Rhiannon Firth

Link to buy: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030577131
Or email author for more information: r.firth"@essex.ac.uk

This book considers how the UK government’s response to the recent COVID-19 pandemic disadvantages the working class, and how mutual aid, based on anarchist principles, can be used as a force for social change.The authors draw on Marxist and anarchist thought in class theory and social movement analysis to demonstrate that the virus and its material and discursive consequences are an active part of continuing class struggle and class interpolation. Preston and Firth examine how plans for quarantine and social isolation systematically work against the needs of the working class, and rely on classed assumptions about how markets and altruism operate.
In the face of neoliberal methods of dealing with a pandemic, ranging from marketization, disaster capitalism, to a strengthening of the State, Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the UK explains how radical alternatives such as social movements and mutual aid can be implemented to better cope with current and future crises.

In the context of global problems such as the economic downturn, escalating inequality, terrorism, resource depletion and climate change, cynicism prevails in contemporary politics, which need not be the case. Utopian Politics confronts a world intensely aware of the problems that we face and sadly lacking in solutions, positing a utopian articulation of citizenship focused on community participation at a grassroots level.

By re-examining central concepts and thinkers in political theory, this book re-casts the concepts of utopia and citizenship both as part of the classical philosophical tradition and simultaneously as part of the cutting edge of radical alternatives. This book includes never-before published ethnographic research, interviews and photographs from a range of autonomous UK communities, including intentional communities, social centres and eco-villages, to show how the boundaries of politics and citizenship can be questioned and proposes an innovative methodology inspired by classical and post-structural anarchism. By considering ideas and practices that are generally considered to be marginal to mainstream political theory and practice, the book encourages readers to think about longstanding and central political debates in an entirely new, and creative way.

Utopian Politics will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, ethics and citizenship.

Critical cartography is a methodology and pedagogy that begins from the premise that maps are embodiments of power. It advocates utopian possibilities for other mapping practices, providing tools for communities to spatially illustrate their struggles whilst reconstituting social bonds through collective knowledge production. Whilst critical cartographers gesture towards activist initiatives, a lot of the literature focuses mainly on theory and is light on alternative practices, failing to explore their pedagogical and transformative value. Furthermore, those literatures that do study practice tend to focus on ‘counter-mapping’, for example enabling indigenous communities to make resource claims. Such practices undoubtedly have progressive uses but have also been criticized for investing in dominant spatial practice and for perpetuating exclusions and hierarchies. This paper argues for a critical cartographic practice based on an anarchist ethos of anti- rather than counter-hegemony...

Purpose-This paper maps utopian theories of technological change. The focus is on debates surrounding emerging industrial technologies which contribute to making the relationship between humans and machines more symbiotic and entangled, such as robotics, automation and artificial intelligence. The aim is to provide a map to navigate complex debates on the potential for technology to be used for emancipatory purposes and to plot the grounds for tactical engagements. Design/methodology/approach-The paper proposes a two-way axis to map theories into to a six-category typology. Axis one contains the parameters humanist-assemblage. Humanists draw on the idea of a human essence of creative labour-power, and treat machines as alienated and exploitative form of this essence. Assemblage theorists draw on posthumanism and poststructuralism, maintaining that humans always exist within assemblages which also contain non-human forces. Axis two contains the parameters utopian/optimist; tactical/processual; and dystopian/pessimist, depending on the construed potential for using new technologies for empowering ends. Findings-The growing social role of robots portends unknown, and maybe radical, changes, but there is no single human perspective from which this shift is conceived. Approaches cluster in six distinct sets, each with different paradigmatic assumptions. Practical implications-Mapping the categories is useful pedagogically, and makes other political interventions possible, for example interventions between groups and social movements whose practice-based ontologies differ vastly. Originality/value-Bringing different approaches into contact and mapping differences in ways which make them more comparable, can help to identify the points of disagreement and the empirical or axiomatic grounds for these. It might facilitate the future identification of criteria to choose among the approaches.

