Jenny Pickerill

The University of Sheffield | Sheffield · Department of Geography

Indigenous activists and anarchist Settler people are articulating common ground in opposition to imperialism and colonialism. However, many anarchists have faced difficulties in Indigenous solidarity work through unintentional (often unwitting) transgressions and appropriations. Through the introduction of settler colonialism as a complicating pow...

This paper explores the role of emotions in activism. Although, increasingly, researchers have examined what emotions inspire or deter different forms of political and social movement activism, this paper takes a new direction by considering what spaces, practices and emotional stances are necessary to sustain individual and collective resistance i...

Drawing upon low impact development (LID), a radical approach to housing, livelihoods and everyday living, this article interrogates the notion of sustainability and argues for greater attention to be paid to its geographies. We wish to reconceptualise the geographies of sustainability to do five things: (i) pay close attention to ‘actually existin...

This is the authors final draft of an article published as Progress in Human Geography, 2006, 30(6), pp.730-746. The published version is available from http://phg.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/30/6/730, doi:10.1177/0309132506071516 This paper’s focus is what we call 'autonomous geographies' – spaces where there is a desire to constitute non-cap...

This paper focuses on everyday encounters between environmentalists and Indigenous activists during a dispute around a proposed gas hub development in the Kimberley, NW Australia, to explore the possibilities of practising environmentalism differently. It makes visible the complexity, contestations and dilemmas of putting environmentalism into prac...

Indigenous and decolonising geographies should be unsettling and challenging to the ontological foundations of the geographical discipline. Yet despite many scholars recognising and arguing for the need for these perspectives, Indigeneity remains marginal and Indigenous knowledge has been denied academic legitimacy within geography. Using ‘doings’...

Being experimental and experimenting in other ways of being is a central tenet of radical geography. There is often a distinction made between geographers conducting experiments or staging experimental interventions, and the geographical analysis of already existing sites of experimentation. Geographers have a fascination with how money, food, tran...

Community economy, since the mid‐1990s, has signalled an expanding and evolving project within radical geography that resonates with a host of initiatives taking place around the world. Activating community economy as an object of analysis and economic practice requires a rethinking of economy where the economy loses its power to structure and figu...

This paper is comprised of a series of short, conversational or polemical interventions reflecting on the political ‘moment’ that has emerged in the wake of the rise of right-populist politics, particularly in the Global North. We position the UK’s ‘Brexit’ vote and the election of Donald Trump as US President as emblematic of this shift, which has...

This paper is comprised of a series of short, conversational or polemical interventions reflecting on the political 'moment' that has emerged in the wake of the rise of right-populist politics, particularly in the Global North. We position the UK's 'Brexit' vote and the election of Donald Trump as US President as emblematic of this shift, which has...

Eco-homes have only been researched in fragmented and partial ways, which fail to adequately examine their complexities and possibilities. Numerous myths about eco-homes persist in the public imagination and policy support has been mixed with, in practice, little change to the construction of contemporary homes. The ecological and social potential...

There is continued failure to build homes for diverse and disabled occupancy. We use three eco-communities in England to explore how their eco-houses and wider community spaces accommodate the complex disability of hypotonic cerebral palsy. Using site visits, video footage, spatial mapping, field diary observations, surveys and interviews, this pap...

Living sustainably involves a broad spectrum of practices, from relying on a technological fix to a deep green vision. The latter is often articulated by advocates and critics alike as involving shifting to a simpler lifestyle that dispenses with some of the (perceived) frivolous or environmentally damaging attachments to luxury or convenience. Thi...

Eco-building is a male domain where men are presumed to be better builders and designers, more men than women build and women find their design ideas and contributions to eco-building are belittled. This article suggests that a focus on bodies, embodiment and the ‘doing’ of building is a potentially productive way to move beyond current gender disc...

The main argument in this article that academics should engage with blogging but should do so mindful of its problems – is valid and an important one. However, we also need to place blogging in its historical context of work on Internet activism and public geographies and relate it to the current rising trend for geographers to employ other social...

Ecovillages are arguably seen as "pioneers of change." Yet, thus far, little light has been shed on their potential to effect change beyond their own borders. This issue of RCC Perspectives presents a much needed overview of research on ecovillages, looking at the history and philosophy of utopias and presenting case studies and ongoing research fr...

The late nineteenth century saw a burgeoning of geographical writings from influential anarchist thinkers like Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus. Yet despite the vigorous intellectual debate sparked by the works of these two individuals, following their deaths anarchist ideas within geography faded. It was not until the 1970s that anarchism was onc...

