Academic Archive

My most recent articles are “Is Local Food a Social Movement?”, “Can Enchantment Save the World (Is Alternative Consumption a Social Movement?)“, and “Participatory Democracy in Action“. This website archives my publications, lectures, interviews, briefings, and action reports, as well as unpublished articles.

My most recent activism focuses on the Political Economy of Food. This has been a longstanding interest since I started teaching a course on this topic in 1995. At that time, the concept was so extremely uninteresting (both to the political economists and to the cultural studies people) that the university not only wouldn’t pay us but wouldn’t even allow us access to classroom space. Tony Samara and I taught the course in our living room for several years and I continued to teach it annually through 2009. By 2002, the course was drawing students from 21 different departments in 4 colleges. In 2005, I decided to create a community institution to make politics more appealing. My underground restaurant is The Viand. And in 2012 I wrote a book about how a dinner party can change the economy, Underground Restaurant: Local Food, Artisan Economics, Creative Political Culture.

My education includes a Ph.D. in Sociology (Political Economy) from the University of California, Santa Barbara (advisors Richard Flacks, Mark Juergensmeyer) and a Masters in City Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (advisor Mel King). As an undergraduate, I studied at M.I.T.’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (advisor Otto Peine), which promoted collaborations between artists and engineers to create public and participatory artwork, as part of a Bachelors of Science in Architecture and Design. I also have a Certificate in Permaculture from a designers course taught by Bill Mollison himself.

After 11 years of University professorship, In 2009, I retired from academia.

The manuscript of Naming the Enemy: Anti-Corporate Movements Confront Globalization was completed in 1998, more than a year before the Seattle WTO protests. Later published by Zed Books, it is the first systematic survey of the movements which would shortly converge into the anti-globalization movement.

My second book, Global Revolt: A Guide to Alterglobalization, is an introductory text, reviewing points of consensus, disagreements, and some of the tactics from the global struggle. (Zed Books, 2005)

My third book, Shutting down the Streets: The Political Violence of Social Control in the Global Era (NYU Press, 2011) revives the field of social control by providing a framework for analyzing the social control of dissent. Based on extensive ethnographic and archival research, the book concludes that such control, even in the purportedly more peaceful “negotiated” form, must be understood as a form of political violence against democracy.

My fourth book, Underground Restaurant: Local Food, Artisan Economics, Creative Political Culture (2013) draws on the successes of the local food movement to propose ways we can transform further sectors of the economy.

I also wrote and directed This is What Free Trade Looks Like, a 2004 documentary which examines México’s experience with NAFTA as a basis for understanding the WTO.

Articles appear in Cultural Studies, Agriculture and Human Values, Journal of Social Movement Studies, Qualitative Sociology, Journal of World Systems Research, New Political Science, Latin American Perspectives, Social Justice, Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, Socialist Register, and Journal of Developing Societies. All of these articles are available from this page.

From 1999-2003, I participated in 12 different mass confrontations of elite free trade, international development, and biotechnology meetings. (Seattle 1999 WTO, Washington DC 2000 IMF/WB, Los Angeles 2000 DNC, Cincinnati 2000 TABD, Québec City 2001 FTAA, Washington DC 2001 Anti-War, New York City 2002 WEF, Denver 2002 ICC, Sacramento 2003 Biotech (USDA/WTO), Cancún 2003 WTO, Miami 2003 FTAA, San Francsico 2004 Anti-War). In 2004, my political collective wrote an online handbook about called “Don’t Be a Tourist: A Mass Action Handbook for getting your community on the road and into the street”.

If you’re outside the US, here are my explanations of the effects of 9-11 on the US alterglobalization movement and academic self-censorship.

During this period, I also worked with ad-hoc student, staff, and faculty groups to organize eight University-wide day-long teach-ins in a period of five years. These teach-ins covered, in an interdisciplinary and democratic manner, urgent current issues from sweatshops to terrorism. Over fifty different students gave presentations (many for the first time) at teach-ins from 1999-2002. We also helped organize two teach-ins on campus following 9-11. “What’s the Context?” took place promptly in September 2001 and “War=Profit: Economic Interests of the War on Terrorism” was held in April 2002. I participated in organizing committees for these teach-ins which include fellow faculty, staff, community members, current students, and alumni. Generally these teach-ins run from 9 am until 6 pm and offer about 6 panel presentations. The organizing committee (a democratic and open group) frames a series of panels to cover the topic at hand, identifies the crucial issues to be addressed by each panel, divides those into small manageable research projects, and then recruits and supports panelists in researching and organizing 10-minute presentations. At each of the 2002 teach-ins we had from 30-70 people in the room for each panel.