I’m really excited to announce the publication by PM Press of this new edition of Marie Louise Berneri’s Journey Through Utopia. The original edition was written in 1948, shortly before her death, and published in 1950. It gives an incredibly readable history and analysis of utopian literature since Plato from an anarchist perspective.

In addition to the original foreword by George Woodcock there is an excellent new introduction by Matt Adams which situates Berneri’s work in the context of her life and her 1940s milieu surrounding Freedom Bookstore in Whitechapel, London (just down the road from my house, and where 80 years later I also hang out sometimes!).

There is also a postscript by Kim Stanley Robinson and an Afterword by me in which I attempt to carry on Berneri’s work by charting the trajectory of utopianism since her death.

Thanks James Proctor for inviting me to do this & for excellent editorial support & all my friends who read drafts

Available now in the US from https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1008 with 50% off using the coupon code: JULY. Available for pre-order in the UK from https://pmpress.org.uk/product/journey-through-utopia/ with 50% off using the coupon code: preorder. Also keep an eye out for copies at your local bookstore.

This is a short chapter written for a book edited by Helena Lugo to commemorate the 2015 the quincentenary of Thomas More's famous novel. The book features chapters by many different artists, writers, and thinkers inspired by the topic of return to More's island. The book encompasses the metaphor of a sea-voyage to revisit the ideals of modernity along with its broken promises and aims to recover a lost future among imaginary and real cartographies. The book can be purchased via the Chalton Gallery, London [http://www.chaltongallery.org/] or please contact me to be put in touch with the editor.

This chapter outlines the complex yet productive three-way relationship between utopianism, anarchism and intentional communities. It begins with a brief historical exegesis of the concept of utopia, and a critical exploration of the anti-utopian sentiment that has permeated modern political theory and contemporary culture. It then follows points of resonance between utopianism and anarchism, drawing on the anarchist theorists Gustav Landauer, Martin Buber, Max Stirner and Colin Ward, all of whom vindicate voluntary communities or unions of individuals who produce social change through experimenting with different values and meeting their needs in the here-and-now.

The chapter moves on to the intentional communities movement as a living example of critical, anarchistic utopianism. It is argued that intentional communities are incredibly diverse, not all are anarchist, though many draw on anarchist principles. This section explores anarchist approaches to property relations, decision-making and geographic scale and federation in the movement. Finally, the chapter covers controversies and tensions within and between anarchism and the intentional communities movement, including leftist versus post-leftist visions of social change, commitment to longevity versus temporariness and informality versus democratic structuring.

Using the theories of Max Stirner and the jointly authored works of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this chapter seeks to critique pedagogies of
moulding and to map and theorize alternatives. We begin by summarizing “moulding,”—why it is incompatible with post-representational politics, and the ways in which it persists in contemporary pedagogical theory. We then explore Stirner’s anarchism, demonstrating the complicity of moulding pedagogies with political representation. We draw on further sources of inspiration including Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004) three stages of schizoanalysis as well as practices of feminist consciousness-raising in the 1970s. Using these diverse sources, we seek to provide a working model of pedagogy without moulding, which can give rise to autonomous, self-valorizing subjects of becoming.

This paper takes as its context widespread feelings of anxiety within neoliberal society caused by a combination of material and discursive factors including precarious access to work and resources. It is argued that the state uses 'discourses of affect' to produce compliant subjects able to deal with (and unable to desire beyond) neoliberal precarity and anxiety. Critical education theorists have argued that discourses of 'well-being', emotional support and self-help have gained increasing purchase in mainstream education and in popular culture. These discourses are dangerous because they are individualized and depoliticized, and undermine collective political struggle. At the same time there has been a 'turn to affect' in critical academia, producing critical pedagogies that resist state affective discourse. I argue that these practices are essential for problematizing neoliberal discourse, yet existing literature tends to elide the role of the body in effective resistance, emphasising intellectual aspects of critique. The paper sketches an alternative, drawing on psychoanalytic and practiced pedagogies that aim to transgress the mind-body dualism and hierarchy, in particular Roberto Freire's work on Somatherapy.

