Projects

I am currently organizing my work around five core intellectual themes:

• Autonomy as lived practice: how people build and feel everyday control and collective capacity through governance, provisioning, and the usage of things. decision-making; intersectional heterarchy and power relations; autonomous goods/usage regimes; the culture-like effects of autonomous spaces; integrated autonomy (as relational and supported, rather than atomized); “commoning” emotions; and autonomy as a felt experience within a Daoist wu wei lens.

• Daoism: Daoist social theory as an analytic resource, specifically to understand agency beyond intention and the spatio-temporal fluidity of autonomous spaces. Wu wei, shi, ziran as they relate to agency, autonomy, and resistance. Includes Daoist Agency/Resistance; feeling autonomous (within wu wei logics), and human/more-than-human balances (including climate/resilience).

• Democracy within a critique of mainstream capitalist democratic systems, how individuals harness their own intimate political voices and capacities to create autonomous and parallel democratic spaces: the evolution and privatization of democracy; post-totalitarian neoliberal governance; “degrees of caring”, democratic voice, and democratic escalation; prefigurative and educational democracy;.

• Intentionality: Specifically, how significant political acts emerge without clear intent. Specifically within Daoist and autonomous notions of agency and resistance, I seek to move theories of action and decision-making ‘beyond intentionality,’ and towards more dynamic and less Western-centric ways of understanding action. 

• Resistance from overt to quiet forms that often lead to more durable parallel structures: unintentional resistance; parallel structures/infrastructures; squatting and captured land; preemptive insulation and deflection.

Finally, building upon and across the above strands, I engage through a core critique of capitalism(s), specifically how market-centered imperatives reshape everyday life, and how people build (or maintain) alternatives within and alongside that reality.

Projects: 

Squatting as a Democratic Act:

My current PhD project looks at alternative (i.e. non-institutional) political and democratic expression.  To this end, I am doing ethnographic research using participant observation and un/semi-structured interviews with political squatters throughout Europe, primarily within the Czech Republic and Sweden.     

The Evolution of Democracy

Another Democracy is Possible:

This is a longer term project, which I am building collaboratively with other scholars and activists.  The project is a web platform, AnotherDemocracy.com, and is inspired by the often heard phrase “another world is possible.” We believe that to achieve another world, everyone must have an equal say in what that world looks like. We must create a true and knowledgeable democratic society. To this end, we seek to increase knowledge and understanding, as well as foster a space for dialog, by posting intellectual and activist experiences, studies, and data that illuminate more equitable ways that people and societies have (and do) live and organize themselves socio-politically. Whether it is consensus based direct democracy at an Occupy encampment, indigenous participatory democratic processes in the highlands of Peru, kinship politics in an historical Africa, or horizontal tribal political forms from antiquity; there are other ways of understanding what a democratic “rule by the people” looks like. These examples show us that a democracy does not have to be a corrupt privately funded representative electoral processes, in which corporations and the wealthy have disproportionate influence over candidates, whose messages speak to moneyed and powered interests. Another democracy is possible… it exists among us, has for millennia… Through this website, we hope not only to show other understandings of democracy that already exist, but more importantly, to foster a reimaging of – and illuminate pathways towards – a more pervasive and inclusive democracy where individuals and communities can genuinely achieve a rule by all the people, not just some of the people. For more information see AnotherDemocracy.com  

Walking Lion / aibia:

In 2010 I was back in the US, unemployed and unhappy.  Rather staying mired in the misery of job hunting and joblessness, I decided to build upon my previous research on Sierra Leone and undertake an educational, ethnographic, and awareness raising trip, and walk/backpack through the country.  I spent several months there and eventually settled in with local partners in the city of Makeni, and started a community based organization called aibia.  While it has been very slow since then, we have slowly been building an alternative development organization based on a non-profit, community based revenue generating business model that keeps all proceeds in country and community.  We were in the process of building a small office and community center when the ebola crisis hit. The people involved turned their attention to this issue of course, and are jsut now returning to our previous work.  We are currently re-fundraising for the remaining funds for the building (what was not yet used turned towards ebola projects).  For more information see walkinglion.org.  

Privatization of Democracy




Occupy Wall St. and The Occupy People's Think Tank: 




The Reconstruction of Czechoslovakia (MA Thesis):




Flood Relief, Prague 2002: