| Ben Price | As projects director for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), I hear from people every day, asking for help to protect their right to live in self-governing communities instead of municipal resource colonies handed over to powerful corporations by way of...
What Do We Want? And Who Decides?
| Kai Huschke | In the fall of 2007 seven people – active on neighborhood, social justice, and environmental fronts – gathered in a small living room in one of Spokane, Washington’s poorest neighborhoods to talk about their community. Seated on a puffy brown couch or on the floor –...
High Practice
| An Interview with David Graeber | Is it possible to speak of the activist and the academic as the same person? What can be done to revive the relationship between critical thought and practice? The emergence of the alter-globalization movement has provoked some interesting responses to...
Working Theory
| Interview with a Plane Stupid Activist | On 1st March 2010, after a successful campaign to stop airport expansion at Heathrow, a group of activists swooped on a abandoned market garden near the airport. They transformed the site into a community garden and created a space to build local...
Local Acts of Resistance Counter Global ...
| Haleh Zandi | As I witness food injustices in Oakland, California, I am filled with a deep sense of urgency. People of color suffer disproportionately from diet-related diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. Youth in Oakland have little access to fresh produce in their...
Mastering Masterlessness
| Nina Power | ‘The most important quality of a schoolmaster is the virtue of ignorance’: Rancière in 2010 returns in an essay to the fundamental thesis of his 1987 book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, in which he had told the story of Joseph Jacotot, a curious kind of schoolteacher who...
The Practice of Unknowing
| Marianne Maeckelbergh | The popular educator Paolo Friere said ‘You make the path by walking it’. This saying is one of the guiding principles of the alterglobalization movement and it is this approach that radically differs from the dogmatic and overdetermined politics of the...
Can the Commons Move from the Margins to...
| David Bollier | Why is it that the commons is so often excluded from official policy discussions about how to manage resources and improve people’s lives? This strikes me as a serious void in our public conversations, one that we desperately need to correct. So much of nature, culture...