Contemporary articulations of dissent to social order and its production of truth cannot be ignored any longer. Hamburg during the G20 gathering; Washington, D.C., on the day of Trumps inauguration; the squares and streets of Paris and Tunis at the end of 2018. Public space is temporarily taken by those who rise against the powers that keep structural oppression and social order in its place. Not only riots, but collective social centres, protest camps and temporary as well as permanent occupations of lands and buildings are other, utopian spatial alternatives created by autonomous social movements to prefigure a horizontal social organization.

This book discusses spatial practices of autonomous social movements, the movements who see their everyday experiences and creations as the revolution they are making, together with these movements and in taking the diversity of their articulations into account.Sites of Dissent is thus the story of a daring attempt to create research practices for radical transformation which requires a radical transformation of research practices. During this attempt, methodological rules of scientific research are broken, and methodological heresy and wild experimentation with research practices take place.

Sites of Dissent aims at opening new possibilities of including diverse ways of knowing and speaking into a collective knowledge creation process, at overcoming the individualized isolation in which the researcher produces knowledge about the outside world; and it aims to create a space for collective learning about spatial practices of autonomous social movements, to learn with and from the movements.

Alissa Starodub is a Graduate Researcher at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Introduction

Chapter 1. Nomad Science and Sites of Dissent

Chapter 2. Studying Autonomous Social Movements: A Collage

Chapter 3. Horizontal Participatory Action Research

Chapter 4. Sites of Dissent

Chapter 5. Collective Analysis

Chapter 6. Lines of Flight towards Horizontality

Conclusions

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

References