School of Geography - Faculty of Environment

Project Overview

From the New Enclosures to the Circulation of the Commons

The aims of my research are to establish the extent to which social movements contribute to the collective creation of "commons", through which participants struggle not just against capitalist enclosure as a resistive aspect of their praxis, but as a way of co-creating prefigurative forms of life as an affirmative aspect of their politics. I am interested in the way this “commoning” acts as a motor for the production of what De Angelis terms “other values”, values radically different to those of capitalism, and the way in which these values, embodied within “value practices”, form the basis of a “value struggle” as capital attempts to co-opt and re-enclose the “doing” of these commoners. Ultimately, I am interested in discovering how this commoning circulates, as struggles and tactics are adapted and taken up in different spatial contexts, and how this might be both strategically accelerated and/or deepened so that what Dyer-Witheford has called the ‘circulation of the common’ might act as a more conscious and concrete force forming a process of what I tentatively call ‘commonisation’. At the heart of my research is the desire to develop militant methodologies that can, in Marta Malo de Molina’s words, ‘generate rebellious bodies’. I draw on a long and diverse history of radical research approaches, developed inside and outside the academy, which have been orientated towards finding a way out of the present state of things, so that we might move towards some form of post-capitalist future(s).

Supervisors

Dr Paul Chatterton
Dr David Bell

Publications

• 'Does the entrepreneuriat dream of electric sheep? Why contemporary activists talk about power'. Lunghi, A. Wheeler, S. (eds) (2012) Occupy Everything! Reflections on why it’s kicking off everywhere. London/New York: Minor compositions. With Russell, B.
• (2011) 'What can an assemblage do?', City, 15:5, pp577-583 . With Russell, B & Chatterton, P.
• Noterman, E. & Pusey, A. 'Inside, Outside and on the Edge: Experiments in Radical Pedagogies. In Haworth, R. (2012) Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education. Oakland: PM Press.
• Pusey, A., Russell, B. & Sealey-Huggins, L. 'From Copenhagen to Cancun, via Cochabamba: Tracing threads of Climate Justice', ACME (in press)
• Gillespie, T. Pusey, A, Russell, B, & Sealey-Huggins, L. 'Showdown at the Sausage Factory'. Roundhouse (2)
• Pusey, A. (2010) 'Social Centres and the New Cooperativism of the Common'. Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action, Volume 4, Number 1, Summer 2010, pp. 176-198. Available on the World Wide Web: journals.sfu.ca/affinities/index.php/affinities/article/view/31/124
• Pusey, A. & Russell, B. (2010) 'The Climate Crisis of the Crisis of Climate Politics?', Perspectives, available on the world wide web: anarchiststudies.org/node/423
• Pusey, A & Russell, B. (2010) Review of Commonwealth, by Hardt, M. & Negri, A. In, Red Pepper, April/May (171), p62
• Pusey, A. & Sealey-Huggins, L. (2010) 'Trouble at the Sausage Factory'. Red Pepper, June/July (172), p29
• Pusey, A. & Chatterton, P. (2008), ‘Hotspots: Social Centres’, New Internationalist November

Under review:

• 'Transforming the University: Beyond Students and Cuts '. ACME. With Sealey-Huggins, L.

Presentations

• With Leon Sealey-Huggins.. Value Struggles in the Sausage Factory:  Metrics and Resistance to Neoliberalisation. At Higher Education in the Liquid Modern Era: Swirling down the Drain? . University of Leeds, Spetember 2011.
• With Bertie Russell, Value Struggles In and Against the Sausage Factory. at Re-imagining Society Together: New Directions in Radical Praxis, University of Exeter, June 2011
• Re-imagining the University and the classroom with the Really Open University. At Educational Spaces of Alterity. University of Nottingham, April 2011
• With Sealey-Huggins, L. (2011) The 'Activist-Academic': A False Dilemma, Social Movement Scholarship: Perilous Positionings between Academia and Activism 2, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Seattle, April 2011
• part of panel, Critical Geographic Theories of Public Education's Problems and Struggles , Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Seattle, April 2011
• With Noterman, E. & Sealey-Huggins, L. Developing the Really Open
  University: problems and experiences. At Learning from each other's struggles: Social movements, activist and militant research, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, June 2010
• The Postpolitics of Climate Change, panel discussion on 'Climate Change and the Political' with Milburn, K, Russell, B, Seley-Huggins, L. Roundhouse Group,
  University of Leeds, February 2010
• The Postpolitics of Climate Change and the Production of Other Values, as part of a panel on 'Tackling Capitalism and the Climate Crisis'. Klima Forum, Copenhagen, December 2009.

Invited Presentations

• In, Against and Beyond the Neoliberal University? Reflections on the Really Open University. University of Central Lancashire, February 2012. 
• From the New Enclosures to the Circulation of the Common(s). Part of a one day workshop entitled 'Contested Spaces: Identity, Religion, Resisitance', at The International University College of Turin, May 2011
• Panel participant at the 'Private Law of Protest' workshop at Kent Law School, November 2011.
• Thinking creatively about anticapitalism: producing the urban commons. Part of  the 'Designing Economic Cultures' seminar series, at Goldsmiths, University of London, November 2011, with Hodkinson, S. & Gillespie, T.
• Brief talk at a book launch for Occupy Everything: Reflections on Why It’s Kicking off Everywhere (Lunghi & Wheeler, eds, 2012). in which I have a chapter published titled ‘Do the Entrepreneuriat Dream of Electric Sheep?’ (co-authored with Bertie Russell). Held at The Space Project in Leeds, March 2012.

Conferences Attended

• On the Idea of Communism, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, March 2009
• Antipode Summer Institute for the Geographies of Justice, Universities of Manchester & Leeds, May 2009
• Is Black and Red Dead? Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice, at the University of Nottingham, September 2009
• Deleuze and Activism, The Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University, November 2009
• Activist Geographies, Engaging Geographies Seminar Series, University of Leeds, March 2010
• Critical Theory and Education, University of Leeds, May 2010
• Critical Education for Critical Times, University of Nottingham, June 2010