Anarchist Essays: Recent Episodes
ARG
Brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group (ARG), Anarchist Essays presents leading academics, activists, and intellectuals exploring themes in anarchist theory, history, and practice.
For more on the ARG, please visit https://www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ and follow us on Twitter at @arglboro
In this essay, Michael Grooff argues for a bipartite reading of Kropotkin’s account of sympathy, the mechanism behind the evolutionary mutual aid principle. Incorporating both simulation as well as perception in our analysis solves the problem of animal sympathy and provides a better account of sympathy as the basis of anarchist morality.
Michael Grooff is a PhD researcher in fundamental and practical philosophy at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. Grooff's most recent publications are Sympathy as the Engine of Mutual Aid: Reading Kropotkin's Bipartite Account of Sympathy and Freedom of Recreation: A Critique of the Prohibition, Decriminalization, and Legal Regulation of Psychedelics for Recreational Use.
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In this essay, Alejandro Forero examines how bourgeois criminology weaponized positivist science to pathologize dissent, pseudoscientifically labeling anarchists as "born criminals" to justify state repression and legal exclusion. In response, Spanish anarchists repurposed evolutionary theory to propose the total abolition of prisons, advocating for a society rooted in mutual aid, rational education, and the elimination of the social inequalities that breed crime.
Alejandro Forero is Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Barcelona. His most recent publications on the topic are: (2025) Anarchism and the Abolition of the Criminal Justice System: The Struggle for the Discourse on Evolution and Social Order in Spain., in Envisioning Abolition (edited by David Scott and Emma Bell), and 2023 “The new man and the abolition of punishment: Hulsman’s approach and its similarities with the anarchist tradition” in Pain in Vain: Challenging the Penal System, Towards the Abolition of Punishment: On the Legacies of Louk Hulsman.
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In this essay, Ruby Tuke argues that the political philosopher, author and proto-anarchist William Godwin’s critique of punishment, alongside his commitment to a form of community-rooted justice guided by rational moral judgement, offers a striking yet overlooked antecedent to contemporary penal abolitionist debates.
Ruby Tuke is a writer and researcher currently working at the intersection of nineteenth‑century radicalism and contemporary penal abolitionist thought. Her most recent publication is a chapter in Envisioning Abolition, edited by David Gordon Scott and Emma Bell (Bristol University Press, 2025).
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This essay introduces Envisioning Abolition, arguing that modern penal abolitionism has deep roots in nineteenth and early twentieth-century anarchist and libertarian socialist thought that challenged prisons, punishment, and state coercion. It highlights how the traditions of red and black converge around a shared commitment to equality, freedom, and the abolition of punitive justice systems.
David Gordon Scott, Chair of the Weavers Uprising Bicentennial Committee and The Open University. His most recent books include Abolitionist Voices (Bristol University Press, paperback March 2026)
Emma Bell, Professor of Contemporary British Politics, Université Savoie Mont Blanc, France. She has also recently published Policy Press | Commons, Citizenship and Power - Reclaiming the Margins, Edited by Filippo Barbera and Emma Bell
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In this essay, Roberta Cesana examines the relationship between anarchism and print culture through the figure of Leda Rafanelli (1880–1971). It shows how writing, printing, and publishing functioned as forms of self-construction, shaping Rafanelli’s identity as a militant, an intellectual, and a professional.
Roberta Cesana is Associate Professor of History of Bibliography, Books and Publishing at the University of Milan. She is President of Apice. Her recent work focuses on women’s roles in editorial production and includes L’altra metà dell’editoria. Le professioniste del libro e della lettura nel Novecento (Ronzani, 2022) and Libri e rose. Le donne nell’editoria italiana degli anni Settanta (MUP, 2024), both co-edited with Irene Piazzoni. Her essay on Inge Schöntal Feltrinelli as Publisher has been included in The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing 1900-2020 (EUP, 2024). She has published articles and essays on Leda Rafanelli in journals and edited volumes and is currently working on a monograph on the subject.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Vincent Bouchard and Asia Matthews discuss how contemporary anarchism can be used as a framework to rethink how we teach mathematics at the university level. At its core, anarchism aims at aligning thoughts and actions, and we argue that an anarchist viewpoint on undergraduate mathematics may offer a path toward a more equitable, horizontal and human-centred approach. This is not an essay about math: this is about how it is taught, and why it matters!
Vincent Bouchard is Professor in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at the University of Alberta (personal website: https://sites.ualberta.ca/~vbouchar/). Vincent's publication list is freely available on arXiv.org at https://arxiv.org/a/bouchard_v_1.html .
Asia Matthews is a professor of mathematics and interdisciplinary educator. She worked at Quest University Canada until recently, and is now a free agent. You can find her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/asiamatthews/. Asia and Vincent's recent publication, "An Anarchist Approach to the Undergraduate Mathematics Curriculum", on which this essay is based, was published in the Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education (2025) and is freely available on arXiv at https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18811.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Eleanor Strangways explores the collaborations between anarchists and anti-imperialists in Britain during the Second World War. The essay begins by examining publications on imperialism within War Commentary, before turning to the participation of anti-imperialist activists in both the publication and anarchist meetings, including George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, and Chris Jones.
Eleanor Strangways is a final-year PhD student at Loughborough University and the author of the recent article, 'Anarchism, Anti-Militarism, and the British Empire: The Case of War Commentary and the Freedom Defence Committee', which forms the basis of this episode.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Sean Ketteringham examines the anarchist and anti-imperial politics which informed the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915), the French modernist sculptor who was based in London for the final and most productive years of his life. By suggesting several new models for Gaudier-Brzeska's Maquette for a Large Basin (referred to until recently as Maquette for a Bird Bath), the essay nuances readings of how anarchist revolutionary principles of direct action and anti-statist transnational solidarity shaped the artist's approach to primitivism, labouring bodies, and classicism.
Sean Ketteringham is Assistant Curator at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. His first monograph, Architectures of Identity: Imperial Decline and the Homes of English Modernism, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. He will join the University of Birmingham as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in May 2026.
Thanks are due to the following people for their generous help and feedback in support of this work: Rebecca Beasley, Holly Bird, Jennifer Johnson, Clare O’Dowd, Evelyn Silber and Sarah Turner as well as to the two anonymous reviewers and the editorial staff at Sculpture Journal for the many improvements they suggested to the version of article that appeared in print.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Maria Chomard examines the transatlantic anarchist mutual aid initiative after World War II, focusing on its attempted reunification and the tensions between universalist politics and Jewish postwar relief. Through this case, she argues that the Holocaust constituted a structural rupture in anarchism’s social and moral economy, reshaping practices of solidarity and contributing to the movement’s postwar crisis.
Maria Chomard is a historian with a Ph.D. from the University Paris 8 Vincennes — Saint-Denis, specializing in transatlantic Jewish anarchism. She recently published “To Save the Saviors: Reorganizing Anarchist Solidarity in Europe after World War II,” in S. Korbel and P. Strobl (eds.), Practices of Reunification: The Continuation of Refugee Life after 1945 (Routledge, 2025).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Ruth Kinna and Simon Stevens discuss their article Anarchism: war, violence and scapegoating - an analysis of power, violence and government irresponsibility. They talk about issues that inspired the article and the central claim, namely that violence does not turn solely on its performance, but on the embrace of an ethic of violence that empowers transgressive action without necessarily exposing law breakers to the punishing violence of the state.
Ruth Kinna is a political theorist and member of the Anarchism Research Group at Loughborough University. She is the author of The Government of No One. Her co-authored book with Alex Prichard (Exeter) Constitutionalising Anarchy is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Simon Stevens is a political philosopher and member of the methods in Normative Political Theory Group (ECPR). His research lies in normative political theory, with particular interests in democratic theory, political methodology, and public political philosophy. He has published on civil disobedience, homelessness, epistemic authority, and marginalisation in journals including Contemporary Political Theory, Theoria, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, and the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. He is the author of Political Theory: Why Big Ideas Matter(SAGE, 2025) and has published recent work on [https://doi:10.1017/pub.2025.10079]public political philosophy, moral sentimentalism, and live action roleplay in the Public Humanities journal published by Cambridge University Press.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
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In this essay, Kirwin Shaffer explores the creation of an anarchist ethnic identity (an anarchist Latinidad) among Spanish-speaking anarchists in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s. This identity united anarchists from Spain and Cuba around a common language and common experiences confronting capitalism and the Cuban War for Independence in the 1890s while rejecting divisive ethnic and nationalist politics centered around the place of one's birth.
Kirwin Shaffer is Professor of Latin American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University - Berks College. His most recent books include A Transnational History of the Modern Caribbean, Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion, and the forthcoming Anarchist Militants in Latin America: Biographies, Historiographies, and Transnational Lives co-edited with Amparo Sánchez Cobos and María Migueláñez Martínez.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Robert T.F. Downes examines how the eco-anarchist philosophy of social ecology and the pluriverse of Indigenous political thought come together in anarcho-Indigenous solidarities, from Standing Rock to the Zapatista caracoles, to imagine a “democracy of species” beyond the (neo)liberal rule of law. He asks how these experiments in “living otherwise” challenge anthropocentrism, private property, and the State while sketching participatory, multispecies alternatives to governance, grounded in care, consent, land, more-than-human relations, and mutual aid.
Robert T.F. Downes is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, investigating questions at the intersection of political theory, environmental politics, and law. His most recent publications are "Green Anarchy & Red Praxis: An Anarcho-Indigenous Dialogue Towards a Democracy of Species," Anarchist Studies 33, no. 2 (2025): 6-49 (doi.org/10.3898/AS.33.2.01) and "Constitutional Dictatorship and Enemies Within: A Constitutional and Historical Analysis of the Alien and Sedition Acts from John Adams to Donald Trump," Journal of International Relations, Peace Studies, and Development 10, no. 1 (2025): 1-60 (https://scholarworks.arcadia.edu/agsjournal/vol10/iss1/4/).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Livia K. Stone discusses the origins of the concept of autogestion/self-management, generally associated with anarcho-syndicalism. Often described as emerging from Yugoslavia in the 1950s, Stone argues that the origins of the term actually lie in the Algerian independence movement in the 1960s and represented a defining shift in twentieth century social movements.
Livia K. Stone is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Illinois State University. She is the author of Atenco Lives!: Filmmaking and Popular Struggle in Mexico (2019), and "Autogestion: Correcting the History of Self-Management" (2024)
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Juan Carlos Mijangos Noh reflects on an experience of creating a microcosm of an anarchist community in a Yucatecan Maya Village in Mexico. The experience involved women students trained in a neoliberal university who, despite that, were able to perform in an anarchistic fashion.
