“This is how I want to live my life”: An Experiment in Prefigurative Feminist Organizing for a More Equitable and Inclusive City

Abstract

This paper aims to think differently about possibilities for feminist organizing in cities. We use a current experiment with city‐based feminist organizing to explore how it can be possible to work with the local state while at the same time challenging and disrupting understandings and practices that marginalize the diversity of women's needs, contributions and concerns. Trying to work “inside” the local state while maintaining an “outside” critical perspective involves a tricky balancing act between being inside enough to have credibility and effectiveness within the business of city politics and administration, and outside enough to maintain strong connections with the community and grassroots support. In managing this balancing act, we argue that the organization enacts a strategic use of prefiguration both within the organization and when engaging the local state.

Fragments of an anti‐fascist geography: Interrogating racism, nationalism, and state power

“…and action (how can we prefigure more liberatory non-dominating worlds?). Anarchists, as well as feminists, have been at the forefront of considering these questions (e.g., Franks, 2014;Mott, 2018;Siitanen, Klodawsky, & Andrew, 2015).…”

Arbeit außerhalb der Arbeitswelt – neue Organisationen im Rahmen sozialer Bewegungen am Beispiel Spaniens

“…Zentrale Grundsätze all dieser Organisationen entsprechen weitgehend jenen der anarchistischen Organisationstheorie (Graeber 2002;Reedy 2014), feministischen Prinzipien (Siltanen et al 2014;Butler 1995) K leaderless, it does not necessarily mean that it is also leadershipless" (Sutherland et al 2013, 759 In dem Zusammenhang steht auch die hohe Bedeutung von Emotionen. Diese ist auch in konventionellen Organisationen gegeben, wird hier aber auf einer sehr expliziten Ebene ausgehandelt.…”

The prefigurative power of urban political agroecology: rethinking the urbanisms of agroecological transitions for food system transformation

“…The type of practices the actors are engaged in, we believe, have begun to disrupt the structures of domination of the capitalist urbanism-food regime alliance and, taken together, are prefigurative of an agroecological urbanism. They address power and its structures not purely through forms of political organizing that are addressed toward a goal in the distant future (a way of political organizing often considered at odds with prefiguration), but through the day-to-day experimenting within contradictory, fluid social organizations, enmeshed within longer-term political strategies and idealized futures (Siltanen, Klodawsky, and Andrew 2015). We believe that prefigurative practices, for their ability to live productively with the tension between the now and the future, to build place-based alternatives (Escobar and Harcourt 2005), and to engage with a politics of the possible (Gibson-Graham 2006), are fertile pedagogical grounds for agroecological transitions.…”