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Movement Engaged Political Theory: Beyond Education and Cooking Up a Revolution

Sat, August 31, 10:00 to 11:30am, Hilton, Tenleytown West

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This panel facilitates a discussion about two new books that intersect political theory with social movement-engaged research. It focuses on two books: Sean Parson’s Cooking Up a Revolution: Food Not Bombs, Homes Not Jails, and Resistance to Gentrification (Manchester University Press, 2018) and Eli Meyerhoff’s Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Three respondents, Isaac Kamola, Nancy Love, and Thea Sircar, will give remarks on the books, followed by responses from the authors and discussion with the audience. A summary of the two books follows:

(1) During the late 1980s and early 1990s the city of San Francisco waged a war against the homeless. Over 1,000 arrests and citations where handed out by the police to activists for simply distributing free food in public parks. Why would a liberal city arrest activists helping the homeless? In exploring this question, Sean Parson’s _Cooking Up a Revolution_ treats the conflict between the city and activists as a unique opportunity to examine the contested nature of homelessness and public space while developing an anarchist alternative to liberal urban politics that is rooted in mutual aid, solidarity, and anti-capitalism. In addition to exploring theoretical and political issues related to gentrification, broken-windows policing, and anti-homeless laws, this book provides activists, students and scholars, examples of how anarchist homeless activists in San Francisco resisted these processes.

(2) Higher education is at an impasse. Most recent books on higher education politics respond to the impasse with moralizing narratives of ‘crisis.’ As an antidote, Eli Meyerhoff’s _Beyond Education_ argues that the impasse of higher education is rooted in political questions about conflicts between alternative modes of world-making that are co-constitutive with certain modes of study. In the course of political struggles, education has been presented as if it is the best and only mode of study. Because education is romanticized in this way, the possibilities of alternative modes of study have become almost unthinkable. Against the grain, this book takes aim at the romance of education. Its middle chapters trace the origins of ideas about education that the British settlers brought with them to the colonies, presenting a history of how different elements of the education-based mode of study emerged from political struggles: a vertical trajectory of individualized development, an ideology of ‘education’ for preparing people to participate in governance, a pedagogical mode of accounting, and dichotomous figures of educational waste and value, including the 'dropout' and 'graduate.’ To offer avenues for putting alternative modes of study into practice in the present, the end of the book reflects on embedded activist-research with an anarchist free university and presents lines of inquiry for abolitionist university studies.

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