Juan Carlos Mijangos Noh is a full professor at the Autonomous University of Yucatan, Mexico. His most recent publications are: Creating an Anarchist Community: How can Students from a Neoliberal University Participate?, published by Anarchist Studies (https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/anarchiststudies/vol-33-issue-2/); and The Canicab Charter: A Mayan Model for Data Governance, published by the International Council of Media Literacy (https://ic4ml.org/journal-article/the-canicab-charter-a-mayan-model-for-data-governance/).
A longer version of this article appeared in Anarchist Studies 33.2 (2025).
For a version of this podcast in Spanish, fast forward to 15.34
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Jason Garner, looks at the debate between anarchists in countries on both side of the Atlantic about the need, or not, to revise anarchist tactics in the light of the end of the postwar revolutionary wave in 1923. This is part of an overall project on “Reformism and Cooperation in interwar anarchism. National and transnational debates in a context of decline”.
Jason Garner, former lecturer and teacher in Contemporary and Argentine history though presently freelance historian relocatied to Europe. External member of Gesraiot, Grupo de Estudios sobre Representaciones y Acciones de las Izquierdas y Organizaciones de Trabajadores, IIDyPCa, Rio Negro National University (Argentina).
Recent publications:
Goals and Means: anarchism, syndicalism and internationalism in the origins of the Federacion Anarquista Iberica, AK Press, 2016.
‘The Revue International Anarchiste’s World Survey (1924-1925) A transnational attempt at reappraising, revising, and reinvigorating the anarchist movement’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Spring 2023, Vol.27, no.1, 1-25
‘“Too many cooperatives and too few cooperativists”: The Consumer Cooperative movement in Catalonia 1898-1939.’ Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, July 2022
‘Left to die – The fate of the Catalan Consumer Cooperative Movement during the Primer Franquismo (1939-1959’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, April 2022
‘A failure of Praxis? European revolutionary anarchism in revolutionary situations 1917-1923’. Left History. An interdisciplinary journal of historical inquiry and debate, (24) 1, 2021, 10-44.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Steve Emery and Dai O'Brien discuss the life and politics of a deaf anarchist communist, Leonard A. Motler. Steve and Dai explain his significance to both the anarchist movement in the UK as a visibly deaf signing person and to the deaf community as an openly anarchist radical. A longer version of this article appeared in Anarchist Studies 33:1 (2025). This episode is read by Isobel van Hagen.
Steve Emery is a freelance writer and researcher in the field of Deaf Studies and works as a project manager at the University of Surrey. His most recent publications are: O’Brien, D. and Emery, S. (2025). L.A. Motler: a Deaf Anarchist. Anarchist Studies 33(1) DOI:10.3898/AS.33.1.02X and Emery, S. D., and Iyer, S. (2024). Deaf Migrants in London in Kusters, AMJ, Moriarty, E, le Maire, A, Iyer, S & Emery, S (2024). Deaf Mobility Studies: Exploring International Networks, Tourism, and Migration. Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press, 91-117. DOI:10.1111/jola.70013. https://gallaudetupress.manifoldapp.org/projects/deaf-mobility-studies
Dai O'Brien is an Associate Professor in BSL and Deaf Studies at York St John University. His most recent publications are: Sauntson, H., Cunningham, C., Ennser-Kananen, J., & O'Brien, D. (2025). Language and Social Justice: An Introduction to Linguistic Activism. Routledge. and O’Brien, D. and Emery, S. (2025). L.A. Motler: a Deaf Anarchist. Anarchist Studies 33(1) DOI:10.3898/AS.33.1.02
Isobel van Hagen is a PhD candidate in politics and philosophy at Loughborough University.
In this essay, Alexandria H., Juan Verala Luz, and Charles W. draw distinctions and connections between two important aspects of social movements: organizing and mutual aid. They argue that practicing mutual aid inside organizing campaigns and the mass organizations that sustain them can prefigure the kinds of social relationships that will truly liberate us.
Full text of the article can be found at: https://www.blackrosefed.org/survival-organized-mutual-aid-2025/
Alexandria H., Juan Verala Luz, and Charles W. are members of Black Rose Anarchist Federation / Federación Anarquista Rosa Negra. You can read more about how they build popular power alongside their coworkers and neighbours at blackrosefed.org.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
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In this essay, Josie Holland breaks down key characteristics of queer anarchism and its connection to anarchist principles of prefiguration and revolutionary desire. They conclude with an invitation to develop a critical utopian impulse through anarchist practices more generally.
Josie Holland is a doctoral student in the English Department at the University of California, Riverside. Their most recent publication is "Leading Towards the Queerest Insurrection: Queer Anarchism and Leadership Studies," available in The Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies. They also have forthcoming reviews in Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this reading from Tolstoy’s Search for the Kingdom of God: Gender and Queer Anarchism (2025), Javier Sethness Castro reflects on Leo Tolstoy and the Russo-Ukrainian War. While praising the relevance of Tolstoy’s anti-militarist principles in light of this ongoing conflict, the author also considers not only Tolstoy’s contradictions as a Russian chauvinist, but also the Putin regime’s utilization of his fame to legitimize its genocidal war.
Javier Sethness Castro is a primary-care provider, libertarian socialist, and author or editor of six books, including Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography (2023).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Theresa Warburton talks about the power of story for building a place-based method in anarchist organizing. Building on their own experiences and the works of Indigenous scholars, Warburton asks how anarchists can make space for the past, present, and future in the work we do together.
Theresa Warburton is an educator and organizer living in Washington State. Their most recent publications are Other Worlds Here: Honoring Indigenous Women's Writing in Contemporary Anarchist Movements and, with Elissa Washuta, Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She serves on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies and the editorial collective for Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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This essay is based on the introductory chapter from a collection edited by Owen Clayton and Iain McIntyre entitled The Popular Wobbly: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim (University of Minnesota Press, 2025).
Owen Clayton is a Senior Lecturer in English literature at the University of Lincoln in England and the author of Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: The Literature and Culture of U.S. Transiency, 1890–1940 and Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915.
Iain McIntyre is an honorary fellow with the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, a researcher at social change website commonslibrary.org and author of Environmental Blockades: Obstructive Direct Action and the History of the Environmental Movement.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Graham McGeoch speaks about his research of Orthodox Christian influences on Anarchism in Latin America. A fuller version of the research was published in the edited volume, Orthodoxy and Anarchism: Contemporary Perspectives (ed Davor Dzalto, Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).
Dr Graham McGeoch teaches Theology & Religious Studies at Faculdade Unida de Vitoria, Brazil and is a Visiting Professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His most recent publications include, Russian Émigré Theology and Latin American Liberation Theology (Volos, 2023), World Christianity and Ecological Theologies (eds. Raimundo Baretto, Graham McGeoch & Wanderley Pereira da Rosa, Fortress Press, 2024), Theology After Gaza (eds Mitri Raheb & Graham McGeoch, Cascade, 2025).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Jesse Spafford argues that plausible libertarian premises support the classical anarchist conclusion that no one has any moral property rights over land or resources. Drawing on the argument advanced in Chapter 4 of his book Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny, he contends that neither states nor would-be property owners can impose obligations on others without consent.
Jesse Spafford is a Lecturer in philosophy at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, where he researches moral debates between libertarians, socialists, and anarchists. He is the author of Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny (available open access on the Cambridge University Press website) and various other papers on anarchism including "Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Private Property" and "An Anarchist Interpretation of Marx's 'Ability to Needs' Principle." A complete list of his research and public-facing work is available on his website.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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This essay is adapted from Jim Donaghey's excellent collection, Fight for a New Normal? Anarchism and Mutual Aid in the Covid-19 Pandemic Crisis . It discusses some of the applications of 'mutual aid' in government agencies and its articulation in nineteenth century anarchist thought to flesh out a grassroots, transformative conception.
Ruth Kinna is a member of the Anarchism Research Group at Loughborough University and the author of The Government of No One.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Bluesky @anarchismresgroup.bsky.social
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay Keith Jacobs considers the relevance of Colin Ward’s work for addressing contemporary housing challenges. It is claimed that Ward’s writings on housing offer both a trenchant critique of managerially inspired policies and a set of political interventions that merit consideration.
Keith Jacobs is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania. His two most recent publications are: ‘’Historical sensibility’ and its relevance for contemporary housing studies’ 10.4337/9781800375970.00010 and ‘Political economy perspectives and their relevance for contemporary housing studies’ (coauthored with R. Atkinson and D. Warr) 10.1080/02673037.2024.2359411.
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Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Rhiannon provides an Afterword summarizing some of the key themes in a recently published volume of collected essays edited by Jim Donaghey titled Fight for a New Normal? Anarchism and Mutual Aid in the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis. Rhiannon also playfully problematizes the title of the book, arguing that rather than fighting for a new normal, anarchists should be fighting against normativity itself.
Rhiannon Firth is Lecturer in Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education, UCL Faculty of Education and Society. Rhiannon's most recent publications are Disaster Anarchy and Entangled Futurities.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Matt Grimes discusses the continuing significance of anarchism among a group of ageing anarcho-punks, who first engaged with anarchist ideologies and politics in their adolescence in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on the relationship between ageing, identity, memory and nostalgia, Matt explores how this group of ageing anarcho-punks have negotiated their anarchist beliefs, alongside the responsibilities often associated with adulthood and ageing.
Dr Matt Grimes is Course Director BA (Hons) Music Business and Senior Lecturer in Music Industries and Radio. Matt’s most recent publications are; Way, L. and Grimes, M. (2024) (eds) Punk, Ageing and Time. London: Palgrave MacMillan and Grimes, M. (2024) "I'm not someone who calls himself an anarchist, I am an anarchist". Anarcho-punk praxis and the continuing ideological significance of British anarcho-punk in the later lives of its ex-adherents’. In: Laura Way and Matt Grimes (eds) Punk, Ageing and Time. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Dana Williams discusses the many complicated connections between sociology and anarchism. In particular, Williams explores what could be meant by "anarchist-sociology" and the potential for a social science anarchist studies.
Dana Williams is Professor of Sociology at California State University, Chico in California (USA). Williams's most recent publications include "The Uncivil Sphere and Anti-authoritarian Movements: Problems of Status Quo Violence, Internationalist Militancy, and Non-state Civil Society" (published in Theory in Action) and "Anarchist and Anarchistic Anti-Systemic Movements in World-Systems Perspective: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Non-State Spaces" (with Spencer Louis Potiker and Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, in Journal of World-Systems Research), and a forthcoming book about radical trust with Pluto Press.