Analysing the Occupy movement is important for understanding the political importance of social movements and the theoretical limits of social movement approaches. Occupy enables us to critically re-examine and question what we think we know about the processes of collective action. We identify eight contentions which illustrate why Occupy matters...

Social scientists often use the notion of ‘transition’ to denote diverse trajectories of change in different types of bodies: from individuals, to communities, to nation-states. Yet little work has theorised how transition might occur across, between, or beyond these bodies. The aim of this paper is to sketch out a multiple, synthetic, and gene...

This article explores a number of key questions that serve to introduce this special issue on the ethics of research on activism. We first set out the limitations of the bureaucratic response to ethical complexities in our field. We then examine two approaches often used to justify research that demands time consuming and potentially risky particip...

This edited volume proceeds from the perspective that as contemporary global challenges push anarchist agendas back into widespread currency, geographers need to rise to this occasion and begin (re)mapping the possibilities of what anarchist perspectives might yet contribute to the discipline. We develop an exploratory volume, where explicitly and...

Low impact development (LID) has been characterised as a radical approach to housing, livelihoods and everyday living which began in Britain in the 1990s as a grassroots response to the overlapping crises of sustainability (Halfacree, 2006; Maxey, 2009). It employs approaches that dramatically reduce humans’ impact upon the environment, demonstrati...

This article aims to broaden and deepen debates on the everyday practices of autonomous activists. To do this we present three main research findings from a recent research project that looked in detail at what we called 'autonomous geographies'. First, in terms of political identity, we highlight how participants in political projects problematise...

Series Editors' Preface viii Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Space, Contestation and the Political 1 Part I Networking the Political 13 1 Place and the Relational Construction of Political Identities 15 2 Geographies of Solidarities and Antagonisms 36 Part II Geographies of Connection and Contestation 57 3 Labourers' Politics and Mercantile Netwo...

This paper is an honest, reflexive account of action research with activists. Through a two year project called 'Autonomous Geographies', a team of researchers undertook case studies with three groups: self-managed social centres, tenants resisting housing privatisation, and eco-pioneers setting up a Low Impact Development. The original aim was to...

The increased flexibility facilitated by Information and Communication Technologies has enabled anti-war activists to garner great control over representations of their arguments. This paper explores the value of the symbolic dimension of collective action through three cumulative forms of analysis: understanding how the symbolic domain is used; ex...

Critiquing the usefulness of cosmopolitanism this paper argues that we need a more nuanced and subtle understanding of how commonalities are found, created and maintained across difference. This paper uses two juxtapositions of perspective (around place and environment) to explore how such boundaries of difference can be negotiated. It uses an exam...

This article observes high levels of anxiety about war in the present era, although wars are in decline. It addresses this paradox by distinguishing ideal-typical features of Industrial and Information War. Industrial War is fought predominantly between states over territory, harnesses industry and the military, and requires mass mobilisation of pe...

This paper was published as Antipode, 2008, 40 (5), pp. 719-723. It is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com. Doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00633.x Metadata only entry Embargoed until November 2010. Full text of this item does not appear in the LRA. Debates about the possibilities and importance of open access publishing in academia are reaching a...

This is the author's final draft of the paper published as Antipode, 2008, 40 (3), pp. 482 - 487. The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com. Doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00617.x None.

The upsurge in activism opposing wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq appears to represent a significant process of transnational collective action. Using data collected through participant observation, interviews and web site analysis, this article explores the role of the Internet in facilitating transnational activism between Australia,...

This is the author's final draft of the paper published as Environmental Politics, 2008, 17 (1), pp. 95-104. The final version is available from http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1080/09644010701811681. Doi: 10.1080/09644010701811681 There is increasing recognition that environmental groups' evocations of 'wilderness' as a...

This thoroughly interdisciplinary book is the first major study of the anti-war movement after the recent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Brimming with empirical material that comes from two years of fieldwork and capturing the passions of its subjects, Anti-War Activism addresses post-9/11 circumstances, the character of Information War that pr...

The recent anti-war movement appears to have crossed boundaries in transnational collective action directed at the sphere of international relations. Commentary from within the movement, from mainstream media and from recent scholarly studies often highlights this trans nationalism as a defining feature. In this chapter we identify those aspects of...