I have also built several Permaculture gardens, participated in activist legal defense teams, and supported my students in a variety of campaigns.

food

2015 Global Political Economy of Food and “Creating a new Food System“, lectures for ETH World Food Systems Summer School.

2015 “Local Food’s Victorious Struggle for Hegemony” in English, and Deutsch.

2013 Underground Restaurant: Local Food, Artisan Economics, Creative Political Culture.

2010 “Is Local Food a social movement?” Cultural Studies 10.6: 479-490.

2003 “Sustaining Local Agriculture: Barriers and Opportunities to Direct Marketing between farms and restaurants in Colorado”  Agriculture & Human Values 20: 301-321 .

2006 interview by Christine Petit, “Food, the Connecting Issue” in LOUDmouth 12 Spring.

2002 “Can Industrial Agriculture Feed the World?”  lecture to Collegiate Farm Bureau, Colorado State University, 16 April.

1995-2009, The Political Economy of Food University Syllabus

objects

Interviews with artisans, in preparation for forthcoming book on Local Objects

2008 The Local Objects Manifesto (how we could build an economy for local objects drawing on the methods of the local food movement)

2008 “Can Enchantment Save the World? (Is Alternative Consumption a Social Movement?)”, unpublished.

 

2011 “Participatory Democracy in Action: A comparative study of the Zapatistas and the Movimento Sem Terra”, with María Elena Martinez and Peter Rosset.  Latin American Perspectives 38.1: 102-119.

2009  intermediate version of Participatory Democracy in Action, including the literature review and a third case, the German Autonomen. More about this project.

2003 with the boron collective, mass action handbook getting your community on the road and into the street

2006 “grumpywarriorcool: what makes our movements white?”  in Igniting a Revolution: Voices In Defense of Mother Earth, ed. Anthony J. Nocella & Steven Best. AK Press, Oakland.

2004 “how can anti-imperialism not be anti-racist?: a critical impasse in the anti-globalization movement” Journal of World Systems Research 10.1. Winter 2004.

 

2011 “Participatory Democracy in Action: A comparative study of the Zapatistas and the Movimento Sem Terra”, with María Elena Martinez and Peter Rosset.  Latin American Perspectives 38.1: 102-119.

2009  intermediate version of Participatory Democracy in Action, including the literature review and a third case, the German Autonomen. More about this project.

2003 with the boron collective, mass action handbook getting your community on the road and into the street

2006 “grumpywarriorcool: what makes our movements white?”  in Igniting a Revolution: Voices In Defense of Mother Earth, ed. Anthony J. Nocella & Steven Best. AK Press, Oakland.

2004 “how can anti-imperialism not be anti-racist?: a critical impasse in the anti-globalization movement” Journal of World Systems Research 10.1. Winter 2004.

 

*** all use must cite source. these reports are scholarly work product, not data *** 

Seattle WTO 30 November 1999

Washington DC 16 April 2000 (report lost)

Los Angeles Democratic National Convention August 2000

Cincinnati TABD November 2000

Québec City FTAA 20 & 21 April 2001

Washington DC anti-war 29 & 30 September 2001

New York City World Economic Forum 31 Jan – 3 Feb 2002

Sacramento biotech 22-25 June 2003.

Cancún, México 5th WTO Ministerial September 2003

Miami FTAA november 2003

 

 

1995 It Takes a Village: Beyond the war on youth in urban communities, unpublished manuscript.

1998 “Safe Places to Go and Things to Do: Political Texts from Urban Youth of Color”, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, XXV: 3, September.

2003 ” ‘It’s Got to be Us’: Urban Youthworkers”, Children & Youth Services Review 25.3.

 

Book

2011 Shutting down the Streets: The political violence of social control in the era of alterglobalization 2011 NYU Press

Journal Articles

2008 “The Impact of Surveillance on the exercise of assembly rights: an interdisciplinary analysis”, co-authored with Luis Fernandez, Randall Amster, Lesley Wood, and Manuel J. Caro, Qualitative Sociology 31:3, 251-270.

2008 “The Legal Arena of Social Control: Protest Policing Since Seattle”, co-authored with Luis Fernandez, Social Justice 35.3.

2010 “radicalism, politics, organizing and safety on campus: a little operationalization” in Anthony Nocella, et. al., ed., Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex. AK Press.