Foreword

Looking Backward/Acting Forward

Myrna Margulies Breitbart

School of Critical Social Inquiry, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, USA;
mmbSS@hampshire.edu

This special issue of Antipode on “anarchist geography” is a welcome and long

overdue effort to demonstrate the centrality of anarchist thought and practice to
twenty-first century geography. The essays are rich with theoretical insight and
present many important examples of transformative social practice. I am delighted
that the Editorial Collective took up the challenge of establishing the currency of
an anarchist perspective and am deeply honored to be asked to write this brief
foreword.

First Encounters with Kropotkin and Anarchist

Geography
When I first stumbled upon the geographical writings of Kropotkin and Reclus as a
graduate student I wondered why we had been fed so much Christaller and Von
Thunen without ever encountering the work of these astonishingly prescient activist
geographers. As students immersed in anti-Vietnam war protests and anti-poverty
struggles, we began to question the role of our institutions of higher education
in social change and we initiated many conversations about how best to bring
relevance to our discipline. With classes such as “Capital, Volume One” and “The
Geography of American Poverty”, we felt well schooled in critiques of capitalism
and thought we understood the geographic dimensions of inequality. What many
of us hungered for was more attention to how spatial relationships and alternative
uses of space might become vehicles for radical social change.
The editors of this special issue rightly underscore how “social transformation
is . . . necessarily a spatial project” (Springer et al 2012: Introduction). The desire to
explore this potential is what captured our imaginations as students in the 1970s. As
young geographers we were especially interested in finding new ways to think about
space beyond its constraints, and to examine its potential as a partner in struggle.
We searched for theories, or rather, practices, that would move us closer to the
kind of society we envisioned—changes that did not necessarily depend on mass
movements and yet could ignite often incremental, yet important, transformations
of everyday work and living environments. These activities eventually led to the birth
of Antipode.
My personal interest in the connection between geographic theory and social
change was reflected in an early essay entitled “Impressions of an anarchist

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landscape” (Breitbart 1975). In this short initial effort, I used Kropotkin’s and
Proudhon’s writings to extract some of the spatial implications of anarchist ideology
and developed very preliminary thoughts on what I thought of then as “a people’s
location theory” (Kropotkin 1927 [1905], 1974).1 Eventually my graduate research
focused on the Spanish Anarchist movement, where the role of space in radical
transformation was quite explicit (see Breitbart 1978). My dissertation began as
an exploration of the practices of worker’s control and community-based forms
of decentralized planning in the USA. A turning point occurred in 1974 when a
member of the Black Rose collective in Cambridge, Massachusetts informed me of
an upcoming lecture by Sam Dolgoff2 on Spanish anarchism, a movement about
which I knew nothing. I decided to go to this lecture with Maria Dolores Garcia-
Ramon, a post-doctoral colleague at Clark. Dolores had grown up in Barcelona when
Franco was still alive. Due to the suppression of information under the dictatorship,
she too knew little about the anarchist social revolution that accompanied the civil
war from 1936 to 1939.
Dolgoff shared inspiring examples of urban and rural collectivization at this talk,
and provided us with the names of Spanish anarchists who were still alive in exile in
southern France. He also spoke at length about the direct influence of geographers
Kropotkin and Reclus on the Spanish anarchist social revolution (Dolgoff 1974).
This naturally piqued my interest, and before long I found myself sitting in the
Institute of Social History in Amsterdam reading through documents that had been
transported out of Spain before Franco’s fascist army had the chance to destroy
them. I remember sitting at a desk and reading the 1936 Decree of Collectivization,
which, in spite of its title, was actually a counter-revolutionary effort on the part of
the coalition Republican government of Catalonia to bring worker collectivization
under control. Before long I felt someone tap on my shoulder. In imperfect English
this very large older gentlemen smiled and pointed to the signature on the bottom of
the Decree. The comrade, Josep Tarradellas, then pointed to himself with great pride.
I wrote my dissertation on this movement following many extraordinary interviews
with such anarchists as José Peirats [a member of the Young Libertarians, editor
of Solidaridad Obrera, a member of the Durruti Column, and an active participant
in the CNT (Confederacion National de Trabajo)]; Federica Montseny (the Emma
Goldman of Spain, who was a poet, novelist and anarcha-feminist, and who made
a controversial decision to become Minister of Health for the coalition government
during the Civil War); Frank Mintz (a scholar of the Spanish anarchist collectives
active the French anarcho-syndicalist movement); Federico Arcos (another Spanish
anarchist who moved to Windsor, Ontario after the Civil War and compiled perhaps
the largest library of anarchist literature and art in the world); and Pura Perez
(Federico’s companera, who was also in the anarchist youth movement in Spain
and a lifelong anarcha-feminist involved in Mujeres Libres). A key lesson from their
rich teachings is to maintain the ideal of and hope for change even in the face of
unspeakable obstacles or total defeat. José Peirats and Federico Arcos captured this
best as they reflected, near the end of the twentieth century, on the conclusion of
the Spanish Revolution following the Civil War:
Two things have to be distinguished in a revolution: the constructive work of changing
people’s minds and economic circumstances, which is the result of an incorruptible