Williams can be found on social media at: https://scholar.social/web/@dmw and https://bsky.app/profile/dmwilliams.bsky.social
Full-text articles available here: https://hcommons.org/members/dmwilliams/ and https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dana-Williams-4
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Alexandria Hollett describes how liberal and conservative approaches to civic education in the so-called United States dangerously position the nation-state as the incontestable organizer of contemporary life, promote national myths, encourage young people to develop affinity for the nation-state, and position voting and other constitutional processes as exclusive tactics for social change. By contrast, this essay offers direct democracy, mutual aid, and direct action as anarchist interventions into the ongoing crisis of civic education.
Alexandria Hollett is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Education at California State University, Northridge. Alexandria Hollett's most recent publication is ‘No Gods, No Masters: Practicing Freedom through Anarchist Civics’ and she is a member of the Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation. You can find her at https://academics.csun.edu/faculty/alexandria.hollett or on Instagram at @alleholle.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro.
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In this essay, Libera Pisano explores Gustav Landauer’s unique approach to anarchism, grounded in a rejection of death as both a literal and symbolic concept. Landauer’s philosophy emphasizes the transcendence of individual isolation through community and mystical consciousness, positioning revolution as a life-affirming path to unity and interconnectedness.
Libera Pisano is a Research Associate at Nova University Lisbon. Her recent publications are “Resisting Nihilism: The Motif of Entwurzelung in Jonas’s Early Writings,” in Hans Jonas: The Early Years (eds. D. Herskowitz, E. Lapidot, C. Wiese; London: Routledge, 2024), 201-217 Hans Jonas: The Early Years - 1st Edition - Daniel M. Herskowitz - Ela, and “Die Grammatik der Hoffnung: Diasporisches Hören und weiblicher Abgrund bei Margarete Susman,” in Margarete Susman: Beiträge zu Werk und Wirkung (eds. M.J. Kudla, C. Battegay, I. Sauter, W. Goetschel; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2024), 317-333 Margarete Susman.
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In this essay, Alexander Sawatsky talks about his recent book, Anarchist perspectives for social work: Disrupting oppressive systems. Along with a summary of the main topics and themes, he describes how he arrived at the idea of writing this book as well as his motivation to work towards an anarchist informed social work practice.
Alexander teaches and is chair of the social work program at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada where he lives with his partner, Wendi and his two children, Marianne and Lukas. His most recent publications are the following:
Sawatsky, A. (2023) What is at the centre? Faith, social work & anarchism, Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work: Social Thought, 42:4, 477-495.
Sawatsky, A. (2024). Anarchism & social work. Critical Social Work. Vol. 25, No. 1.
Sawatsky, A. (2024) Anarchist Perspectives for Social Work: Disrupting Oppressive Systems. Oxford University Press.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro.
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In this essay, Leonard Williams reflects on the course of the 2024 presidential campaign in the United States. He then explores some implications of a second Trump presidency for both anarchists and anarchism.
Leonard Williams is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Manchester University in Indiana. His forthcoming book entitled Hybridity and Ideology was co-written with Benjamin Franks. Other recent publications include Black Blocks, White Squares: Crosswords with an Anarchist Edge and the edited volume, Anarchism: A Conceptual Analysis.
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In this essay, Jim Donaghey reads an adaption from the introduction to DIY or Die! Do-it-yourself, do-it-together and punk anarchism – the latest volume in The Anarchism and Punk Book Project. The essay goes beyond and before punk to explore the radicality that runs through DIY, in its diverse applications from home improvement to anarchist political philosophy.
Jim Donaghey is a punk working in academia, currently as a Research Fellow at Ulster University. You can read his publications at his website.
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In this essay, Alex Christoyannopoulos maps out and discusses the main qualms aired by anarchists about pacifism and nonviolence (around effectiveness, origins and compromises, and dogmatic censorship). He also fleshes out a rejoinder for each, and reflects on the mutual resonances and overlaps between the two.
Alex Christoyannopoulos is Reader in Politics and International Relations at Loughborough University. His most recent publications include a contribution to a forum debate on Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a paper articulating an anarcho-pacifist reading of international relations, as well as two pieces he mentions in this essay: a longer paper mapping out the tensions and similarities between anarchism and pacifism, and the editorial to the founding issue of the Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence. A fuller list of his publications is available on his website.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro.
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In this essay, Jon Burke describes Qalang Smangus, an aboriginal village in Taiwan which has been collectively organized. Jon makes a case for identifying it as an intentional Christian anarcho-collectivist community, assesses its success, and identifies its internal and exernal challenges.
Jon is a former lecturer in photography and media studies at Ming Chuan University in Taiwan, and is currently a technical writer in Melbourne, Australia. His most recent publications are ‘Learning to love fakes: how to overcome the inauthenticity of digital artifacts’, for the 2023 conference Medievalisms on the Screen III: Digital Medievalisms and the Teaching of History, hosted by Central European University, and ‘Anarchitecture: Anarchist Principles Made Concrete for the Anarchist Studies Network 7th International Conference, 2022.’
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In this essay, Jess Dillard-Wright and Danisha Jenkins make the case for an anarchist approach to nursing. Part love note to a problematic profession we love and hate, part fever dream of what could be, we set out to think about what nursing and care might look like after it all falls down, because it is all falling down.
Jess Dillard-Wright is an associate professor of nursing at Elaine Marieb College of Nursing at University of Massachusetts Amherst. You can learn more and find Jess’s contact information here.
Danisha Jenkins is an assistant professor of nursing at San Diego State University.
Jess and Danisha’s most recent publications are:
Jenkins, D., Cohen, J., Walker, R., McMurray, P., & Dillard Wright, J. (2024). Getting Ours? “Girlbossing” and the Ethics of Nurse Reimbursement Models. Health Equity, 8(1), 480-492. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/heq.2024.0059
Dillard-Wright, J., & Jenkins, D. (2024). Dangerous and Unprofessional Content: Anarchist Dreams for Alternate Nursing Futures. Philosophies, 9(1), 25. https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/9/1/25
Dillard‐Wright, J., & Jenkins, D. (2024). Nursing as total institution. Nursing Philosophy, 25(1), e12460. https://doi.org/10.1111/nup.12460
Out of the hospitals. Into the streets.
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In this essay, Cahal McLaughlin reflects on the influence of anarchist principles on his documentary filmmaking practices in societies affected by state violence, using case studies from South Africa, Haiti, Brazil and Ireland.
Cahal McLaughlin is Professor of Film Studies, Queen's University Belfast. His recent publications include Challenging the Narrative: Documentary Film as Participatory Practice in Conflict Situations (Anthem Press, 2023) and We Fight For This Land: Quilombola and Ka'apor Communities in Brazil (2024, 62 mins). See more at www.itstayswithyou.com and www.prisonsmemoryarchive.com
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In this essay, Henry Brown examines the controversial participation of anarchists in the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War (1936-9). Despite the universal association of anarchism with antimilitarism, the Spanish anarchists responded to the demands of antifascist war in a nuanced fashion, creating a distinctive military subculture based on solidarity, comradeship, and clandestine political agitation.
Henry Brown is a PhD candidate at the University of Kent, examining military culture and identity in the Popular Army of the Spanish Republic (1936-9). His most recent publications include ‘The Anarchist in Uniform: The Militarisation of Anarchist Culture during the Spanish Civil War’ and his contribution to the Special Issue ‘Iberian Anarchism in Twentieth-Century History’: ‘“¡Vivan las tribus!”: persecution, resistance and anarchist agency in the Popular Army.’
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In this essay, Alex Doyle examines how anarchists in late 19th and early 20th century Cuba grappled with thorny issues of the nation and nationalism in their pursuit of social revolution. Contrary to common assumptions about anarchism which posit that the movement wholly rejects and ignores the nation, the anarchists in Cuba, through their discourse and praxis, cultivated a critical engagement with the nation characterised by a fascinating mixture of compromise, support and rejection.
Alex Doyle is an independent researcher. He recently completed a Master's of Research at the University of Leeds with a focus on class, transnationalism and national identity within Cuban anarchism. His most recent publication is ‘Transnationalism, class and national identity in the Cuban labour movement (1898-1902)’.
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In this essay, Diogo Duarte proposes a different look at the history of the State, urban planning and social housing in Portugal, by bringing into the picture the often forgotten presence of a significant anarchist movement in the country. As he suggests, to fully understand some of the social and political processes that were underway in Portugal during the first decades of the 20th century, it is essential to consider the threat that anarchism posed to the economic and political elites.
Diogo Duarte is a researcher at the Instituto de História Contemporânea (Institute of Contemporary History) in NOVA University Lisbon. He has a PhD in contemporary history with a thesis about the history of anarchism in Portugal and in 2024 he published the book "O Anarquismo e a Arte de Governar, Portugal (1890-1930)" (Edições Fora de Jogo). Recently he has also published the articles "Anarchism, colonialism and the question of "race" in Portugal (c.1890-1930)", in the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, and "'Um grito de alarme contra a degenerescência da espécie': Homosexuality and Decadence in the Anarchosyndicalist A Batalha in the Early 1920s", in Portuguese Studies, both co-written with Richard Cleminson.
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This essay introduces a short series of podcasts emanating from last year's 'Iberian Anarchism in Twentieth Century History' special issue. Joshua Newmark highlights some of the parallels and linkages between the Spanish and Portuguese anarchist movements, while Sophie Turbutt explores the key themes emerging from the special issue and what they contribute to research on anarchist history.
Joshua Newmark is a fourth year PhD student in the School of History, University of Leeds, researching internationalism in the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement, 1910-1939. In 2023 he published an edited collection on British and Irish solidarity with the Spanish anti-fascist struggle.
Sophie Turbutt is a third year PhD student in the School of History, University of Leeds, researching gender and comradeship in the Spanish anarchist movement, 1923-1939. In 2022 she published a journal article on sexual revolution and the Spanish anarchist press.
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In this essay, David Christopher explores and unpacks the mutually anarchistic and apocalyptic propensities in the early films of David Cronenberg. Christopher positions Cronenberg's films as exemplary of an innovative new methodology of cinema analysis for films following Cronenberg's influence. For more on these topics, see Anarchist Studies 32.1.
