Radical Spaces

Epoch-making political events are often remembered for their spatial markers: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the storming of the Bastille, the occupation of Tiananmen Square:. Until recently, however, political theory has overlooked the power of place. In Radical Space, Margaret Kohn puts space at the center of democratic theory. Kohn examines different sites of working-class mobilization in Europe and explains how these sites destabilized the existing patterns of social life, economic activity, and political participation. Her approach suggests new ways to understand the popular public sphere of the early twentieth century.This book imaginatively integrates a range of sources, including critical theory, social history, and spatial analysis. Drawing on the historical record of cooperatives, houses of the people, and chambers of labor, Kohn shows how the built environment shaped people's actions, identities, and political behavior. She illustrates how the symbolic and social dimensions of these places were mobilized as resources for resisting oppressive political relations. The author shows that while many such sites of resistance were destroyed under fascism, they created geographies of popular power that endure to the present.

RADICAL SPACES explores the rise of popular radicalism in London between 1790 and 1845 through key sites of radical assembly: the prison, the tavern and the radical theatre. Access to spaces in which to meet, agitate and debate provided those excluded from the formal arenas of the political nation-the great majority of the population-a crucial voice in the public sphere. RADICAL SPACES utilises both textual and visual public records, private correspondence and the secret service reports from the files of the Home Office to shed new light on the rise of plebeian radicalism in the metropolis. It brings the gendered nature of such sites to the fore, finding women where none were thought to gather, and reveals that despite the diversity in these spaces, there existed a dynamic and symbiotic relationship between radical culture and the sites in which it operated. These venues were both shaped by and helped to shape the political identity of a generation of radical men and women who envisioned a new social and political order for Britain.

A multidisciplinary collection which brings together cutting edge research about the cultural politics of space.

Examines how radical bookstores and similar spaces serve as launching pads for social movements How does social change happen? It requires an identified problem, an impassioned and committed group, a catalyst, and a plan. In this deeply researched consideration of seventy-seven stores and establishments, Kimberley Kinder argues that activists also need autonomous space for organizing, and that these spaces are made, not found. She explores the remarkably enduring presence of radical bookstores in America and how they provide infrastructure for organizing—gathering places, retail offerings that draw new people into what she calls “counterspaces.” Kinder focuses on brick-and-mortar venues where owners approach their businesses primarily as social movement tools. These may be bookstores, infoshops, libraries, knowledge cafes, community centers, publishing collectives, thrift stores, or art installations. They are run by activist-entrepreneurs who create centers for organizing and selling books to pay the rent. These spaces allow radical and contentious ideas to be explored and percolate through to actual social movements, and serve as crucibles for activists to challenge capitalism, imperialism, white privilege, patriarchy, and homophobia. They also exist within a central paradox: participating in the marketplace creates tensions, contradictions, and shortfalls. Activist retail does not end capitalism; collective ownership does not enable a retreat from civic requirements like zoning; and donations, no matter how generous, do not offset the enormous power of corporations and governments. In this timely and relevant book, Kinder presents a necessary, novel, and apt analysis of the role these retail spaces play in radical organizing, one that demonstrates how such durable hubs manage to persist, often for decades, between the spikes of public protest.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Introduction: defining the moment -- 1. Sleeping on the floor and other spaces: the importance of space and place to learning -- Note -- 2. Social change and the political academic: creating a place for research in social movements -- Grounding the theory -- Note -- 3. Political? Pedagogical? Philosophical?: putting the theory to work in conversation -- Note -- 4. Organic education from the ground up: stories from Occupy -- 5. Becoming organised: co-operatively organised education: stories from the Social Science Centre and higher education against neoliberalised consumerism: stories from Student as Producer -- The Social Science Centre -- 6. In the beginning Occupy created camps: thinking through the implications -- Story and experience -- Occupation -- Reclamation -- Conscientization -- Creating a dialogue between the pedagogies: finding the trajectory -- Thinking through education. -- Thinking through research -- The future of the academy, the community and change agents -- The escape from enclosure -- Final words of radical hope -- 7. Capturing future resistance in education -- References -- Index

Contemporary educational practices are heeding the calls of Wall Street for more corporate control, privatisation and standardised accountability. In many cases, educational policies are created to uphold and serve particular social, political and economic ends. Schools, in a sense, have been tools to reproduce hierarchical, authoritarian and hyper-individualistic models of social order. The important news is that emancipatory educational practices are emerging. Out of the Ruins sets out to explore and discuss the emergence of alternative learning spaces.

The idea of the imagination is as evocative as it is elusive. Not only does the imagination allow us to project ourselves beyond our own immediate space and time, it also allows us to envision the future, as individuals and as collectives. The radical imagination, then, is that spark of difference, desire and discontent that can be fanned into the flames of social change. Yet what precisely is the imagination and what might make it 'radical'? How can it be fostered and cultivated? How can it be studied and what are the possibilities and risks of doing so? This book seeks to answer these questions at a crucial time. As we enter into a new cycle of struggles marked by a worldwide crisis of social reproduction, scholar-activists Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish explore the processes and possibilities for cultivating the radical imagination in dark times. A lively and crucial intervention in radical politics, social research and social change, and the collective visions and cultures that inspire them.

Develops third-space theory by engaging with zines produced by feminists and queers of color. Zines in Third Space develops third-space theory with a practical engagement in the subcultural space of zines as alternative media produced specifically by feminists and queers of color. Adela C. Licona explores how borderlands rhetorics function in feminist, and queer of-color zines to challenge dominant knowledges as well as normativitizing mis/representations. Licona characterizes these zines as third-space sites of borderlands rhetorics revealing dissident performances, disruptive rhetorical acts, and coalitions that effect new cultural, political, economic, and sexual configurations.