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integrity; and the historical outcome of the revolution itself. It is not always possible to
control the fate of a political revolution, which has its own laws of rise and decline. But
we can see to it that when the revolution is over there remain concrete, constructive
achievements. Perhaps this residue of permanent achievement is the only real and useful
revolution. Pity the revolution that devours itself in order to obtain victory. Pity the
revolution that waits for a final triumph to put its ideals into practice (Peirats 1990:189).
One of the things that Emma Goldman said that I remember well is that “Life without an
ideal is a spiritual death. When you cannot dream any longer, you die.” We are idealists;
we have an ideal and this is our life (Arcos interview in Pacific Street Films 2010).

Spending time with these individuals provided an education that far exceeded what
I was able to absorb from the historical literature. What struck me then, and has
remained with me since, is the seamless way in which their anarchism became their
very being, infusing every aspect of their lives. Anarchism was not a “philosophy”
or a “theory” to these individuals, though it could surely be theorized and written
about. It was a way of life that influenced how you conduct your relationships
with others, and how you work to expand arenas of freedom in collaboration with
others during your lifetime. Nearly all of the social anarchists I met as a geography
graduate student had a “day job” that was profoundly different from the larger task
to which they committed their lives as agents of radical social change. Sam Dolgoff,
translator of Bakunin into English, and the author of many books, including The
Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective (Dolgoff 1976), was a house painter by trade.
Federico Arcos worked for years in the Canadian offices of Ford Motor Company
while creating networks of communication among anarchists worldwide. The point
is that their essential identity and life’s work was not formed through their paid
occupation; it was molded by their lifelong activism and continuing promotion of
an anarchist social agenda.
I returned to Clark inspired by the character and generosity of the many anarchists
I had met and whose stories I wanted to share. With the support of Richard Peet, I
began to compile essays for the first issue of Antipode on anarchist geography and
decentralism.

Where has Anarchist Geography Traveled Since?

Since the early issue of Antipode on “Anarchism and Environment”3 there have
been sporadic essays and books published that deal explicitly with the topic of
“anarchist geography”, including several written by non-geographers (eg Clark and
Martin 2004; Dunbar 1978; Fleming 1979; Miller 1976; Ward 1974). The editors of
this special issue make a point, however, of referring to the “quiet” that followed
these early forays (Introduction). They discuss how Marxist, feminist, and post-
structuralist critiques have dominated, while the more recent worldwide financial
crisis and Occupy movements, once again, emphasize the relevance and insight
of anarchist approaches to human geography in struggles for social change. While
I surely concur with this latter point, I think the notion that anarchist geography
lay dormant between the late 1970s and the present, or was overshadowed by
other radical perspectives, requires more discussion that I will only allude to briefly
here. From my perspective, anarchist geography did move forward both outside


