Sandilands, Catriona A. H.Patrick, Darren Joseph2023-03-282023-03-282019-10-072023-03-28http://hdl.handle.net/10315/40947“‘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.Author owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.Environmental studiesGender studiesGeographyElectronic Thesis or Dissertation2023-03-28AutonomyTransfeminismAutonomous praxisQueerUrban geographySpatial praxisSpaceItalySocial movementsAutonomiaAuto-inchiestaPraxis