Alissa Starodub – författare

Contemporary articulations of dissent to social order and its production of truth cannot be ignored any longer. Hamburg during the G20 gathering; Washington, D.C., on the day of Trump’s inauguration; the squares and streets of Paris and Tunis at the end of 2018. Public space is temporarily taken by those who rise against the powers that keep structural oppression and social order in its place. Not only riots, but collective social centres, protest camps and temporary as well as permanent occupations of lands and buildings are other, utopian spatial alternatives created by autonomous social movements to prefigure a horizontal social organization. This book discusses spatial practices of autonomous social movements, the movements who ‘see their everyday experiences and creations as the revolution they are making’, together with these movements and in taking the diversity of their articulations into account. Sites of Dissent is thus the story of a daring attempt to create research practices for radical transformation which requires a radical transformation of research practices. During this attempt, methodological rules of scientific research are broken, and methodological heresy and wild experimentation with research practices take place.Sites of Dissent aims at opening new possibilities of including diverse ways of knowing and speaking into a collective knowledge creation process, at overcoming the individualized isolation in which the researcher produces knowledge about the outside world; and it aims to create a space for collective learning about spatial practices of autonomous social movements, to learn with and from the movements.

Contemporary articulations of dissent to social order and its production of truth cannot be ignored any longer. Hamburg during the G20 gathering; Washington, D.C., on the day of Trump’s inauguration; the squares and streets of Paris and Tunis at the end of 2018. Public space is temporarily taken by those who rise against the powers that keep structural oppression and social order in its place. Not only riots, but collective social centres, protest camps and temporary as well as permanent occupations of lands and buildings are other, utopian spatial alternatives created by autonomous social movements to prefigure a horizontal social organization. This book discusses spatial practices of autonomous social movements, the movements who ‘see their everyday experiences and creations as the revolution they are making’, together with these movements and in taking the diversity of their articulations into account. Sites of Dissent is thus the story of a daring attempt to create research practices for radical transformation which requires a radical transformation of research practices. During this attempt, methodological rules of scientific research are broken, and methodological heresy and wild experimentation with research practices take place.Sites of Dissent aims at opening new possibilities of including diverse ways of knowing and speaking into a collective knowledge creation process, at overcoming the individualized isolation in which the researcher produces knowledge about the outside world; and it aims to create a space for collective learning about spatial practices of autonomous social movements, to learn with and from the movements.

Riots and Militant Occupations provides students with theoretical reflections and qualitative case studies on militant contentious political action across a range from across Europe to Nigeria, China and Turkey. This multi-authored, interdisciplinary collection adopts an interpretive and participatory approach to examining meanings, affects, embodiment, identity, relationality and space in the context of riots and protests. The rapidly shifting terrain of riots and occupations has left existing social-scientific theories lagging behind, challenging dominant constructions of agency and rationality. This book will fill this gap, by offering new understandings and critical perspectives on the question of what happens in space, in time and between people, during and after riots. Weaving together observations, experiences and analyses of riots from participants, theorists and social scientists, the authors craft theoretical perspectives in close connection with researched practices. These perspectives take the form of new theoretical contributions on the spatiality, affectivity and immanent meaning of riots, and grassroots qualitative case-studies of particular events and contexts. Countering the preconceptions of riots as a trail of broken windows, burned dumpsters and angry conservatives, this book aims to demonstrate that riots are fundamentally creative, generating forms of meaning, power, knowledge, affect, social connection and participatory space which are rare, and sociologically important, in the modern world.