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and inside the discipline of geography and the academy post 1980. It is important
to examine the where and how of this forward movement if, in fact, the ideas and
actions that are its products are to be given primacy over disciplinary affiliations or
over the publications that disseminated them.
One place to begin is with a large international gathering of anarchists that took
place in Venice, Italy in September 1984. This event was significant for many reasons,
not the least of which was its drawing of attention to the spatial dimensions of both
oppression and liberation. The event was sparked by the anniversary of George
Orwell’s 1984, and its goal was to bring together a diverse array of activists to reflect
upon the present and future of anarchism. The week-long event, held in numerous
outdoor public spaces of the city (including a large circus tent erected on a main
square), attracted hundreds of people and provided an extraordinary opportunity to
engage in dialogue with syndicalists and anarcho-communists, older veterans of the
Spanish Civil War, feminists, young punk anti-nuclear activists, municipalists, and
social ecologists. Geography was prominent at this event. Environmental justice,
nuclear proliferation, housing needs, and inequities in resource distribution were
central to discussions, as was the role of insurgent place-making, occupations of
public space, and the role of visible transformations of the built environment in
resistance, community organizing, and experimentation in sustainable land use and
planning. Local school children were brought to some of these events to learn
about anarchism. Videographers and graphic artists produced amazing visual art in
the streets, and everyone was fed from makeshift kitchens. It was here, at a picnic
table in the middle of a small square, that I first met Colin and Harriet Ward. Writing
about the event for The Guardian, Ward described the gathering as an opportunity
to seek “new directions for constructive anarchism, with the emphasis on building
the new in the shell of the old”.
My personal memory of the event is two-fold. On the one hand, I recall the
enormous disagreements that emerged in discussions about strategies for change.
On the other hand, the sharing of so many diverse perspectives, informed as they
were by differences of culture, race, age, and gender, also contributed to the
development of a more complex and richer base of knowledge that all participants
could draw upon to envision alternatives and further their critique of the existing
state of the world. While I attended this event with the lens of a geographer and an
academic, I left with a broader vision of who could contribute to the development of
anarchist geography from outside as well as inside the discipline. This partly explains
why I am reluctant to agree with the editors of this special issue that geography lay
dormant after the late 1970s.4
Anarchists always look for the interstices and marginal spaces where there is the
possibility of doing things differently. This is another reason why I do not believe
that anarchism ever went into remission in geography. Rather, it seems that those
influenced by its tenets were drawn into various occupations and forms of direct
action both within and outside the university. Some activist scholars left the academy
altogether to pursue their activism or to move into spatial-related fields with a more
hands-on dimension such as planning, design, environmental education, or even
community organizing. Some, like myself, did find a home in academia where it
was possible to continue work towards radical social change both through teaching


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and through community-based work. In my own case, this was made easier by the
fact that my home institution, Hampshire College, was birthed in the 1960s as a
deliberately constructed undergraduate alternative to traditional hierarchical forms
of higher education.5
Many activists and scholars from outside the discipline of geography have
sought to demonstrate the underlying role of social domination and hierarchy in
environmental destruction. Notable here are Ynestra King (1982, 1989), Gwyn Kirk
(1983, 1989, 1997, 1998) and Murray Bookchin (2005). Several of these individuals
participated in major occupations (eg the anti-cruise missile Women’s Peace Camps
at Greenham Common and the surrounding of the Pentagon of the 1980s). They
published not only in feminist journals but also in popular zines and pamphlets,
much as Kropotkin and Reclus did in their effort to reach a larger audience in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the introduction to the first Antipode
issue on “Anarchism and Environment”, I tried to make the point that anarchism
and feminism converge in many important areas, whether it is in attacks on all forms
of hierarchy and domination or in seeing the “personal” as “political”. I still believe
that it is important not to draw clear demarcations between feminist and anarchist
contributions to geography, but rather look at their intersections. Similarly, while
there are some very clear distinctions to be made between anarchism and Marxism
in geography, the lines separating radical perspectives sometimes blur. This point is
implicit in the essay that Richard White and Colin Williams (2012) have written for
this special issue where they discuss the extensive work of J.K. Gibson-Graham and
the ongoing Community Economies project.6 This important body of work focuses
on developing a theory and practice of a post-neoliberal economic future using
extensive examples of already existing and viable cooperative economic and social
practices. Many facets of this work converge with the aims of anarchist geography.
Other spatial practitioners, such as architect and educator, Colin Ward,
emphasized the importance of liberatory education as the core of anarchism’s
revolutionary project, and then worked to significantly alter secondary school and
college level art and geography curricula. Ward (1978), numerous public scholars
concerned with environmental activism and youth empowerment (eg Cahill 2006;
Chawla 2002; Hart 1997; Hart, Selim and Beeton 2006), and geographers (eg
Breitbart, 1995, 1997; Breitbart and Kepes 2007) worked to challenge traditional
in-classroom approaches to learning. Like Ward, they establish imagination and
critical inquiry through the study of the built environment as the very foundation
for meaningful citizenship. From my perspective, this project carries Kropotkin’s
ideas set out in the essay “What geography ought be” (Kropotkin 1885) forward
by pioneering hands-on participatory research that builds on young people’s
innate curiosity and familiarity with their immediate surroundings. Such approaches
establish a crucial role for geography in social justice activism at a local level by
building the research and critical inquiry skills of local residents of all ages, and
by developing the capacity of local neighborhoods to articulate needs and desires
while claiming space for alternative approaches to housing, cultural production, and
economic development.
Colin Ward and several of the practitioners named above did not generally publish
in academic journals, preferring to write for a more general audience. In Ward’s case