This book chapter explores geographies of gentrification and resistance in relation to the monstrous through the lens of street-art in post-Olympic London. It takes as a geographic case study Hackney Wick, which has for a long time been a bastion of alternative and creative living due to cheap rents in large, ex-industrial warehouse spaces. The artistic sociality of the area is imbued within its landscape, as prolific street artists have adorned ex-industrial warehouses and canal-side walls with graffiti and murals. Since the announcement of the 2012 Olympic Games, the area has been a site of intense political and aesthetic contestation. The post-Olympic legacy means that the area has been earmarked for redevelopment, with current residents facing the possibility of joining thousands already displaced by the games. The anxiety of dispossession is reflected by monstrous characters and sinister disembodied teeth, eyes and fingers embedded within the landscape, painted by local artists. Using geographically sensitive mobile and visual methodology to document the landscape and artwork, the chapter analyses and interprets the monstrous themes using a range of theorists including Mikhail Bakhtin, Georges Bataille and Nick Land. I argue that monstrous street-art lays visible claim to public territory for aesthetic purposes at odds with the visions of redevelopers and the needs of capital. Whilst street-art and graffiti do not fit easily within frameworks of organized political resistance or collective social movements, they operate as a kind of epistemological transgression that triggers transformative affects in the viewer. This creates conditions for pedagogies of resistance to gentrification by expressing and mobilizing political affects such as anger and anxiety, raising awareness of geographical politics, and encouraging the viewer to question the status quo of the built environment.

This paper looks back on the methodology and experience of feminist consciousness-raising (CR) in the 1970s, in relation to the current re-emergence of feminism. It constructs an argument that a new wave of CR is desirable so as to construct new forms of feminist pedagogy and activism. The paper will argue that contemporary feminism in the UK and USA would benefit from this kind of methodology, through which a standpoint is constructed. The core of the paper is an analysis of how CR works as an affective and social process. Drawing on academic studies and participant accounts, the paper reconstructs the mechanisms through which participants’ subjectivities and narratives are expressed and transformed. It suggests that these mechanisms express different non-homogeneous temporalities. The paper invites feminist pedagogy to get back to the base level of experience and unfold new theories and strategies to address the current context.

This article explores and discusses the development of a mapping tool inspired by Charles Renouvier’s philosophical novel Uchronie (l’utopie dans l’histoire) (1876). The article explains the research and design process of creating a uchronian map of a formerly empty site in Fish Island in East London and describes a participatory workshop titled ‘Hackney Wick and Fish Island: Future Perfect(s)’ (25 April 2015) that used uchronian mapping to explore past and future development imaginaries of two sites in the neighbourhood. Given a uchronian mapping template, a protocol and a dossier of planning and other documents, participants were encouraged to develop their own uchronian map of each site, and in doing so test and question the process of visualizing ‘what was supposed to happen’, ‘what actually happened’ and ‘what could have happened’. The article concludes with a reflection on uchronian mapping as a tool for researching, analysing and making visible urban alternatives.

Critical cartography is a methodology and pedagogy that begins from the premise that maps are embodiments of power. It advocates utopian possibilities for other mapping practices, providing tools for communities to spatially illustrate their struggles whilst reconstituting social bonds through collective knowledge production. Whilst critical cartographers gesture
towards activist initiatives, a lot of the literature focuses mainly on theory and is light on alternative practices, failing to explore their pedagogical and transformative value. Furthermore, those literatures that do study practice tend to focus on ‘counter-mapping’, for example enabling indigenous communities to make resource claims. Such practices undoubtedly have progressive uses but have also been criticized for investing in dominant spatial practice and for perpetuating exclusions and hierarchies.

