Preface

Where I StandWhen engaging in qualitative research, it is important that the researcher be transparent about standpoint, perspective, identity, and experience and how these might impact the research.I would therefore like to take a moment to briefy explain, as bell hooks says, "where I stand."I have been an anarchist organizer for more than twenty years (for details, please refer to the Appendix).Anarchists critique all forms of oppression, exploitation, domination, and hierarchies.We also work to construct alternative liberatory systems and practices in everyday life.Tis political approach has several impacts on this book.First, it shapes the range and types of groups, networks, texts, theories, and organizations included in my research, which focuses on grassroots autonomous social movements and media projects that tend to reject political parties, capitalism, NGOs, the state, and other top-down institutions.Tese movements and projects are contesting neoliberal capitalism, corporate globalization, poverty, racism, colonialism, ableism, heteronormativity, eco-destruction, and more.Not just my research but also my activism has focused on these contestations.Second, my activism shapes the theoretical frameworks I fnd salient.In particular, anticapitalist and anti-state analyses are strong in anarchist organizing and thought, but intersectionality, political economy, and several other disciplines such as feminism, queer studies, critical race theory, and x Preface decolonization, in their most radical forms, also inform the analysis in this book, my activism, and my life more generally.My education lends me a certain amount of privilege; however, my relationship to this privilege is complex.I grew up in a rough-and-tumble lowermiddle-class family with working-class relatives.As an adult I have lived in poverty with a street-involved life including periods of precarious housing, homelessness, and squatting.In graduate school and as a professor, my background and politics have shaped experiences of non-belonging in academia.I have been considered too loud, too political, biased in my research, not respectable, and so on.At the same time, for the past ten years I have been working as a professor at a small rural university and have held several research grants (see Acknowledgments below).I have progressed through the ranks -a hierarchy that sits uneasily with me -and have recently been promoted to Full Professor.As someone who has never been at home in academia, I have felt the need to work harder to prove my worth in an institution I fnd smothering.At the same time, living in a rural area means I am cut of from radical movements and must leave home to be with comrades in struggle.Tis isolation creates an emotional tax and a feeling of nonbelonging where I live and work, a feeling further exacerbated by the pandemic.My education did not start in the social sciences and humanities.My undergraduate degree is in systems design engineering from the University of Waterloo, which shapes my understanding of technologies, algorithms, and so on.I subsequently completed a master's degree in English and creative writing at Concordia University (and published a novel, Kiss Painting, about anarchist punk activists), attempting to carve out liberatory spaces and practices in creative production within academia.Tis was followed by a PhD in English literature at York University where I wrote a thesis on "guerrilla texts, " or media and culture produced within an anti-authoritarian cultural logic.My thesis was infuenced by the emergent feld of alternative media, as well as my involvement in the punk and anarchist scenes in Toronto, Montreal, Germany, and beyond.Upon completing my PhD, I was fortunate to land a precarious gig as a limited-term appointment in the Communication Studies department at Concordia University in Montreal, during which time I was involved in organizing the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, among other things.I now work in the Media, Film, and Communications program in the Interdisciplinary Studies department at Lakehead University Orillia.In this book, I attempt to draw together and draw from these formative educational trajectories.

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