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this included classroom teachers with whom he founded the Bulletin of Environmental
Education as a vehicle to present examples of radical teaching practice. Ward also
helped to start several Urban Studies Centres in the UK, where new ideas and
creative practices could be collected for use. Many geographers post 1970 have
continued to challenge educational hierarchies and sought to break down the
borders between the academy and the community, as Farhang Rouhani (2012)
describes in this special issue. Continuing the work of the Venice gathering, they
challenge restrictions to imaginative and fruitful critical inquiries that are erected
through the maintenance of strict disciplinary boundaries.
I realize that I may be accused here of favoring the work of those who identify
with social anarchism as a practice or “way of life”, viewing geography as a helpful
means to a radical end, over others who maintain more of an academic interest in
anarchism and a strong loyalty to promoting the discipline. In either case, we have
evolved to the point where interdisciplinarity is no longer a luxury but a necessity
if we are to fuel struggles for social justice and better understand global change
and the exercise of power. As geographers, we have a lot to contribute to this
epistemological mix.

Multiple Agendas for the Future of Anarchist

Geography
The simple point that anarchist geography continues to develop our understanding
of human/environment relationships, and exerts influence on theories and practices
of social change from outside as well as inside the discipline says little about where
it might go in the future. The authors in this special issue lay a basis for building an
agenda that could reanimate radical geography through the application of social
anarchist principles. I want to underscore the importance of adopting this agenda
and also highlight a few areas where we could devote considerably more attention:
(1) radical pedagogy; (2) use of space for resistance and the incubation of alternative
social structures; and (3) dissemination of new ideas and spatial/social practices.

Radicalizing Pedagogy
The first of these areas was touched upon above and is addressed by several
contributors to this special issue, as they point to the importance of denying any
false dichotomy between the academy as space of knowledge production and the
community as a site of struggle. We must not leave our own institutional structures
outside critique or beyond an agenda for change as we theorize and participate in
various autonomous movements for social justice outside the academy. This means
challenging tenure, research and teaching practices within the academy that restrict
definitions and sources of knowledge production, and that penalize or fail to value
research that is collaboratively generated or actively involves the community outside
the university. Challenging standard research practice and routes to tenure involves
questioning restrictions on what we write, where we publish, and who we partner
with in our writing. With respect to in-classroom teaching we must bring our own
approaches to the classroom into line with anarchist teaching methods that value