The anti-war movement in Britain is generally described in singular terms, thereby implying there is a unified body. It is more accurate to refer to the collectivity as the anti-war and peace movements because this encompasses the range of activists, from those wanting to see one side defeated to those who abhor all forms of violence. For the sake...

This book sets out to analyse the anti-war movement in Britain during the opening years of the 21st century. To address this subject adequately we need first to detail the circumstances in which anti-war activism developed over this period. That such activity is shaped by conditions beyond activists themselves is scarcely contentious, since it is o...

There is a continuum of anti-war activism ranging from the person full-time devoted to the cause to the onlooker who is moved to do little more than sign a petition opposing the occupation of Iraq. Analysts try to distinguish activism by what people do, yet the notion must also involve people’s own perceptions; since distinctions between ‘adherents...

The ways in which a group represents campaign messages can be vital to its success. The more effective a group’s communication, the more likely it is to capture public, media or political attention. Social movement scholars, in a body of work that deals specifically with the framing of movement messages, indicate that movement groups typically atte...

A focal concern of this study has been activist uses of technology rather than the properties of technologies. Nevertheless, where activists are making use of ICTs they show considerable awareness of ways in which the properties of those technologies affect their practices. ICT use occurs on a number of levels and, in particular, we find a differen...

The concern of this chapter is with the information environment of war, its distinguishing features, and ways in which the anti-war and peace movement adapts and contributes to this changing domain. By information environment we mean the full range of information resources available to the public, which may extend from recollections of returning co...

The paper examines Australian Indymedia collectives as a means to improve understanding of the practices of alter-globalisation movements. Indymedia, which emerged around the anti-World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle in 1999 is an attempt by media activists to offer new forms of alternative media using the internet and to widen the possibil...

This is a copy of paper which was presented at the Resistance Studies Network launch: Workshop on Resistance, Power and Agency, 6th June 2007, University of Göteborg, Sweden by Dr Jenny Pickerill. I think we all know why we need Resistance Studies. We do not have to look far to see freedoms being eroded, injustices and inequalities. And if any of y...

This is the author's draft of an article which was published in 'International Relations' by Sage. Using the concept of Information War we explore the conditions and mediation of contemporary war. Examples from British anti-war and peace movements are then employed to better understand the importance of ‘symbolic struggles’, focusing on the importa...

This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Parliamentary Affairs following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version [Parliamentary Affairs, 2006, 59,(2) pp.266-282] is available online at: http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/59/2/266 This paper explores the importance of radical...

Electronic Democracy analyses the impact of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) within representative democracy, such as political parties, pressure groups, new social movements and executive and legislative bodies. Arguing for the validity of social perspective in theory building, it examines how representative democracies are ad...

The internet is rapidly permeating the everyday lives of many British citizens. The politics of cyberspace is of importance both for the future use of computer mediated communication (CMC) and within traditional political arenas, society and commerce. As political activists incorporate CMC into their repertoire this will influence not only their ow...

Environmental activists have been widely recognised for their innovative use of the media, often deploying it to raise public awareness and pressurise politicians. Over the last few years environmentalists have extended their media savvy to the use of the internet. Individuals and groups have used the technology to publicise their campaigns, mobili...

Water companies require quick methods of identifying leakage from rural subterranean aqueducts over large areas. This research assessed the possibility of locating water leaks using airborne remotely sensed data and thus considered if such leaks expressed unique and identifiable features. Analysis of soil moisture and vegetation biomass inferred us...

This article reports a research project concerned with Information War (Robins and Webster, 1999; Webster 2003, 2006; Pickerill and Webster 2006). It stresses that, in privileged areas of the world, war is now fought generally at a distance, with little direct risk to citizens of these nations. Yet these populations experience war in much expanded...

The contemporary anti-war movement is diverse and heterogeneous. It is at once fractured and fragmented, and yet simultaneously full of alliances and coalitions. This paper critically explores these alliances and fractures. Drawing materials from a two year ESRC research project, it provides evidence from in-depth analysis of case studies from a fu...

This is the unpublished paper of a presentation given at the Information, Communication and Society Symposium, at Oxford University in September 2003. Indymedia is a global open publishing project that has redefined what we might understand as ‘media’. Based upon the premise of openness the alternative media network has employed many novel features...

This briefing paper was published by the International Security Programme at Chatham House, in conjunction with the New Security Challenges Programme of the Economic and Social Research Council. Copyright © The Royal Institute of International Affairs. It is available from http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/9803_bp1007islamuk.pdf In 2002 the UK’s...