Dr Christopher is a Lecturer in Popular Screen Cultures at the University of Leicester for the School of Arts, Media, and Communication.
David's most recent publications are:
Flexing Armageddon: Displacing Climate Change Anxiety through Soft Power Nationalist Interests in GuoFan’s The Wandering Earth, Brill - Youth and Globalization Journal: Cultural Production in Asia, Spring 2024. DOI - tba.
Horror and the Cube Films: An Unlikely Vehicle for the Negotiation of Nationalist-Cultural Ideologies, Mutual Images – On Politics of Visual Media, Issue 11 (2023-24): pp. 139-170. (Co-edited and with and Introduction by Dr. David Christopher and Dr. Marco Pellitteri, pp. 53- 59). https://www.mutualimages-journal.org/index.php/mi/issue/view/11/14.
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In this essay, Andrew Whitehead examines the two most lethal incidents linked to anarchism in London's history: the murder of three police officers during an attempted armed robbery at Houndsditch in December 1910 and the ensuing siege of Sidney Street in Stepney. He looks particularly at the links between the mainly Latvian perpetrators and three anarchist luminaries then living in exile in London, Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta and Rudolf Rocker.
Andrew Whitehead is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham and an associate editor of History Workshop Journal. His latest book A Devilish Kind of Courage: Anarchists, Aliens and the Siege of Sidney Street, was published by Reaktion Books in March 2024.
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In this essay, Jayne Malenfant and Hannah Brais unpack an anarchist approach to confronting housing precarity by bringing together existing anarchist scholarship while proposing housing interventions that support agency, anti-colonial work, and justice. They confront the inadequacy of existing housing interventions and propose an alternative vision that aligns with anarchist values of solidarity, agency, prefigurative politics, and harm reduction.
Jayne Malenfant is an Assistant Professorat McGill University in Tio'tia:ke/Montreal. Their work focuses on housing, homelessness, community-led research and anarchist education.
Hannah Brais is a doctoral candidate at McGill University in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. Her work focuses on improving practices and policies for people experiencing homelessness.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro.
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This essay examines the rise of 'direct action' as a key concept in anarchist and radical politics over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It traces the transnational arguments, texts and networks that made this possible.
Sean Scalmer is a Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. This essay is a greatly edited version of a recent article: 'Direct Action: Invention of a Transnational Concept', International Review of Social History, vol. 68, no. 3, December 2023, pp.357-87. (An open access version is here).The research and the essay forms part of a research project on 'Direct Action and Democracy: Utopia, Experience, Threat', funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung.
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In this essay, adapted from his recently published book, Sam C. Tenorio (he/they) reconsiders the Watts Rebellion of 1965 and its ruinous disruptions, like arson, theft, and vandalism, as a cataclysm that clears material and discursive ground and proffers its own questions of property. It argues that the cataclysmic vantage of the Watts rebellion overflows on a state narrative meant to misapprehend both the political subjectivity of Black people and their conditions of possibility.
Sam C. Tenorio is Assistant Professor in African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. He writes about carcerality and black radical practice as well as black trans and trans of color critique. His most recent publications are Jump: Black Anarchism and Antiblack Carcerality (NYU Press) and “White Carceral Geographies” (South Atlantic Quarterly).
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In this essay, Nolan Bennett traces through Alexander Berkman's 1912 Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist an unresolved tension between two approaches to the prison: advocacy for political prisoners and advocacy against the politics of prisons. Berkman's ambivalence between these approaches amid his memoirs and later activism signify the book's importance and point toward enduring tensions in contemporary prison politics.
Nolan Bennett is a political theorist and assistant professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Nolan's most recent publications are "The Ambivalence of Alexander Berkman's Anti-Prison Anarchism" and "George Jackson's Perfect Disorder."
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In this essay, Peterson Silva talks about metaphors for freedom among anarchists. He particularly discusses a metaphor concerning failure in complex systems, pointing out that anarchists relate freedom to the deep transformation of social patterns. A list of the references he cites in this episode is available here.
Peterson Silva is a writer, translator, and PhD student of Sociology and Political Science in Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil. Peterson Silva's most recent publications are Modelos anarquistas de legitimidade [Anarchist models of legitimacy] and A posição anarquista nos debates sobre privatização, burocracia e meritocracia [Anarchists on privatisation, bureaucracy, and meritocracy].
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In this essay, Chris Robé explores the origins of video activism from the ecology, women’s liberation, and anarchist movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He then traces the state’s increasing surveillance of video activism and recent debates regarding the value of such activism among participants of the Stop Cop City movement.
Chris Robé is a Professor of Film and Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies. He writes about media activism of all varieties and has recently published Abolishing Surveillance: Digital Media Activism and State Repression with PM Press. He occasionally writes film reviews for PopMatters. He is also vice-president for his faculty union, pushing back against the attacks against academic freedom while pursuing creating a quality and free public higher education for all.
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In this essay, Pranay Somayajula critically examines the anarchist movement’s relationship to anticolonial politics. Drawing on a rich history of anticolonial movements, from the Kurds in Rojava to the Zapatistas in Chiapas, who have sought national liberation and self-determination without being confined by the nation-state, he argues for an anarchist politics of anticolonial solidarity rooted in a radical conception of nationhood without nationalism.
Pranay Somayajula is an Indian-American writer, researcher, and cultural critic currently based in Washington, D.C. His writing has appeared in outlets including Jacobin, The Nation, and The Drift, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock. He can be found on Twitter at @p_somayajula.
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In this essay, Christopher Powell examines how sovereign statehood generates an economy of shame that fosters identification with the imagined sovereign. Achieving anarchy requires a shift in who is shamed and for what, shifting self-worth from ‘higher' ideals to horizontal solidarity.
Christopher Powell is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. His most recent publication is “Radical Complexity: Using Complex Systems Theory to Think About Social Transformation” in New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry.
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In this essay, Elena Pagani presents theorising and practices of freedom as interpersonal and intersubjective. She does this through the conceptions of agonistic self-creation and agonistic empathy in conversation with empirical findings from a militant research of radical worker co-operatives in Greece. Her presentation invites us to imagine and prefigure an anarchist utopia where the notion of power would be redundant (without 'archy') in the now, or otherwise, how we could potentially get rid of informal hierarchies.
Elena Pagani is an activist and currently a Lecturer in Organisation Behaviour at the University for the Creative Arts. Her doctoral thesis was Organising Equal Freedom: from antagonism to agonism.
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In this essay, Deric Shannon outlines the anarchist analysis and critique of capitalism. He also gives some potential explanations for capitalism's resilience.
Deric Shannon is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University's Oxford College. His most recent books are The State of State Theory: State Projects, Repression, and Multi-sites of Power and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Pedagogy and Place-Based Education: From the Abstract to the Quotidian.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group and the journal Anarchist Studies. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro.
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In this essay, Sonia Hernández describes the central role Mexican women played in the emergence of anarcho-syndicalist organizing during the early 20th century. She examines the emergence of transnational feminism influenced by anarchist ideas in the Gulf of Mexico region - such women's labor activism left an indelible mark on the greater history of the US-Mexican borderlands.
Sonia Hernández is a Professor of History at Texas A&M University. Her most recent publications are For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900-1938 (University of Illinois Press, 2021) and "Gendering Transnational State Violence: Intertwined Histories of Intrigue and Injustice along the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, 1900-1913," Journal of American History, Volume 110, Issue 2, September 2023: 258-281.
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In this essay, Benjamin Franks identifies the core principles that lead anarchists to reject participation in democratic elections. It then explores the occasions where anarchists have engaged in different forms of electoral engagement and showing the particular conditions that make some constitutional interventions compatible with anarchist principles.
Benjamin Franks is a Senior Lecturer in Social and Political Philosophy, School of Social and Environmental Sustainability, University of Glasgow. His most recent publications are: Anarchism, Postanarchism and Ethics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) and (2020) “Four models of anarchist engagements with constitutionalism”. Theory in Action, 13(1), pp. 32-69.
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In this essay, Carne explores the spiritual dimension of anarchism, which he once assumed was more a ‘political’ philosophy about how people make decisions and transact business. He concludes that there is indeed a vital spiritual element and moreover that anarchism centres love and human connection at its core.
Carne Ross is a writer. His most recent book is ‘The Leaderless Revolution: how ordinary people will take power and change politics in the 21st century’. His articles, films and other writing can be found at carneross.com.
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In this essay, William Marling asks why there seems to be so much rhetoric in/about anarchism. He digs for an answer in his recent book on Ammon Hennacy, finding an answer in the practice of "parrhesia," or speaking truth to power.
William Marling is Professor of American Literature and Film at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. His most recent books are Christian Anarchist: The Life of Ammon Hennacy and Gatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature.
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In this essay, Rhiannon Firth reads from an article published in DOPE Magazine issue 22, which is part 2 of a 2-part summary of her latest book, Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action, published by Pluto Press last Autumn. In it, she offers a response to the question: Do anarchist approaches to disaster relief have more to offer beyond state-friendly 'social capital', mopping up the failures of the austere neoliberal state? How do anarchists engaged in disaster relief stay radical, rather than just papering over the cracks in a failing neoliberal system?
Rhiannon Firth is Lecturer in Sociology of Education at IOE, UCL's faculty of Education and Society. Her most recent publication is Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action (Pluto 2022) and she is soon to publish the co-edited volume Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown: Entangled Futurities (Palgrave, 2024).
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In this essay, Gabriele Montalbano considers the Italian-speaking anarchists of the end of the nineteenth century and their involvement and legacy in trade union movements and strikes in Tunis during the first decade of the twentieth century. This essay demonstrates the connection between diasporas, anarchism, and labour movements, and the place of Tunis in the global radical network.
For the English version of the talk: 00.41 - 16:07
For the Italian version of the talk: 16.11 - 30.31
Gabriele Montalbano is Postdoctoral Researcher and Adjunct Professor in History of Colonial and Postcolonial Spaces and in History of Maghreb at the University of Bologna. His most recent publications are ‘Tunis in the Global Radical Web’ and Les Italiens de Tunisie.
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In this essay, Javier Sethness Castro presents a new, queer reading of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy's life and art. By referencing homoeroticism in Tolstoy's diaries and comparing the anarchist writer's libidinal and political desires with historical and literary examples of uprisings and revolts, Sethness highlights the liberatory potential of queer anarchism and sexual revolution.
Javier Sethness Castro is a primary-care provider, author, and translator. His most recent publications are Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography and Eros and Revolution: The Critical Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse.