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the innate curiosity of students and their different ways of learning and approaches
to knowledge. We must, in short, do what Simon Springer (2012) suggests in this
special issue, and explore the untapped potential of anarchist praxis. This requires a
broadening of the possibilities for more cross-disciplinary teaching, the restructuring
of in-classroom learning using non-hierarchical methods, and support for what is
now called “engaged learning” outside the classroom.
With respect to the latter, many colleges now promote community internships
as co-curricular forms of learning. Few, however, give real academic credit for
such experiences or require the kind of reflection that enables students to truly
integrate their out-of-classroom learning with their in-classroom work. Fewer, still,
allow community members outside the university to drive the research agenda;
nor do colleges generally prepare students and faculty to address community-
defined agendas in ways that benefit the community directly in their everyday
survival struggles. Community organizations challenge unequal and exploitative
community/college relationships and seek reciprocity as they assume a role in the
engaged learning of our students. Those of us who promote engaged learning
need to give serious consideration to how we might forge more effective local and
global partnerships that support struggles for social justice while also addressing the
educational needs of our students.
To answer this challenge, we can continue to extend the legacy of Colin Ward and
others who believe that the immediate neighborhood environments that we inhabit
provide fertile ground for critical learning and active engagement. At the same
time, we must require our institutions to become responsible citizens as opposed
to predatory land grabbers. We must also find ways to make the work we do,
and the resources our institutions have, more accessible and more relevant to the
needs of the larger surrounding community (everything from providing meeting
space; the opportunity to take or teach classes; access to computers and on-
campus events; community product purchasing agreements, etc. to encouraging
a greater community influence over our curricula and access to free consultancy
services).7
Another imperative is to recast rather traditional practices, such as academic
conferences, to better serve the needs of the larger community. Several years ago
the radical Planner’s Network, directed then by Ken Reardon, asked my institution to
host their next conference. Our response was to approach a number of community-
based partner organizations in Holyoke, Massachusetts to ask if they would co-
sponsor the event with us. In the end, they set the whole agenda for the conference
around their own interests, which were to elicit ideas from planners on how to
overcome political and social obstacles to addressing the needs of lower income
Latino residents, and to create an environment in which the city could be defined not
by its deficiencies and the historical obsolescence, but by the innovative community-
building initiatives underway. The title they chose to represent these goals was
“Bridging divides and building futures in historic cities”. Community partners
went on to organize entire sessions, host participants on city tours of designated
community-based projects, and arrange a dinner catered by local restaurants that
included dance performances by local youth and a night of salsa. Only the first


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welcoming session was held in the auditorium of the college; the remainder was
held in the city of Holyoke (15 miles from campus), focusing on the work of
community-based organizations, who directly challenged attendees to help them
address key planning dilemmas.
Like so many of my colleagues, I share the experience of living in a liminal space,
one foot inside and the other outside the college. None of this personal history or
a call for “exploding the school”—Colin Ward’s and Anthony Fyson’s (1973) term
for valuing and seeking knowledge outside the traditional classroom—is meant
to suggest that geography as a discipline would not benefit from a more active
engagement with anarchist spatial theory, particularly one as open to variety and
methodological interpretation as this special issue. It is to suggest, rather, that this
larger project expand to include more extensive and deliberate application of critical
pedagogical practices and outcomes to teaching and engaged research.

Creating Spaces for Resistance and the Incubation of Alternative

Structures
We know that space is key to enforcing inequality, oppression and the exercise of
power in all of its many forms. Using the landscape and built environment to reveal
and educate on the issue of social injustice is central to building a movement for
change, as the first WTO protests in Seattle and the current Occupations illustrate.
As geographers, we need to do much more, however, to develop and document
decentralist alternatives.
In a short pamphlet entitled The Relevance of Anarchism to Modern Society,
Sam Dolgoff (1989 [1970]) argued that the increased complexity of society made
anarchism more rather than less relevant. The focus was not to be on some distant
future utopia but rather on the stimulation of those forces “propelling society in
an anarchist direction” through the “practical application of anarchist principles to
the realities of social living”. Errico Malatesta (1965) said essentially the same thing
when he argued strongly for the importance of generating concrete examples of
how to live differently and collectively. Social anarchists are not in the business of
prescribing blueprints for a new society or the landscape that would support it.
They believe that social and spatial alternatives must emerge from specific historical
circumstances as well as local needs and desires. That said, there is a lot to be
done and more that can be documented in the pages of journals like Antipode
to bring attention to grassroots mobilizations that successfully subvert planning
agendas promoted by private developers or the state, and that create new spaces
for resistance and experimentation with alternative social, economic and cultural
formations.
The editors of this special issue point out that anarchism is a “philosophy of
everyday life” and at times “a tool for survival, well-being, and social change”
(Introduction). We need to identify and examine examples that illustrate this value
more closely, evaluate the elements that present obstacles or contribute to their
success, and theorize from this analysis. Drawing attention to positive examples of
even small spaces within which cooperative and heterodox forms of production,
distribution or consumption take place can expand our notions of efficiency.


