practices: A Diversity of Tactics Journal of Media Practice 15(1): 21-38. (2014)
A participatory action research study of anti-authoritarian activist media practices in Quebec, Canada was carried out by the Collectif de Recherche surl Autonomie Collective (CRAC). Analyzing interviews from 117 participants in nine activist groups and networks, we have found that grassroots anti-authoritarian and anarchist activists engage in a diversity of media tactics, choosing tools consistent with their desired goals and audiences. These goals can be grouped into four categories: developing affinity, creating social movement spaces, mass mobilizations and global solidarity. These communicative tactics in the activist repertoire of communication are informed by several important commitments to alternative content and processes, including collective self-representation, prefigurative politics, and accessibility. We conclude that grassroots autonomous activists sometimes limit the reach of their media to create safer spaces or to deepen and extend their political analysis and they sometimes produce media for wider audiences, for local mass mobilizations or to develop global relationships of solidarity. This deepens our understanding of the specific diversity of tactics developed by grassroots autonomous media activists in their repetoires of communicative action challenging received notions that anarchist or anti-authoritarian media only ever reach a limited audience.
The Anarchist Commons Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 14(4): 879-900. (2014)
Through analyzing the anarchist commons in Montreal, Canada using participatory action research interviews with 127 participants, we find that anti-authoritarian groups and networks addressing disparate but connected struggles are building an anarchist commons — constructing a loose grouping of spaces, networks and collectives united by a shared political culture. Key debates explored are centered on the intentional development of the commons, mixed labour models, and anti-oppression practices of 'calling in' versus 'calling out'. Participants indicate an understanding of the anarchist commons through theories and practices beyond capitalism, including feminist, queer, trans and anti-racist commitments. Finally, we argue that a shared anti-authoritarian political culture provides a certain resistance to enclosure of the anarchist commons through the processes and practices that are used to construct it.
DIY Zines and Direct-Action Activism Alternative Media in Canada: Policy, Politics and Process, 264-81. (2012)
Alternative media holds the promise of building public awareness and action against the constraints and limitations of media conglomeration and cutbacks to public broadcasting. But, what exactly makes alternative media alternative? This path-breaking volume gets to the heart of this question by focusing on the three interconnected dimensions that define alternative media in Canada: structure, participation, and activism. The contributors reveal not only how various kinds of alternative media — including Indigenous, anarchist, ethnic, and feminist media — are enabled and constrained within Canada’s complex policy environment but also how, in the context of globalization, the Canadian experience parallels media and policy challenges in other nations.
Beyond Academic Freedom: Canadian Neoliberal Universities in the Global Context Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 28: 87-114. (2012)
In April 2010, the University of Toronto announced receipt of a thirty-five million dollar donation from the Peter and Melanie Munk Charitable Foundation to fund a new institute to be named the Munk School of Global Affairs. This donation is emblematic of the intensifying neoliberalization of university governance in Canada, and critical responses to it have been two-fold. Faculty members have suggested that academic freedom — an important principle that protects researchers from censorship, termination and other institutional pressures — is at risk. Students, on the other hand, have drawn attention to the source of Munk’s capital pointing to his role as CEO of Barrick Gold and to recent accounts of human rights abuse in Barrick’s mining practices. However, in practice we have found that both academic freedom and human rights are arguably less available to people in some specific global and social locations. This article critically analyzes the discourses of academic freedom in Canada in relation to human rights discourses in the global South. Using anti-authoritarian intersectionality theory, we argue that in both instances the systems of oppression and exclusion are part of the same logic of global neoliberalism — infected by intersectionally hierarchical practices of capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism. To conclude, we look briefly at alternative knowledge production sites that strive for horizontalism in pedagogies, research and governance, and that attempt to eliminate hierarchies by experimenting with real practices of equality — practices that are fundamental to the accessibility of academic freedom.