This paper argues for a critical cartographic practice based on an anarchist ethos of anti- rather than counter-hegemony, drawing ideas of cartographic pedagogy as affect, affinity and performativity. Furthermore it argues that such practices already exist and ought to be expanded. Using David Graeber’s ethnographic methodology of ‘utopian extrapolation’ the paper will draw on material found in the ‘map archive’ of the 56a infoshop in London to begin to inspire and imagine an anarchist cartographic pedagogy.

This article examines a number of critical-theoretical, utopian alternatives to the dominant temporal conception of 'homogeneous empty time'. It explores the ways in which difference is theorised within the field of time, and the ways in which relations to the past and future can be constructed non-sequentially. It focuses on four related theories. Nietzsche's theory of eternal return is shown to be inspired by a critique of backward-looking views of time and an orientation to an abundance of the present. Benjamin's theory of messianic time combines the immediacy of 'now-time' with a non-successive connection to past and future times. Deleuze's Bergsonian view of time suggests the simultaneity of the past with the present, and the possibility of constructing connections between different zones of time and actualising these zones in the present. Agamben's theory of temporal play focuses on immediacy, the redemption of the past, and the abandonment of the mastery of history. Each of these theories is discussed in terms of its own conception of time, its difference from dominant conceptions of time, and its relationship to utopia. While offering four distinct alternatives, the theorists all critique alienated and objectivist views of time, and offer different varieties of temporal rhizomatics and polyphony. The juxtaposition of these theories provides the underpinnings for temporal utopianism as a new field of study. The idea of temporal utopianism demonstrates that utopia can be a temporal as well as a spatial phenomenon, and that the experience of time characteristic of capitalist modernity is contingent rather than necessary. It thus points towards a rupture with the sense of closure generated by dominant conceptions of time, creating temporal zones in which utopian spaces can be actualised.

It has been extensively argued by theorists of liberal globalization as well as by radical theorists such as situationists and anarchists, that as the site of the concentration of capital, the city is the primary site for the formation of new subjectivities, new rights-claiming practices and the intensification of resistance as the starting point for an alternative, inclusionary urban citizenship. This article contends that by dismissing or separating rural and agricultural practices, such theories express a contradiction that can best be understood not as a struggle between rural and urban utopias, but between two different approaches to utopianism – hegemonic, associated with statist practices; and critical, associated with autonomous practices. The article considers emergent free spaces within UK, including intentional communities, autonomous social centres, radical housing co-operatives and eco-villages, both in urban and rural areas, as specific instances of materialized utopias that are becoming-autonomous, allowing us to think beyond dominant spatial formations by offering alternative futures whilst simultaneously engaging in resistant practices in the present. Voices of interviewed practitioners and observations of practices in these spaces are brought into dialogue with theory, highlighting gaps and weaknesses and opening space for further theorizing and new imaginings. This offers possibilities for a critical-autonomous conception of utopianism that does not take existing spatial formations for granted.

Author Rizwaan Sabir, as a then-MA student at Nottingham University, became known as one-half of the "Nottingham Two" following his arrest along with Hicham Yezza in May 2008. They were detained for six days without charge on suspicion of terrorism for the possession of a document titled the Al Qaeda Training Manual, which was freely available on the internet and from bookstores. Sabir had downloaded it from a US government website for use as primary source material in his proposed PhD research on armed Muslim groups. But Sabir's arrest, detention, interrogation, and release without charge takes up only about one-fifth of the pages; the remainder covers subsequent events revealing the extent of the surveillance to which he was subject, and his increasing awareness of information held about him not only by the police but by a dizzying array of interconnected authorities. These events include several stop-and-searches by the roadside (each a frightening and infuriating story in its own right), detentions at the border, and an attempt by the UK military to recruit him into their psychological warfare unit. These events occurred more than seven years after the 9/11 attacks that haunt the book, forming a backdrop of ever-increasing securitization against the everyday lives of Muslims in the West. These historical conditions and their political, social and psychological consequences are the subject of the book, as we witness the development of Sabir's complex trauma and psychological distress. A gripping read from start to finish, the book is a standalone mustread; moreover, The Suspect is not just relevant but indeed essential reading for any scholar of utopia.