Anarchist Essays
Brought to you by Loughborough University’s Anarchism Research Group (ARG), Anarchist Essays presents leading academics, activists, and thinkers 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
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Episodes
Monday Jun 05, 2023
Monday Jun 05, 2023
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.
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
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday May 15, 2023
Monday May 15, 2023
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.
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
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Apr 17, 2023
Monday Apr 17, 2023
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.
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
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Apr 03, 2023
Monday Apr 03, 2023
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.
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
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Mar 06, 2023
Monday Mar 06, 2023
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).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Feb 13, 2023
Monday Feb 13, 2023
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).
Anarchist Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Jan 30, 2023
Monday Jan 30, 2023
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.
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
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Jan 16, 2023
Monday Jan 16, 2023
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
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Jan 02, 2023
Monday Jan 02, 2023
In this essay, Kim Kelly discusses her 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 Essays is brought to you by Loughborough University's Anarchism Research Group. Follow us on Twitter @arglboro
Artwork by Sam G.
Monday Dec 19, 2022
Monday Dec 19, 2022
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
For text versions of these essays, see the Anarchist Studies blog:
English - https://anarchiststudies.noblogs.org/article-a-brief-history-of-anarchism-in-indonesia/Bahasa Indonesian - https://anarchiststudies.noblogs.org/article-sejarah-singkat-anarkisme-di-indonesia/
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
Artwork by Sam G.