Anna Feigenbaum

The Teachable Moment: Feminist Pedagogy and the Neoliberal Classroom

In this article I will argue that this corporatization of the university limits and restricts possibilities for teaching critical theory. Discussing the notion of a ‘teachable moment’ I engage in what Jane Gallop calls anecdotal theory, examining the conditions and context of two of my own encounters with students. I work through these two teachable moments in order to better locate the effects that the increasing corporatization of the university has on students, as well as teachers.

Protest camps: An emerging field of social movement research

Recently protest camps have emerged around the world as a highly visible form of protest. Part and parcel of new social movement activism for over 40 years, they are important sites and catalysts for identity creation, expression, political contention and incubators for social change. While research has punctually addressed individual camps, there is lack of comparative and comprehensive research that links historic and contemporary protest camps as a unique area of interdisciplinary study. Research on the phenomenon to date has remained punctual and case based. This paper proposes to study protest camps as a distinct new field of research in social movement studies. Existing literature is critically reviewed and framed in three thematic clusters of spatiality, affect and autonomy. On the basis of this review the paper develops a research approach based on the analysis of infrastructures used to make protest camps. We contest that an infrastructural analysis highlights protest camps as a unique organizational form and transcends the limits of case-based research while respecting the varying contexts and trajectories of protest camps.

Quality after the Cuts? Higher Education Practitioners' Accounts of Systemic Challenges to Teaching Quality in Times of "Austerity".

What are the ramifications of current changes in the higher education landscape in the UK for the ways in which teaching staff perceive their teaching practices? What impact are funding cuts, increases in student fees and the concomitant increased workloads having on faculty morale? How might this influence ‘quality cultures’ in teaching in media, communications, cultural studies and related disciplines, and higher education more broadly? To investigate issues around teaching quality enhancement and teaching quality assurance in the changing higher education environment in the UK, we designed an innovative ‘Teaching Exchange’ (TE) workshop, which ran during 2010 and 2011 in Media and Communications departments at five diverse higher education institutions around England. Drawn from discussions with over 40 faculty members, this paper provides an account of how our TE workshop participants viewed the current structural constraints on teaching quality in regard to: (1) changing teaching loads, (2) the marketisation of degree programmes and (3) the internationalisation of student bodies without adequate support structures. In reporting on these challenges to quality in teaching, this paper contributes to the generation of alternatives to the existing top-down bureaucratisation of teaching quality control.

Resistant Matters: Tents, Tear Gas and the “Other Media” of Occupy

From tents to tear gas, objects and architectures of resistance speak to us across the transnational Occupy Movement. More than background scenery or mere props for action, these objects have their own stories to tell about how they mediate and communicate political struggle. Informed by the revitalisation of materialism and object-oriented analyses, this paper draws together affect theory, “post-ANT” scholarship and social movement studies to explore particular nonhuman elements of resistance as “other media.” Beyond those practices already seen to be part of the communications ecology of protest (alternative media, demonstrations, speeches, performative actions), I argue that other technological infrastructures and interfaces make and mediate political communication at sites of resistance in ways that are significant but often overlooked in existing scholarship.

For a politics of atmospheric governance

A rise in social science scholarship on atmospheres has raised questions on how to articulate complex material and imperceptible events and encounters. Responding to Peter Adey’s Air Affinities, this review proposes the need to traverse geopolitics and geopoetics to more fully engage these. Going further, it argues that such traversals are key to approaching specific situations and devices of what we call ‘atmospheric policing’. Exploring recent examples of tear gas and sound warfare deployment in occupied Palestine, the review shows how discourses on atmospheres may be used to bring accountability into ecologies of violence.