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In this essay, Ryan Essex considers what anarchy could do for health and healthcare. Drawing on a number of historical and contemporary examples he argues that anarchist thinking and praxis is too often overlooked and has the potential to radically alter how we approach health.
Ryan Essex is a Research Fellow at the University of Greenwich. His most recent publications include explorations into the intersections of healthcare and resistance and anarchy and health.
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In this essay, Clara Vlessing looks at the cultural memory of Louise Michel (1830-1905). The essay compares Michel’s domestic remembrance with her international afterlives to explore how an anarchist individual is adopted, appropriated or taken as the nominal leader for many different causes.
Clara Vlessing is a lecturer in comparative literature at Utrecht University. Her most recent article “Campaigns to Remember: Writing in the Afterlives of Sylvia Pankhurst” appears in Nineteenth Century Gender Studies. Her chapter "Scarcity in Visual Memory: Creating a Mural of Sylvia Pankhurst” is included in the newly published edited collection The Visual Memory of Protest (Amsterdam University Press).
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In this essay, Robert Leach discusses the gradual awakening of British radicals after the sleepy 1950s, especially some of the festivals that they mounted.
Robert Leach is former lecturer at Edinburgh and Birmingham Universities, freelance theatre director, and writer. His most recent works include the two-volume Illustrated History of British Theatre and Performance, the biography Sergei Tretyakov: A Revolutionary Writer in Stalin’s Russia, and the poetry collection Unraveled Knots.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Chi Shing LEE discusses the relationship between anarchism and nationalism. He introduces the anarchist thought of Ng Chung-yin, an important anarchist figure in Hong Kong during the early 1970s, and elaborates how his anarchism exposes the contingency of the concept of national origin.
Chi Shing LEE is a PhD Candidate at Chinese University of Hong Kong. His most recent publication is "The utopian homeland: new left internationalism, diasporic Chinese nationalism, and anarchism in Hong Kong, 1969–1973.” The Global Sixties: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16 (1): 1-21.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, adapted from his recently published book, Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher, DaN McKee reflects on his personal experiences with the inner conflict of being an anarchist teacher working within a school-system built on discipline and control. He looks back on his misguided attempts to subvert such systems through strict adherence to their absurd rules, and the more successful moments of subversion that came when he restored humanity and horizontalism to his classroom.
DaN McKee received his PhD from Cardiff University in 2009 and is currently Head of Theology and Philosophy at a secondary school in the West Midlands. Alongside Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher: A Memoir of Struggle, Grief, Philosophy and Hope (out now on Earth Island), his recent publications include Authentic Democracy: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism and ‘Character Flaws – An Anarchist Critique of Character Education in England’s Secondary Schools’ in Anarchist Studies. His forthcoming paper, ‘An Error of Punishment Defences in the Context of Schooling’ will be published in the Journal of Philosophy of Education soon. DaN also produces music under the name of Strangely Shaped By Fathers and runs the websites www.philosophyunleashed.com and www.everythingdanmckee.com
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Pablo Angel Lugo analyzes the involvement of anarchists in assisting illegal immigrants through the production of forged documents, facilitating their lawful settlement in the UK between 2015 and 2019.
Pablo Angel Lugo is the sole judicial expert in Public Art in Mexico. His recent publications include "Theft, Plagiarism, and Destruction: Violated Creators and Artists" and "Practices of Disobedience and Clandestine Citizenship: A Proposal Towards an Anarchist Theory of Art." The latter examines a phenomenon that occurred in the UK between 2015 and 2019, where a group of anarchists assisted illegal immigrants by producing forged documents that facilitated their legal settlement in the country.
00.38 -14:43 English 14:48 – 28:42 Spanish
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In this essay, Richard White encourages us to think about why anarchists should embrace the plight of farmed animals, insects and more than human worlds. If anarchism is a understood as a ‘purity of rebellion’ then how might we reflect this more fully in own praxis?
Richard is a Reader in Human Geography at Sheffield Hallam University. Richard’s most recent publications are ‘Critical Animal Studies and Activism’ (2023) and ‘Vegan Geographies: Spaces beyond violences, ethics beyond speciesism’ (2022). Details of these and other publications can be found here.
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In this essay, Jesse Cohn reconsiders the European anarchist tradition's place in modernity. How might our commitments to modernity's foundations compromise our alliances with peoples whom modernity has marginalized? Can we disentangle anarchism from those assumptions?
Jesse Cohn teaches English at Purdue Northwest in Indiana. His most recent publications are his translation of Daniel Colson's A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze and (with Eugene Kuchinov) a translation of Abba Gordin's revolutionary fable, Why? Or, How a Peasant Got Into the Land of Anarchy.
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In this essay, Spencer Beswick argues that anarchist infrastructure, values, and tactics played a key role in the development of militant antifascism in the late twentieth century United States. He explores how anarchists in Anti-Racist Action (1987-2013) and Love and Rage (1989-1998) confronted fascists in the streets while also organizing radical movements that sought to address the root causes of the broader social crisis.
Spencer Beswick is a PhD Candidate at Cornell University writing a dissertation titled “Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century.” His most recent publications are “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s)” in Anarchist Studies and “Defending Democracy Through Elections Won’t Be Enough to Stop Fascism” in Truthout.
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In this essay, Chris Rossdale reflects on the status of rebellion as a political concept. While Extinction Rebellion have been the most prominent advocates of rebellion in recent times, the essay also looks at right-wing mobilisations in order to situate rebellion as entangled with liberal citizenship and bourgeois freedom. Nevertheless the essay closes by arguing that rebellion is essential to anarchist politics, turning to Black Anarchism for a more radical conception.
Chris is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol. They write about social movements, rebellious politics, and militarism and state violence. Their recent publications have engaged with the Black Panther Party as radical theorists of racial militarism and security, and explored the continuities between the arms trade and police power. They tweet at @crossdale.
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Saidiya Hartman asks, “Is love a synonym for abolition?”. bell hooks writes that “true love requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change”. This essay proposes that anarchism is a practice of honest, dedicated and expansive love that opens our lives and our political societies to the possibility of transformation.
Charlotte Lowell is an undergraduate student at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, where they investigate ‘how things change’ in the context of love, physics and anarchism.
This episode of ‘Anarchist Essays’ was supported by a grant from The Lipman-Miliband Trust.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Nora Ziegler critically explores “radical hospitality” as a diversity of tactics that co-construct relationships of mutual aid across differences of power. Her reflections are based on her experience of living and working in the London Catholic Worker’s house of hospitality for migrants with no recourse to public funds.
Nora Ziegler is an independent researcher and writer, active in mutual aid and union organising. Her most recent publications are “Power Relations in Grassroots Groups: An Anarchist Dialectics” and “Herd Mentality, Deathbed Radicalism and Other Things On My Not-To-Do List”.
This episode of ‘Anarchist Essays’ was supported by a grant from The Lipman-Miliband Trust.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Kiara Mohamed Amin and Priya Sharma explore the liberatory potential of psychedelic trips, arguing that such practices possess the potential to humanise parts of the self that have been dehumanised by capitalist systems of living.
Kiara Mohamed Amin is a trans, Somali multidisciplinary artist based in Toxteth, Liverpool. His work focuses on what it means to live at the intersections of marginalisation and still choose joy, healing and community as an act of radical living and dreaming. He uses different mediums to explore intergenerational trauma and looks to see where we are in eternity through astrology, somatic movements and divination.
Priya Sharma is a Lecturer in Arts Management, Policy and Practice at the University of Manchester. Her research explores articulations of feminist and queer British South Asian identity on social media platforms. Her research interests include radical politics, diaspora experiences and the social impact of new media technologies.
The authors' first co-authored publication 'Trip where you stand: Towards psychedelic liberation' will be published in July 2023 by Feminist Review.
This episode of ‘Anarchist Essays’ was supported by a grant from The Lipman-Miliband Trust.
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In this podcast, Dai and Steve discuss the issues that deaf people and deaf communities face in capitalist society and the ways in which deaf people have traditionally framed their engagement and resistance to these issues. We discuss the issues that anarchists need to consider when reflecting on how anarchist spaces can be more accessible to deaf people.
For a video of this talk in British Sign Language, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9_Z6nkFUqwFor a text version, see the Anarchist Studies blog: https://anarchiststudies.noblogs.org/post/2023/01/16/anarchism-and-deaf-people/
Dai O’Brien is an Associate Professor in BSL and Deaf Studies in York St John University. His most recent papers are M Chua, Maartje De Meulder, Leah Geer, Jonathan Henner, Lynn Hou, Okan Kubus, Dai O’Brien and Octavian Robinson (2022) ‘1001 Small Victories: Deaf Academics and Imposter Syndrome’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education, and ‘Theorising the deaf body: using Lefebvre and Bourdieu to understand deaf spatial experience’ in Cultural Geographies.
Steve is a Lecturer in BSL and Deaf Studies at York St John University. His most recent papers are: Emery, S. D., & Iyer, S. (2021) ‘Deaf migration through an intersectionality lens’. Disability & Society, 1-22; and Emery, S.D. (2016) 'Deaf Rights Activism, Global Protest', in G. Gertz & P. Boudreault (eds) The SAGE Deaf Studies Encyclopedia, SAGE: C.A., 266-271. He has written a joint chapter and contributed to the others in the forthcoming publication: Kusters, A., Moriarty Harrelson, E., Le-Marie, A., Iyer, S., Emery, S. D. (2023) International Deaf Mobilities. Gallaudet University Press: Washington D.C.
This episode of ‘Anarchist Essays’ was supported by a grant from The Lipman-Miliband Trust.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Kim Kelly discusses hers opinions and experiences with the past and present of leftist gun ownership and armed self-defense.
Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist, and author of FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American Labor.
This episode of ‘Anarchist Essays’ was supported by a grant from The Lipman-Miliband Trust.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essaysis brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Gloria Truly Estrelita provides an overview of the history of anarchism in Indonesia. Co-authored with Jim Donaghey, Sarah Andrieu and Gabriel Facal, this essay discusses the early roots of anarchist movements in the archipelago in the context of anti-colonialism and nationalism in the late 1800s and early 1900s; details the abolition of leftist movements, including anarchism, in the 1960s; traces the re-emergence of anarchism as part of protest and counter-cultural movements in the 1990s; highlights the shifting forms of state repression in the 2010s; and points to the importance of anarchist critique for the contemporary Indonesian context.
