Intimate Publics: Autoethnographic Meditations on the Micropolitics of Resistance

Abstract

SummaryThis article is based on 18 months of fieldwork with a group of male activists who inhabit a nine‐year‐old protest site, blocking a controversial development project. In it, the female author grapples with the contradictions she notes between the stated intentions of the occupation and her own experiences within it. Through careful mix of her own experiences in the space and material she once discarded from her data—silences, rumors, violence—this article demonstrates that possibilities for rescuing public space are limited by interpersonal relationships between campers. By writing in an experimental mode, the author demonstrates how the act of analysis becomes entangled in the very social dilemmas it aims to uncover.