Resistance post-Occupy : a cultural criminological analysis of resistance, knowledge production and imagination in the radical movement in New York City

Abstract

Based on a critical ethnographic study, the present work explores understandings of resistance, power and social change among activists in the post-Occupy movement in New York City. The research asks how activists understand, experience and define resistance in relation to power and social change, and explores the meaning of resistance for those engaged in it. Here, the research focusses in particular on anarchist and anarchist-inspired resistance, or direct action politics. It analyses how the principles and tactics of direct action are defined by activists; and asks, in consideration of spatio-temporal dimensions (immediacy and future-orientation, and separation and confrontation), what constitutes direct action as 'resistance'. Furthermore, this analysis starts from the assumption that tracing down the relationship between ontology, epistemology and methodology in movement activity allows for the development of an understanding of how shared experiences and conceptions of social reality and social change influence activists' resistant practices. Here, the research asks how resistant practice and theory is shaped in the post-Occupy movement's collective processes of knowledge production and through their large variety of knowledge practices. These are characterized by the interplay between theory and practice - by 'doing resistance' in as much as reflecting, discussing, and negotiating - that aims to achieve a radical (re-)imagination of what it means to be and act political. The work situates both collective processes of knowledge production and activists' conceptualizations of resistance within the (recent) history of New York City's social movements, and within conflicts around housing and gentrification, which have been identified as core struggles of the post-Occupy movement. Here, the research shows how activists' conceptualizations of resistance, power and social change are implemented in concrete resistant practices in the city using a variety of examples, among them the work of the New York City Anti-Eviction Network (NYCAEN). Theoretically, the research utilizes an interdisciplinary approach, while focusing on a combination of anarchist philosophy and cultural criminology. Here, the research aims to contribute to current debates in cultural criminology that seek increased theoretical and analytical clarity of the concept of 'resistance'. It is argued that the analysis of the methods of resistance employed, and discussed, in the post-Occupy movement helps to understand and conceptualize resistance in cultural criminology by linking activists' own theorizing with academic theorizing. This also allows for a re-consideration of the influence of anarchist philosophy on cultural criminological understandings of resistance, which contributes to necessary theoretical clarifications while at the same time challenging the criticism that cultural criminology suffers from a general failure to consider political resistance in its theory and research.