"Bologna is a School of Activism": TransFeministQueer Autonomy and Urban Spatial Praxis

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dc.contributor.advisorSandilands, Catriona A. H.
dc.contributor.authorPatrick, Darren Joseph
dc.date.accessioned2023-03-28T21:12:03Z
dc.date.available2023-03-28T21:12:03Z
dc.date.copyright2019-10-07
dc.date.issued2023-03-28
dc.date.updated2023-03-28T21:12:02Z
dc.degree.disciplineEnvironmental Studies
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstract“‘Bologna is a School of Activism’” is an activist ethnography of the Bologna-based transfeminist and queer autonomous collective Laboratorio Smaschieramenti (Laboratory of/for Demasculinization/Unmasking) and a history of Atlantide, the occupied and self-managed space that was its home from 1998 to 2015. The dissertation presents the Laboratorio’s distinctive approach to autonomy and argues that its praxes comprise a queer urban ecology of autonomous praxis. Positioned as an intervention into urban political ecology and queer geographies, I adopt a transversal and translational understanding of both autonomous social movements and the spatio-political praxes that sustain non-institutional knowledge production. The dissertation’s multi-method approach integrates activist archive-making, life-historical and semi-structured interviews, participant observation, media analysis, translation, and auto-inchiesta––or, collective self-inquiry––a method rooted in the Italian social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Across six chapters, I describe the evolution of the Laboratorio and Atlantide and develop the notion of ecologies of praxis to situate the place-based production of radical theory. Chapter 1, “Towards Ecologies of TransFeministQueer Autonomous Praxis,” reviews the literatures of urban political ecology, feminist and queer ecologies, geographies of sexuality, and feminist/queer geographies, and presents a critique of the disciplinary divergence of queer from feminist geographies by way of the former field’s appeal to queer of color scholarship and intersectional analysis. Chapters 2 and 3 build on the work of collective activist archive-making both to describe the epistemopolitics of transfeministqueer knowledge production and to situate Atlantide as a distinctive kind of space in which the traditions of autonomous Marxism have been actively recomposed. Chapter 4 details the evolution of the Laboratorio and describes its four main areas of political praxis. Chapters 5 and 6 tell the story of the Laboratorio’s and Atlantide’s engagements with the municipal government of Bologna and detail the circumstances that led to the eviction of Atlantide in 2015. As a whole, “‘Bologna is a School of Activism’” argues for an ecological understanding of the intersectionality of political struggles.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/40947
dc.languageen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectEnvironmental studies
dc.subjectGender studies
dc.subjectGeography
dc.subject.keywordsAutonomy
dc.subject.keywordsTransfeminism
dc.subject.keywordsAutonomous praxis
dc.subject.keywordsQueer
dc.subject.keywordsUrban geography
dc.subject.keywordsSpatial praxis
dc.subject.keywordsSpace
dc.subject.keywordsItaly
dc.subject.keywordsSocial movements
dc.subject.keywordsAutonomia
dc.subject.keywordsAuto-inchiesta
dc.subject.keywordsPraxis
dc.title"Bologna is a School of Activism": TransFeministQueer Autonomy and Urban Spatial Praxis
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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