Gloria Truly Estrelita is a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Civilisation at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France. Member of Centre Asie du Sud-Est (CASE), she is also one of the founders of AlterSEA, Observatory of Political Alternatives in Southeast Asia (GT Estrelita's most recent publication is an article on GIS Asie: 'Can progressive thinking exist in contemporary Indonesia?'
For the English version: 0:46 – 19:03For the Bahasa Indonesian version: 19:09-37:32
This episode of ‘Anarchist Essays’ was supported by a grant from The Lipman-Miliband Trust.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Jim Donaghey reads the introductory chapter to the newly published book Smash The System! Punk Anarchism as a Culture of Resistance, edited by Jim Donaghey, Will Boisseau and Caroline Kaltefleiter, and published by Active Distribution in December 2022. The volume includes 18 chapters, offering a snapshot of anarchist punk as a culture of resistance across the globe. In these diverse and internationalist contexts we witness struggles against racism and colonialism in South Africa, resistance to neo-liberalism and state oppression in Latin America, resistance to police brutality and capitalism in Western, Central and Southeast Europe, struggles for equality and against patriarchy in the US, and anarchist resistance against injustice and authoritarianism in Asia.
Smash The System! is the first volume in the Anarchism and Punk Book Project series.
A written version of this essay is available on the Anarchist Studies blog.
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In this essay, Maia Ramnath discusses the concept of the racial capitalocene as a framework for linking anticolonialism and climate justice. As part of a critical dialogue across time with earlier movements, in this case the Progressive Writers Association in South Asia, this framework offers a global context in which to place specific liberation struggles that's appropriate to the present day, as anti-fascism and Afro-Asian solidarity did for the PWA at key periods in the 20th century.
Maia Ramnath is an independent scholar based in New York City. Occupations include writing, research, teaching, tour guiding, organizing, performing and choreographing (dance and aerial). Maia’s most recent publications are Art for Life: Conversations with the Progressive Writers Moment: on Pens, Swords, and Internationalism, from Antifascism to Afro-Asian Solidarity; "The Other Aryan Supremacy," in the collection No Pasaran!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis, and "Reawakening Asia Jaag Utha," in the forthcoming Lateral forum "Toward Third Worlding."
This episode of ‘Anarchist Essays’ was supported by a grant from The Lipman-Miliband Trust.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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This special issue of the Anarchist Essays podcast features a discussion between JoNina Ervin, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, and William C. Anderson. It originally appeared on the Black Autonomy Podcast.
In October 2021, Pluto published the definitive edition of Anarchism and the Black Revolution by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin. The book first connected Black radical thought to anarchist theory in 1979, and now amidst a rising tide of Black political organizing, this foundational classic has been republished with a wealth of original material, including forewords by William C. Anderson and Joy James.
This episode of Black Autonomy Podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Pluto Press podcast 'Radicals in Conversation,' in which JoNina Ervin hosts a discussion between Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin and William C. Anderson about Black anarchism across the generations.
Ervin and Anderson discuss the reasons for the continued relevance and increasing popularity of Black anarchism today, what an ‘ungovernable’ radical movement might look like, and the contradictions inherent to single-issue and state-orientated political projects from the left. They also discuss Black nationalism, and put Anderson's book The Nation on No Map in conversation with Anarchism and the Black Revolution.
This episode of ‘Anarchist Essays’ was supported by a grant from The Lipman-Miliband Trust
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Hannah Kass discusses how the state, capitalism, and property are interconnected systems, working together to produce peasant dispossession and hunger. To challenge these systems and their social relationships, she proposes food anarchy: a new pathway for the food sovereignty movement to wield in their struggle to challenge the current food regime.
Hannah Kass is a joint Ph.D student in the Department of Geography and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hannah's most recent publication is the journal article from which this essay is adapted: ‘Food anarchy and the State monopoly on hunger’, published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.
Kass, H. 2022. Food anarchy and the State monopoly on hunger. The Journal of Peasant Studies. DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2022.2101099
This episode of ‘Anarchist Essays’ was supported by a grant from The Lipman-Miliband Trust.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Jennifer Cole discusses how Peter Kropotkin's early writings on mutualism sit alongside Charles Darwin's writings on human evolution and underpin current interests within evolutionary anthropology on how human psychology, altruism and morality developed. Kropotkin is largely ignored within biological and evolutionary academia, however, even though his approach to human development offer a more cooperative and caring blueprint for society.
Jennifer Cole, Lecturer in Global and Planetary Health at Royal Holloway University of London’s most recent publications include ‘Solidarity not charity’ and Manifesto for Mutual Aid.
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In this essay, Laura Galián delves into the history of anarchism in the south of the Mediterranean from a historical and historiographical perspective by reviewing the anti-authoritarian geographies of the southern shore of the Mediterranean and reassessing the postcolonial status of these emancipatory projects.
For the English version: 0.40-14:10 For the Spanish version: 14.19-29.12
Laura Galián is an Assistant Professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). Laura has recently published the book Colonialism, Transnationalism and Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean (2020).
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In this essay, Sophie Scott-Brown explores the life and times of anarchist autobiography. From Proudhon to Kropotkin, Goldman to Read, many anarchists have written their life stories and provided generations of readers an intimate glimpse of the radical life, but what else motivates this sort of memory making? Moreover, how has it changed over time and what can it tell us about the relationship between anarchist ideas and anarchist identities?
Sophie Scott-Brown is a lecturer in Philosophy at UEA. Her latest book is Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy (Routledge, 2022).
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In this essay, Nathaniel Andrews explores both the role of children within anarchist activism, and anarchist understandings of childhood, focusing specifically on the Argentinian city of Rosario, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Nathaniel Andrews is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute. His most recent publication is a co-authored article with Professor Richard Cleminson, titled ‘Introduction: New Directions in Spanish Anarchist Studies’, which forms part of a co-edited special issue of the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies . He is currently working on his first monograph: a study of prefigurative politics in the Spanish and Argentinian anarchist movements, between 1890 and 1930.
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In this essay, Sarah Gelbard reflects on the messy relationship between punk, anarchy, and anarchism and ways it can be conceived of as identity, politics, scene, performance, and/or practice. For punks in academia and academics studying punk, how do we position ourselves in relation to the work, to power, and with our comrades?
Sarah Gelbard is a Ph.D. candidate in urban planning at McGill University. Her research speaks to the ways marginalized and alternative urban groups negotiate with, subvert, and refuse the formal city-building project of mainstream placemaking and planning. She is a co-organizer of the Spaces of Struggle Radical Planning conferences and research group. Sarah is also the lead singer and bassist in the punk band Bad Missionary.
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In this essay, Frankie Hines argues that an anarchist literary theory requires engaging with the anarchist critique of representation and considering possibilities for non-representational literary modes. Rather than looking for representations of reality, he argues anarchist literature should instead be read for the political effects it produces; that is, as a form of direct action.
Frankie Hines received his PhD in English Literature from the University of Westminster in 2021, submitting a thesis entitled Evading Representation: The Literature of Contemporary U.S. Anarchism. He is the author of "‘A movement that renovates people, as well as buildings’: squatting and neodomestic space in Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood”, published in Textual Practice in 2021.
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In this essay, Dorian Wallace discusses the use of music as a source of emancipatory inspiration, revolutionary practice, and transformational communal healing. He addresses the interconnections between music therapy, political music, and liberation psychology as the first step toward deeper exploration and discourse.
Dorian Wallace is a composer, pianist, music therapist, and educator renowned for his stylistic versatility, improvisational skill, relentless confrontation against unjust social struggles, and the exploration of the complex and nuanced philosophical nature of transformation. In addition to a successful solo career, he regularly collaborates with artists such as Bonita Oliver, John Sanborn, Paul Pinto, Pamela Z, Charlotte Mundy, Frank London, and Nicholas Finch.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Janet Biehl discusses her new graphic memoir, Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS, an exploration of the Rojava revolution as of the spring of 2019. She gives an overview of the revolution and the many and varied people she interviewed, explains how she came to write and illustrate the book, and offers her thoughts on the meaning of this remarkable experiment.
Janet Biehl is an independent editor, author, artist, and translator. Her previous publications are (as author) Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin (Oxford University Press, 2015), and (as translator) Michel Knapp et al., Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women's Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan (Pluto, 2016). The independent film that Janet refers to, called Road to Rojava, will appear in 2023.
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns).
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In this essay, Elizabeth Vasileva discusses what kind of ethics are compatible with anarchist principles and makes the case for joyful, relational ways of being together.
Elizabeth Vasileva is a lecturer at the Free University of Brighton. Her PhD is available to download from your usual choice of legal-grey-zone book repository.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, click here. You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Mark Bray discusses propaganda by the deed and the roles of human rights and 'terrorism' in the anarchist-led transnational campaigns against the "revival of the Inquisition" in Spain at the turn of the twentieth century.
Mark Bray is a historian of human rights, political violence, and radicalism in Modern Europe at Rutgers University. Bray's most recent publications are The Anarchist Inquisition: Assassins, Activists, and Martyrs in Spain and France (Cornell UP) and Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House).
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In this essay, Alice Béja discusses how Emma Goldman and other anarchists "Americanized" anarchism in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, using national tropes and references to counter government repression while maintaining their internationalist beliefs. The essay is based on the article "Dreaming (Un)American Dreams"; Anarchists and the Struggle to Define Americanism" (Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 13, Number 1, Spring 2019).
Alice Béja is Associate Professor in American Studies at the Lille Institute of Political Science (Sciences Po Lille) and a researcher at CERAPS-CNRS. Her most recent publications are "Left-Wing Radicalism in the United States: A Foreign Creed?" (Transatlantica journal of American studies) and "Emma Goldman" (in J-N Ducange, R. Keucheyan, S. Roza, eds, Histoire globale des socialismes, XIXè-XXIè siècles, Presses Universitaires de France, 2021).
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In this essay, Chantelle Gray talks about algorithmic governance - a new art of governing and government that treats individuals as data and the social world as a problem of big data sets - and the effects this is having on politics. Drawing on Tiqqun's The Cybernetic Hypothesis (2020), she thinks about anarchist responses to one of the most pressing issues of our time, namely how to prefigure social consistency in such a way that it produces conditions counter to algorithmic governmentality.
Chantelle Gray is an Associate Professor in Philosophy. Her most recent publications are "Fabulation in a Time of Algorithmic Ecology: Making the Future Possible" (with Aragorn Eloff) in Technology, Urban Space and the Networked Community (edited by Saswat Samay Das and Ananya Roy Pratihar) and Anarchism after Deleuze and Guattari: Fabulating Futures.