Radicaliser l’Action Collective: Portrait de l’Option Libertaire au Québec Lien social et politique 68: 141-166. (2012)
The mobilization against the globalization of trade at the turn of the 21st century and, in Quebec in particular, at the 2001 Summit of the Americas, gave a boost to a form of political engagement that took shape outside of the institutionalized paths of partisan and community-based action. Taking their inspiration from anarchist political thought, the seemingly fragmented activist initiatives that are part of this libertarian current now form an anti-authoritarian social movement in the province. The goal of this paper is to offer an empirical picture of this anti-authoritarian community by highlighting the political culture and organizational interface that tie together the various actors of this community. Focused on a variety of different struggles, these anti-authoritarian activists are the standard bearers of an alternative political project based on the promotion of collective autonomy. The community carries within it, the seeds of an innovative way to reappropriate politics through the practice of prefiguration thus contributing to the radicalization of various forms of engagement available within the Quebec social and political landscape.
Feminisms at the Heart of Contemporary Anarchism in Quebec: Grassroots Practices of Intersectionality Canadian Woman Studies 29(3): 147-59. (2012)
Composed of collectives, groups and networks active in various struggles, the anti-authoritarian movement, which was consolidated in Quebec in the wake of the Global Justice Movement, is guided by values that are based on a common ethical compass. The latter is based on a vision of anarchism as a process that prefigures in the here and now; a society based on collective autonomy. This chapter documents the work of activists involved in three micro-cohorts of the anti-authoritarian movement and who are at the forefront of the development of practices for self-determination and self-organization. These micro-cohorts, composed of radical queers, feminists and (pro)feminists, involved in struggles against racism and colonialism, contribute to achieving this goal through a process of pollination of practices in different spaces. This analysis is the result of research carried out within the Research Group on Collective Autonomy (CRAC). CRAC is a (pro)feminist and anti-authoritarian affinity group that has been documenting its own movement using a participatory action research methodology.
Queering Heterosexuality Queering Anarchism. Christa Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon and Abbey Volcano, eds. San Francisco: AK Press, 147-64. (2012)
This piece considers the impact that taking on queer politics has had on my life — thinking through ways that queering anarchism might happen in the lives of anarchists and anti-authoritarians who society may identify as heterosexual due to the sex and/or gender of the object of their desire, but who ourselves disidentify with all things straight, perhaps even with the subject-position of heterosexual. What does this mean? This means that we are straight-ish allies of queer struggles challenging heteronormativity in the anarchist movement as well as in the mainstream spaces we inhabit — from workplaces to families; classrooms to cultural productions. This piece itself is one intervention that attempts to queer the space of narrative and theory, through non-capitalization on the one hand, and on the other hand, through mobilizing a personal narrative to think through or theorize the queering of heterosexuality and the de-heteronormativizing of 'straight-acting' scapes. Through an examination of the queering of hetero-space from an anarchist perspective, a liberatory politics of sexualities and genders emerges that intersects with anarchaqueer liberation in challenging dominant forms of social organization including the state, marriage, capitalism, parenting, love relationships, friendships, families, and other important sites of anarchist politics and struggle.
Genders and Sexualities in Anarchist Movements The Continuum Companion to Anarchism. Ruth Kinna, ed. London, UK: Continuum, 162-91. (2012)
This book considers the different approaches to anarchism as an ideology and explains the development of anarchist studies from the early twentieth century to the present day. It is unique in that it highlights the relationship between theory and practice, pays special attention to methodology, presents non-English works, key terms and concepts, and discusses new directions for the field. Focusing on the contemporary movement, the work also outlines significant shifts in the study of anarchist ideas and explores recent debates.
Prefigurative Self-Governance and Self-Organization: The Influence of Anti-Authoritarian (Pro)Feminist, Radical Queer and Anti-Racist Networks in Quebec Organize! Building from the Local for Global Justice. Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley and Eric Shragge, eds. Oakland: PM, 156-173 (2012)
At the turn of the century in Quebec, we witnessed a resurgance of anarchist-style organizing that, ten years later, has burgeoned into a nebula of anti-authoritarian groups and networks. This phenomenon, common to many countries in both the Global North and the Global South, emerged out of the uprisings against global capitalism's newest configuration — neoliberalism — which came onto the public radar in North America in 1999 with the mass street protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Since then, anti-authoritarian activists organizing in Quebec have been at most local, regional, national, and even some international street protests — the summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2002, the Summit of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America in Montebello in 2007, the Olympics in Vancouver in 2010, the G20 in Toronto the same year, and the anti-IMF protests in Washington in 2000, among others.
