Tom Marshall
My ongoing PhD research, which is currently supported by an ESRC 1+3 award, explores contemporary practices of 'communization' and 'more-than-representational' political action in the Western world. It attempts to use the cycle of protests that has followed the 2008 global recession to develop new ways of thinking about the political as a set of creative, experimental practices. Whilst some of these practices attempt to create political space beyond the horizon of liberal-democratic institutions, others take the practices of communization as a form of living beyond the wage relation and the law of value.
My research is currently conceptualised around the problematique of the 'flight from capital', and notions of exodus that have been at the forefront of contemporary transgressive politics. This problematique pushes us to explore two dimensions: negativity (that is to say subtraction from the dominant, actualised relations of contemporary capitalism) and recomposition (the emergence of some kind of life beyond the valorisation of capital), and grapple with the way that the two are intertwined. I plan to pursue this theoretical puzzle through three case studies, which are currently:
1) The Global Occupy Movement as an experiment in the construction of political space.
2) Contemporary Anti-Enclosure Movements, particularly 'Teatro Valle Occupato' Opera occupation, in which immaterial labourers have come to manage their activities autonomously in the face of government cuts and the withdrawal of arts funding.
3) The creation of autonomous social spaces at the forefront of immaterial production, particularly the emergence of 'Hackspaces' in contemporary cities.
Through exploring these cases, I hope to tease out some of the problems at the heart of contemporary political activism, particularly those associated with finding effective forms of political organisation beyond the 'wage relation'. In doing this, I also hope to develop some kind of Autonomist critique of the debate around 'the Global Commons', that has emerged in contemporary International Relations Theory.
My wider research interests include the political dimensions of Continental (particularly French) Philosophy, Italian Autonomism, Global Activism, Anarchism, and the Marxist tradition.
Supervisors: Professor Milja Kurki and Dr Berit Bliesmann De Guevara
Address: Department of International Politics,
Aberystwyth University,
Penglais,
Aberystwyth,
SY23 3FE
My research is currently conceptualised around the problematique of the 'flight from capital', and notions of exodus that have been at the forefront of contemporary transgressive politics. This problematique pushes us to explore two dimensions: negativity (that is to say subtraction from the dominant, actualised relations of contemporary capitalism) and recomposition (the emergence of some kind of life beyond the valorisation of capital), and grapple with the way that the two are intertwined. I plan to pursue this theoretical puzzle through three case studies, which are currently:
1) The Global Occupy Movement as an experiment in the construction of political space.
2) Contemporary Anti-Enclosure Movements, particularly 'Teatro Valle Occupato' Opera occupation, in which immaterial labourers have come to manage their activities autonomously in the face of government cuts and the withdrawal of arts funding.
3) The creation of autonomous social spaces at the forefront of immaterial production, particularly the emergence of 'Hackspaces' in contemporary cities.
Through exploring these cases, I hope to tease out some of the problems at the heart of contemporary political activism, particularly those associated with finding effective forms of political organisation beyond the 'wage relation'. In doing this, I also hope to develop some kind of Autonomist critique of the debate around 'the Global Commons', that has emerged in contemporary International Relations Theory.
My wider research interests include the political dimensions of Continental (particularly French) Philosophy, Italian Autonomism, Global Activism, Anarchism, and the Marxist tradition.
Supervisors: Professor Milja Kurki and Dr Berit Bliesmann De Guevara
Address: Department of International Politics,
Aberystwyth University,
Penglais,
Aberystwyth,
SY23 3FE
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