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In this essay, Michael A. Denner explores anarchism’s aesthetic attitude towards reality: What does anarchism "look like" in art? Using examples drawn from texts by two Russian thinkers, Leo Tolstoy and Viktor Shklovsky, Denner tries to answer the question: Why is art so important to the politics of anarchism?
Michael Denner is devourer of universes at Stetson University, DeLand Florida (that's the USA... not far from Disney!) His most recent research is in film studies (What do cowboys eat?). He makes boots and raises bees.
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In this essay, Anthony Ince explores how a state-centric understanding of the world, how it fits together, and our place in it, limits both popular and academic ideas of what forms of societal organisation are possible or desirable. Taking the geographical concept of territory as an example, the essay considers what could be done to reimagine the space of our world, to undermine the hegemonic grip of the state and imagine alternatives that operate against and beyond it.
Anthony Ince is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Cardiff University. His research cuts across geography and political/social theory through an interest in how grassroots forms of collective power interact with large-scale social processes, including recent publications on anti-fascist spatial strategy and neighbourhood-scale legacies of urban riots.
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In this essay, Eric Laursen discusses the roots of the climate change crisis in the forces driving the modern State. He lays out an analysis that locates overreliance on fossil fuels in the State's partnership with capital and their mutual focus on promoting rapid economic growth at any cost.
Eric Laursen is an independent scholar, journalist, and longtime anarchist activist, based in Massachusetts. He is the author, most recently, of The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the State (AK Press, 2021), and The Duty to Stand Aside: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Wartime Quarrel of George Orwell and Alex Comfort (AK Press, 2018).
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In this essay, Jeff Ferrell discusses his lifelong practice of ‘dumpster diving’ (trash picking, skip diving) as a form of anarchist direct action. He argues that dumpster diving constitutes a direct intervention into consumer waste, environmental harm, and economic inequality, while also helping to shape networks of anarchist mutual aid.
Jeff Ferrell is a retired professor of criminology and sociology. His latest books are Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge, published by University of California Press, and the forthcoming Last Picture, a collection of dumpster dived photographs, published by Atopia Projects.
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In this essay, Hayyim Rothman discusses religious Jewish anarchism. Beginning with a survey of its historical and some of its theological foundations, he proceeds to highlight central themes in the work of one of its proponents, Rabba Avraham Heyn (1878-1957).
Hayyim Rothman is an independent scholar of modern Jewish thought; his most recent publications include No Masters but God: Portraits of Anarcho-Judaism, and Knesset Yisrael ve-Milhamot ha-Goyim.
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In this essay, Adam Barker discusses recurrent problems around non-Indigenous anarchists involved in land reclamation actions, along with Audra, a Kanonsionni'on:we (Ga-noon-soon-knee-on-way) resident of the Six Nations of the Grand River, and Delee, a Wet’suwet’en activist who has been involved in ongoing struggles in several communities. Audra and Delee's experiences and encounters with anarchists seeking to work in solidarity with Indigenous land reclamation struggles reveal patterns of patriarchal aggressions, disruptions of community relationships and internal dynamics, and poor reputation among Indigenous communities, but with suggestions for how some groups have done better solidarity work that can inform anarchist activists.
Adam Barker is a Research Assistant in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield. Adam's most recent publication is Making and Breaking Settler Space: Five Centuries of Colonization in North America, with UBC Press.
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In this essay, Iwona Janicka talks about one of the possible ways to understand contemporary anarchism in practice, that is, through the concept of ‘solidarity with singularity’ in a mimetic framework. This philosophical approach is able to account for the anarchist concerns not only with humans in need of solidarity but also with the nonhumans (plants, animals, the environment).
Iwona Janicka is Assistant Professor and EU Maria Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Fellow at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Denmark. She is the author of Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism. Solidarity, Mimesis and Radical Social Change (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). Currently she is working on the question of world-building in contemporary continental philosophy.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Laney Lenox discusses working as an anarchist anthropologist and the practical implications of designing methodological tools to reflect this political ethos. Through prioritizing process over outcomes, Lenox describes how research methods become political action.
Laney Lenox, PhD Researcher in School of Applied Policy and Social Sciences, Ulster University, Northern Ireland. Lenox´s most recent publications are "Everyday Anarchism: Temporal Impermanence and Liberation in Everyday Action" and "Slow Journalism."
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Vittorio Frigerio explores the often-fraught relationship between anarchism and the literary milieu in France, starting with a discussion of Proudhon’s opinions on literature and the place given to serialized novels in his newspapers, and presenting some of the many publications where writers and militants crossed paths, up until the Second World War.
Vittorio Frigerio is Emeritus Professor of French at Dalhousie University (Halifax, N.S., Canada). He is the author of the recent book Nous nous reverrons aux barricades. Les feuilletons des journaux de Proudhon (1848-1850) (Grenoble : UGA, 2021), as well as of several others on anarchism and literary creation, including La littérature de l’anarchisme. Anarchistes de lettres et lettrés face à l’anarchie (Grenoble : ELLUG, 2014). Click here for more information on his activities. Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Hamish Kallin muses on the links between Henri Lefebvre’s idea of a right to the city and the politics of anarchism.
Hamish Kallin is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. Kallin’s latest publications are on debt and gentrification and the rent gap. He is co-editor (with Giovanna Gioli, Bath Spa University) of Thinking as Anarchists: Selected Writings from Volontà from Edinburgh University Press, releasing in early 2022.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Jim Yeoman explores the intersection of anarchism and cycling, through the case study of Amsterdam's Provo movement of the mid-1960s. Yeoman focuses on the portrayal of the group's White Bicycle Plan in the British magazine Anarchy, revealing conflicted attitudes to this eclectic example of direct action, with resonances in leftist attitudes to groups such as Critical Mass and Extinction Rebellion.
Jim Yeoman is an independent researcher, whose previous research has concentrated on the anarchist movement in Spain. His recent publications include his book Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain (Routledge, 2019; soon to be released as a paperback with AK Press), and his introduction and annotation to Slava Faybysh's translation of Leopoldo Bonafulla, The July Revolution: Barcelona 1909 (AK Press, 2021). With Danny Evans, Jim co-hosts the radical history podcast ABC With Danny and Jim.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, John-Erik Hansson examines how and why the 18th-century philosopher William Godwin has been portrayed – positively and negatively – as an anarchist by writers in the 20th century. In so doing, it sheds light on the ideological dynamics and possibilities implicit in the formation and circulation of an anarchist theoretical canon.
John-Erik Hansson is Lecturer in British History at the University of Paris. He recently authored two essays on Godwin’s children’s literature, ‘Through the Looking-Glasses: Godwin’s Biographies for Children’ (2021) and ‘William Godwin, Romantic-Era Historiography and the Political Cultures of Infancy’ (2020), in edited volumes. He is also co-editor of the Ideology, Theory, Practice blog.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Emma Brown Dewhurst discusses the relevance and importance of anarchist theory for reorientating Christian ethics, especially in relation to the theology of St Maximus the Confessor. Love as alleviating suffering, and vice as greed are discussed, along with some reflections on how churches should have more in common with anarchist interests than the oppressive states they have traditionally supported.
Emma Brown Dewhurst is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, specialising in Greek Patristic and Byzantine Theology and its relevance for contemporary ethics. Their most recent publications are "The Absence of Sex and Gender in Early Byzantine Theology" and "On the Soul and the Cyberpunk Future: St Macrina, St Gregory of Nyssa and Contemporary Mind/Body Dualism", and on the topic of anarchism and theology: "To Each According to their Needs: Anarchist Praxis as a Resource for Byzantine Theological Ethics". Their twitter handle is @BrownDewhurst and they can also be reached through their personal website.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Ruth Kinna discusses Peter Kropotkin's defence of communism. Exploring his idea of 'well-being for all' she argues that libertarian communism entails re-thinking economic principles and tailoring productive activity to mutual aid.
Ruth Kinna is a founder member of the Anarchism Research Group. She has taught a variety of courses in political theory and the history of ideas, including anarchism, at Loughborough University since 1992.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Jon Bigger sets out the case for an anarchist ‘exploration’ of the BBC TV drama Doctor Who.
Jon tutors in A-Level Government and Politics in the UK, regularly contributes to anarchist newspaper Freedom and can be found on twitter @DrJonBigger or at his website https://jonbigger.uk/
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, about the islands of southern Vanuatu, which presents an alternative to the traditional Western Civilisation narrative, James Flexner explores the ways that a 5,000 year history of domestication, island colonisation, and agricultural practices contributed to the anti-hierarchical nature of Island Melanesian societies. Chiefly status in southern Vanuatu derived from mass gifting of agricultural surpluses during competitive feasting events, which limited possibilities for the establishment of permanent hierarchies.
James Flexner is senior lecturer in historical archaeology at the University of Sydney. He is a member of the Black Trowel Collective group of anarchist archaeologists. His books include Archaeologies of Island Melanesia (co-edited with Mathieu Leclerc, and Community-Led Research: Walking New Pathways Together (co-edited with Victoria Rawlings and Lynette Riley), which are both available as a free download/Open Access.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Sky Croeser reflects on her experience attempting to make anarchist interventions into university teaching, including teaching online. She suggests some ways in which university teachers might work to undermine hierarchies, rethink assessment, encourage collaboration, and help students to imagine radical change.
Sky Croeser lives and works on Noongar Boodja, and is Senior Lecturer in Internet Studies at Curtin University. Sky’s research focuses on understanding how people use and change the technologies of everyday life. You can find out more about her research and teaching at skycroeser.net
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/. You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Lauren Golder looks at gendered interpretations of free love and sex radicalism through the life of American anarchist-feminist Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912). During the Gilded Age, anarchist men often interpreted free love as a path to personal fulfillment and sexual liberation, while anarchist women saw it as a way to achieve reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy. De Cleyre believed that anarchist free love was women's best hope for freedom from patriarchal oppression, a position which was reinforced by her experience of unwanted pregnancy and encounters with misogyny both within and outside of the anarchist movement.
Lauren Golder teaches History and Gender Studies at Santa Monica College and Victor Valley College in California. Her research explores the intersections of American anarchism, gender, and intimate life, and she is working on a book tentatively titled Intimate Experiments: Free Love, Domesticity, and Feminism in the American Anarchist Movement, 1880-1920. For more information, see https://laurengolder.com/
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Alexander Aston investigates the relationship between urban ecology, social cognition and the emergence of the Paris Commune of 1871. He considers how an anti-cartesian process-anarchism might inform strategies for social transformation by examining self-organising dynamics of people, artefacts, and institutions during the Commune.