The DIY Post-Punk Post-Situ Politics of CrimethInc Anarchist Studies (UK) 19(1): 23-55. (2011)
This paper takes a personal and theoretical approach to the politics of guerilla text production by the loose-knit grouping of ex-workers known only as CrimethInc., situating the texts in a predominantly white middle-class North American social context, considering questions of post-punk economics and the ‘disavowal of the economic’ from Bourdieu, post-situationist politics, anti-capitalist modes of textual production and distribution, and anarchy as an anti-ideology. Following this mapping of CrimethInc.’s texts, the paper analyzes notions of privilege and oppression along the intersecting axes of class, gender, sexual orientation, whiteness and race in CrimethInc.’s texts and the punk subcultures from which they emerge.
Things To Do With Post-Structuralism in a Life of Anarchy: Relocating the Outpost of Post-Anarchism. Post-Anarchism: A Reader. ed. Duane Rousselle. Pluto Press (2011)
Post-anarchism has been of considerable importance in the discussions of radical intellectuals across the globe in the last decade. In its most popular form, it demonstrates a desire to blend the most promising aspects of traditional anarchist theory with developments in post-structuralist and post-modernist thought. "Post-Anarchism: A Reader" includes the most comprehensive collection of essays about this emergent body of thought, making it an essential and accessible resource for academics, intellectuals, activists and anarchists interested in radical philosophy.
Queer Anarchist Autonomous Publics: Direct Action Vomiting Against Homonormative Consumerism. Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society (UK) 13(4): 463-78. (2010)
Global anarchist movements and queer politics are integrating in mutually informing ways. The characteristics of this synthesis include liberatory theories and practices of embodied genders and sexualities in private and public direct actions to visibilize and extend queer publics and queer intersections with capitalism, the environment, race, disability, public space, private property and citizenship, among others. This article critically analyzes three cases of anti-consumerist vomiting — an erotic performance, a punk zine, and a Pink Panthers direct action — to investigate the politics of queer anarchist autonomous publics that extend the anti-homophobic and anti-heteronormative politics of queer counterpublics toward challenging homonormativity through intersectional anti-oppression and liberatory value-practices.
From the ‘War on Poverty’ to the ‘War on the Poor’: Knowledge, Power and Subject Positions in Anti-Poverty Discourses. Canadian Journal of Communication 34(3): 487-508. (2009)
Anti-poverty discourses are interrogated through a case study of articles on the websites of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) and The Toronto Star covering a tenant activism campaign. An autonomous media article by OCAP on direct actions to “stop the war on the poor” is compared with an article in The Toronto Star depicting tenant-activists lobbying government in the “war on poverty.” Subjectivity and power relations are analyzed by deconstructing binaries, including deserving/undeserving poor, pride/shame, and dignity/stigmatization. Productive interdiscursive relations emerge, whereby the two discourses are mutually implicated in creating possibilities for social transformation. I also argue that critical discourse analysis needs to become a more participatory engaged methodology taking direction from and providing accountability to its research subjects.
Creating Guerrilla Texts in Rhizomatic Value-Practices on the Sliding Scale of Autonomy: Toward an Anti-Authoritarian Cultural Logic. New Perspectives on Anarchism. Nathan Jun and Shane Wahl, eds. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 473-496. (2009)
For anarchists, cultural production is part of a larger struggle. It is a struggle against socially inherited forms of oppression and toward the creative production of liberation and social transformation even as we produce “guerilla texts.” Guerilla texts are irregular, non-uniform, anti-authoritarian texts combatting a much larger, normalized, authoritarian system of textual production that tends to be capitalist, patriarchal, heteronormative, racist and/or ableist. This combat is not just a discursive struggle over the content and aesthetics of texts, nor is it simply a material struggle over the economics of production seen as a refusal of profits and co-optation, nor is it just a careful attention to non-hierarchical cultural production processes; rather it is a struggle to be true to an entire range of anti-authoritarian principles and values, to produce non-didactic texts that open people’s minds to new possibilities, to develop a sense of individual and collective autonomy and self-determination, and to produce cultural producers who experience liberation, overflowing joy, love without end, and other sustained outbursts toward transformative social relationships. This may be a rather ambitious set of tasks to have before us when we are making a book, video or zine. Nonetheless, it is this kind of profound transformative project that has a stake in anarchist culture as we “phase authorities out slowly”.