Tag: political violence

Tear Gas as Punishment

Jack Leff April 18, 2024
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Tear gas is a chemical weapon that was developed in the early 20th century and has been predominantly used by police or military forces to stifle political unrest. As a result, tear gas serves as a manifestation of state violence; by forcefully reminding us of our need to breathe, its function is to break collective solidarity. Over time, the tactics surrounding tear gas have evolved and become more militarized. Typically, this has looked like both a general greater use of tear gas at protests, and the development of tear gas as punishment. As a researcher of radical, left-wing social movements in the United States and the security technologies used by the state to suppress them, tear gas is particularly interesting to me because it serves as a security technology par excellence. By examining the interplay between state use of tear gas to punish activists and the protestors fighting against it, we catch a glimpse into the racial capitalist operations of the United States and where it is vulnerable to resistance. This essay examines the police tactic of kettling, how it is wielded to punish activists, and how radical left-wing organizers respond. (read more...)

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On the Harm in Valuing Fish as “Stock”

Jen Telesca April 4, 2017

A 2016 Report by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations remarks: “About 31.4 percent of the commercial wild fish stocks were overfished in 2013” (emphasis added). What is this authority saying—and what does it mean to say—when it uses the phrase “a fish stock?” What does stock as a native category reveal about the contemporary commitments of the experts most trusted to husband sea creatures under threat? What can be accomplished by attending to this and other terms that saturate discourse in the circles of marine conservation, the ones that treat fish as resources plugged into and benefiting ecosystem services like cogs in a fantastical machine? While conducting ethnographic research about ocean governance I found that even environmentalists regularly peddle the language of stock, so taken for granted and commonplace is the animal in its commodified form. (read more...)

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Another Architecture is Possible: Politics, Value, and Architecture in Argentina

Nicholas D'Avella April 26, 2016

Entering the architecture school at the University of Buenos Aires, students pass under a large banner bearing names and photographs of students and faculty disappeared by the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Together with texts like Arquitectos Que No Fueron (Novillo 2008)—literally “architects that weren’t”—the banner provokes reflection about an unrealized future for architecture that was imagined and then pressed to within an inch of its life over forty years ago. It asks students to consider their inheritance of that moment: to rethink the present through a past substantially shaped by violence, and to hold open the possibility that another architecture is possible. The technical aspects of architectural design—the mainstay of architects’ day-to-day training—were taught in an environment suffused with political inheritance. I arrived at the architecture school to conduct fieldwork for an ethnographic study of a construction boom that followed Argentina’s 2001 economic and political crisis. My current book project, Concrete Dreams, is based on two years of fieldwork with architects, real estate investors, and neighborhood residents, and describes how buildings were incorporated into post-crisis practices of economic investment (see D’Avella 2014), and how other forms of value were made to endure in the face of buildings’ increasingly central place in Argentine economic life. (read more...)

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