Alexander lectures on Anthropology and Archaeology at Keble College, Oxford. His research explores how material culture shapes the evolution and development of human social cognition. His most recent publications are, How the Cycladic Islanders Found Their Marbles: Material Engagement, Social Cognition and the Emergence of Keros and Metaplasticity and the boundaries of social cognition: exploring scalar transformations in social interaction and intersubjectivity.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Anders Sandström explores the history of accounting and argues for the need for accounting and bookkeeping also in a future anarchist economy without private capital owners.
Anders Sandström is a trained accountant with a degree from Uppsala University and the author of Anarchist Accounting (Routledge 2020).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Deaglán Ó Donghaile discusses Oscar Wilde’s interest in and support for anarchism. Anarchism influenced Wilde’s literary writings enormously, yet he is still regarded by many readers as an apolitical writer. Drawing on research carried out for his next book, Revolutionary Wilde, Deaglán contextualises these works by relating them to Wilde’s openly professed radical beliefs, as expressed in his public lectures and now-forgotten newspaper writings.
Deaglán Ó Donghaile is a British Academy Research Fellow based at Liverpool John Moores University. His latest book is Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Craig Clark explores the incompatibility of publishing that hopes to shape events and the publishing industry – and some anarchised alternatives.
Craig Clark is a member of the Dog Section Press workers’ cooperative and an editor of DOPE Magazine. This essay draws on his experience of several years of involvement in various attempts to spread propaganda, with varying degrees of success.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Jack Saunders explores our complex relationship with the NHS, its staff and its history.
Jack Saunders is Lecturer in modern British history at University College London. He is author of Assembling Cultures: Workplace Activism, Labour Militancy and Cultural Change in Britain's Car Factories, 1945-82 (2020) and has published widely on the history of work in post-war Britain. This essay draws on his research for the People's History of the NHS project, some of which will published in the forthcoming edited volume by Jenny Crane and Jane Hand, Posters, Placards and Prescriptions: Cultural Histories of the NHS.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Dani Spinosa reads the contemporary campus as a non-place for the precarious labourer. She considers the role of labour relations and the remote teaching of the pandemic to consider how and where the precariat can work against this dislocation.
Dani Spinosa is adjunct faculty at three different institutions in southern Ontario, Canada. She is the Managing Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, a Fellow of the Electronic Literature Organization, and a co-founding editor of the feminist micropress Gap Riot. She is the author of Anarchists in the Academy (U of Alberta P, 2018) and OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible Publishing, 2020). Her recent work considers feminist and anarchist themes in contemporary avant-garde and visual poetry, including studies of revisionist mythmaking and materialities of digital literary texts.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Marcus Collins considers what the Beatles thought about anarchists and what anarchists thought about the Beatles in sixties Britain. He identifies curiosity and ambivalence on both sides, as anarchists sought to contend with the strange phenomena of Beatlemania, the counterculture and pop stars engaged in political campaigns.
Marcus Collins is Senior Lecturer in Cultural History at Loughborough University. He is author of The Beatles and Sixties Britain (2020), Modern Love (2003), co-author of Why Study History? (2020) and editor of The Permissive Society and Its Enemies (2007). He is currently writing the second volume of his study of the Beatles (The Beatles’ World) and a short history of British documentaries about lesbians and gay men (Arrested Development: Broadcasting and Homosexuality from Wolfenden to AIDS) as well as embarking on a collaborative project on attitudinal change in the global sixties.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Geoffrey Swain looks at the impact of the Brest Litovsk Treaty (3 March 1918) on the fragile relationship between the Russian Anarchists and the Bolsheviks. The Russian Anarchists had welcomed Russia’s First Revolution of 1917, when the Tsar was overthrown; they were prepared to work with the Bolsheviks during the Second Revolution, the October insurrection which brought Kerensky’s Provisional Government to an end; however, they reserved the right to start a Third Revolution when the statism inherent in Bolshevik thinking became a threat to worker self-government. That moment came with Lenin’s decision to sign the Treaty of Brest Litovsk.
Geoffrey Swain is Professor Emeritus of the University of Glasgow and spent his career writing on the history of Russia and Eastern Europe. Major publications include The Origins of the Russian Civil War (1996) and Trotsky (2006), and a second edition of his Short History of the Russian Revolution will be published by Bloomsbury later this year. For more information see University of Glasgow - Schools - School of Social & Political Sciences - Our Staff - Prof Geoffrey R Swain.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Tom Goyens takes a look at anarchist possibilities in the face of transnational militarism and fascism during the 1920s and 1930s through the largely forgotten figure of Frederico Kniestedt, a German-born anarchist and labour activist in Brazil who set out to fight the Kaiser and ended up fighting Hitlerism through peaceful direct action and the printed word.
Tom Goyens is an Associate Professor of History at Salisbury University in Maryland, USA. His research focuses on immigrant anarchism in the United States. He is the author of Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914 (2007) and editor of Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab's Saloon to Occupy Wall Street (2017). He is currently writing a new biography of Johann Most. For more information see https://txgoyens.wixsite.com/tomgoyens
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In this essay, Catherine Oliver takes a look at the world beyond the human through a critical lens of precarity in Britain, exploring how humans’ lives with other species have been destroyed, and the consequences of this for the flourishing of more-than-human communities.
Catherine Oliver is a postdoctoral researcher, currently working with rehomed commercial ex-laying hens in London as part of the ERC-funded project Urban Ecologies at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. She completed her PhD on historical and contemporary veganism in Britain in 2020. She can be found on twitter at @katiecmoliver and more on her work is available here: https://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/people/oliver/.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Constance Bantman argues that looking at periods of defeat and isolation in militant careers is important, and explores these perspectives through the example of the French anarchist Jean Grave (1854-1939).
Constance Bantman is a Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Surrey, UK. Her research focuses on the history of the French anarchist movement (1870-1939), with a focus on transnational perspectives (for a publication list on these themes, see: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/constance-bantman).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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Anarchism and Punk - Call for Chapters We are inviting chapter submissions for an edited volume on the interrelationships between anarchism and punk. Send 250-300 abstracts to Will Boisseau (will.boisseau@hotmail.com), Caroline Kaltefleiter (Caroline.Kaltefleiter@cortland.edu), and Jim Donaghey (j.donaghey@qub.ac.uk) by 20 January 2021. More details here: https://jimdonaghey.noblogs.org/anarc...
Timeline: 23 November 2020 – Call for Chapters disseminated. 20 January 2021 – Please send 250-300 word abstracts to the editors by (to the email addresses given above). 21 June 2021 – Subsequently invited chapters, of between 5,000 and 8,000 words, to be written with a general readership in mind. Winter 2021/22 – After review and revisions process, the book is under agreement to be published with a well respected radical (and punk friendly) publisher. Details to be announced.
Some thought-provoking questions, to which you might respond or take as a point of departure: - What lessons can other milieus of the anarchist movement draw from punk’s longevity and impressive global spread? - Is the relationship between punk and anarchism substantially distinct in ‘other’ world contexts (especially in the ‘Global South’)? - Can punk’s success in ‘taking back the means of cultural production’ be replicated in other realms of production (whether social or material)? - Is punk well-placed to respond to, or resist, or escape, the neoliberal capitalist world? Or is punk just another harbinger of neoliberalism’s seemingly irresistible advance? - How do punk scenes respond to life under socialist/communist states and governments? Or to life under fascist/authoritarian/totalitarian states and governments? - What intervention can punk culture (or punk counter-culture) make in the ‘culture wars’? - In our era of perpetual crisis, what role can/do punk scenes play in providing focal points for resistance and mutual aid? - How has punk responded to radical ideologies other than anarchism (Marxism, autonomism, socialism, feminism, environmentalism)? - How has punk interacted with specific social movements (Black Lives Matter, antifa, Extinction Rebellion, trans rights, anti-globalisation, Occupy, disability rights, Food Not Bombs, LGBT, squatting)? - How does punk challenge, or fail to challenge, the patriarchy? Does queer punk look different in diverse global contexts? - What does the prevalence of veganism in punk culture tell us about tensions between individual consumer choices and activism? How do other punk behaviours and consumption practices relate to anarchism? - In what ways does the prevalence of anti-theism in punk reflect anarchist anti-theism and anti-clericalism? - How does the relationship between punk and anarchism compare with other anarchist-associated music cultures or art movements? (Hip-hop, rap, dance, rave, folk, anti-folk, metal, jazz, kraut rock, ska, avant-garde, rebetiko, corridos, no wave, Irish rebel music, ad nauseam!).
Please feel free to expand beyond these questions in your contributions.
In this work of creative non-fiction, James Gifford explores how narrative form can engage with anarchism by looking for evanescent moments of freedom between reactionary nostalgia for the past and prefigurative utopianism for the future.
James is Professor of Literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University and Director of FDU Press. His work is on anarchism, literary modernism, and popular culture, and his recent books are A Modernist Fantasy: Anarchism, Modernism, & the Radical Fantastic and Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks & the Later Avant-Gardes. For his latest article see 'Goblin Modernism: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic'
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
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In this essay, Ole Birk Laursen looks at the Indian anarchist M.P.T. Acharya (1887-1954), his activities within the international anarchist movement, and his attempt to bring anarchism into India's independence struggle and the post-colonial era in order to think more closely about decolonising anarchism.
Ole is a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University (https://www.iias.asia/profile/ole-birk-laursen). His research focuses on anticolonialism, anarchism, and socialism, and he is the editor of M.P.T. Acharya, We Are Anarchists (AK Press, 2019) and Lay Down Your Arms (OOOA! Publishing, 2019). For a recent publication on Acharya, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13688790.2020.1751914.
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365
Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations
In this essay, Lisa Matthews looks at examples of refugee and migrant solidarity, the importance of that solidarity not being limited to nation-states and citizenship, and the sea as a site of potential subversion and opportunity.
Lisa is a Coordinator at Right to Remain. Working with grassroots asylum and migrant groups in the UK, Right to Remain help people navigate the UK asylum and immigration system and campaign for positive change in the asylum and immigration system. For more information, visit www.righttoremain.org.uk
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. For more information on the ARG, visit www.lboro.ac.uk/subjects/politics-international-studies/research/arg/ . You can follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Our music comes from Them'uns (featuring Yous'uns). Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365
Artwork by Sam G: https://www.instagram.com/passerinecreations