Written in the Mud

From the early months of the Greenham Common Womens Peace Camp protests, women wishing to offer different perspectives from those found in the corporate press, created their own newsletters and booklets. These print publications incorporated a wide and vibrant array of anecdotes, analyses and images of life at the camp. They served to mobilize new participants, circulate information about events, document womens actions and create forums for cultivating ideas, demands, tactics and analyses. In this paper, I look at how Greenham publications functioned simultaneously as instrumental tools and affective sites of knowledge production. I situate these womens publications in regard to the histories and political trajectories of zine-making, arguing that the ethics and values that shaped Greenham womens publications share a great deal of similarities with zine-making cultures and cultural productions. In doing so I offer an alternative approach to the historicization of DIY publishing and feminist grassroots media that focuses on the dynamics of autonomous media practices pre and post-internet.

Towards a Method for studying Affect in (micro)Politics: The Campfire Chats Project and the Occupy Movement

In their introduction to A Postcapitalist Politics, J.K. Gibson-Graham quotes artistactivist John Jordan stating, ‘When we are asked how we are going to build a new world, our answer is, “We don’t know, but let’s build it together”’. This ethos of building together underlies the micropolitics of protest camps in which people must not only work, but also live together as they struggle toward a common goal. In relation to theorizations of affect, what differentiates the protest camp from other place-based or space-based social movement gatherings and actions is the sustained physical and emotional labour that goes into building and maintaining the site as simultaneously a base for political action and a space for daily life. At a protest camp people’s perspectives toward others, as well as towards objects and ideas, are largely shaped through communal efforts to create sustainable (if ephemeral) infrastructures for daily life. Camps are frequently home to infrastructures such as DIY sanitation systems, communal kitchens, educational spaces, cultural festivals and performances, as well as media, legal and medical operations.

Protest Camps and Repertoires of Contention

Protest camps have become a prominent feature of the post-2010 cycle of social movements and while they have gripped the public and medias imagination, the phenomenon of protest camping is not new. The practice and performance of creating protest camps has a rich history, which has evolved through multiple movements, from Anti-Apartheid to Anti-war. However, until recently, the history of the protest camp as part of the repertoire of social movements and as a site for the evolution of a social movements repertoire has largely been confined to the histories of individual movements. Consequently, connections between movements, between camps and the significance of the protest camp itself have been overlooked. In this research profile, we argue for the importance of studying protest camps in relation to social movements and the evolution of repertoires noting how protest camps adapt infrastructures and practices from tent cities, festival cultures, squatting communities and land-based autonomous movements. We also acknowledge protest camps as key sites in which a variety of repertoires of contention are developed, tried and tested, diffused or sometimes dismissed. To facilitate the study protest camps we suggest a theory and practice of ‘infrastructural analysis’ and differentiated between four protest camp infrastructures: (1) media & communication, (2) action, (3) governance and (4) re-creation. We then use the infrastructures of media and communications as a brief example as to how our proposed infrastructural analysis can contribute to the study of repertoires and our understanding of the rich dynamics of a protest camp.

From cyborg feminism to drone feminism: Remembering women’s anti-nuclear activisms

By the 1990s the dynamic array of creative direct action tactics used against militarised technologies that emerged from women’s anti-nuclear protest camps in the 1980s became largely eclipsed by cyberfeminism’s focus on digital and online technologies. Yet recently, as robots and algorithms are put forward as the vanguards of new drone execution regimes, some are wondering if now is the time for another Greenham Common. In this article I return to cyborg feminism and anti-nuclear activisms of the 1980s to explore what drone feminism might look like today. I examine how anti-nuclear protesters infused affect and techné, creating innovative images of, and tactics for, material resistance. I argue that Greenham women’s cyborg feminisms arose from their material entanglements with the military base. In their efforts to reveal and undermine the national and imperial myths upon which warfare is based, protesters re-imagined technological possibilities based upon a global accountability for ‘earthly survival’.

Vulnerable warriors: the atmospheric marketing of military and policing equipment before and after 9/11

ABSTRACT In this article, we analyse changes in the circulation of advertisements of policing products at security expos between 1995 and 2013. While the initial aim of the research was to evidence shifts in terrorist frames in the marketing of policing equipment before and after 9/11, our findings instead suggested that what we are seeing is the rise of marketing to police as “vulnerable warriors”, law enforcement officers in need of military weapons both for their offensive capabilities and for the protection they can offer to a police force that is always under threat.