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Examining the intricacies of new networks and federations established to aid

resistance movements, anchor a new economic base, or enable living arrangements
and cultural exchange that is more responsive to people’s needs and desires expands
the range of mechanisms available to promote freedom and achieve greater social
justice. Aided by technology, even small-scale examples can suggest new avenues for
labor and political organizing across borders. They can also promote the dismantling
of overly “ordered” landscapes that restrict the use of public space and exercise social
control.
The emphasis of anarchist geography on decentering knowledge has led to many
critiques of spatial planning. In the effort to demonstrate the efficacy of alternatives,
we should be documenting and evaluating more examples of participatory planning
and design processes, especially those that build on local assets and provide a means
for residents to better articulate their needs and desires. Anarchist geography must
continue to develop arguments against the practice of state-centered planning while
simultaneously demanding access to resources that enable the decentralization of
decision-making and support the reclamation by residents of public space. New
models of regional exchange, and new designs for flexible space that allows for
multiple and changing uses are also key.
Given the growing number of transnational communities in cities that are
characterized by heterogeneous cultural geographies, how might we identify those
structures and places where difference in the very conduct of daily life is effectively
negotiated without the intervention of the state? As more people choose or are
forced to move across borders, how can spaces emerge to best accommodate their
needs, and how do new attachments to place evolve or fail to evolve in the context
of neoliberal agendas? I am clearly not alone in identifying these topics as relevant
to the future of anarchist geography (see, for example, Chatterton 2006; Pickerill
and Chatterton 2006, among many others).

Dissemination of New Ideas and Spatial/Social Practices

Anarchists who were so successful in generating a movement for widespread change
in Spain prior to and in the midst of the Civil War pursued many different strategies
to share and build upon their ideas. They recognized that real and lasting change
had to start with the individual and move people on an emotional as well as factual
level. This is why it was not uncommon for so many inspirational activists of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to combine journalistic and scholarly
writing with more artistic forms of expression. Federica Montseny’s family, for
example, started an important literary journal, La Revista, which published fictional
stories of people that illustrated both their imperfections and their potential. Such
writing inspired the imagination and provided a canvas upon which concrete
examples of non-hierarchical relationships, mutual aid, and the types of built
environments that could support these alternatives could be introduced. Kropotkin
functioned as a traditional academic geographer writing essays and books, and
delivering papers at professional conferences until his arrest while reading a paper
on the orography of mountain ranges in Europe. While in prison, he began to
write short pamphlets that could be more widely distributed and draw in a larger


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audience. These provided compelling examples of effective forms of collaboration

in work and social life that he observed in his travels among the Jura watchmakers
of Switzerland and the peasant communities of Siberia. The future of anarchist
geography still depends on where and how the ideas it generates are distributed.
Seeking a home for new ideas in academic publications is important but how
can we work to radicalize the process of getting ideas into print? Writing can be a
very solitary and lonely act. This is one reason why I often co-author my writing.
Like co-teaching, a collaborative writing process affords an opportunity to push
oneself beyond a narrow sphere and consider different perspectives. For those of
us who work in the academy and are also involved in struggles within the larger
local or global community, co-writing can help to bridge the divide. For me, this
is not about “giving others a voice”. It is about opening ourselves up to a more
complex understanding of issues by incorporating experiences and knowledge that
literally emerge from a different place. Colin Ward occasionally co-wrote pieces and
also started an entirely new journal, Bulletin of Environmental Education, in order to
incorporate the ideas and practices of teachers working to introduce more freedom
of exploration into their curricula. This brought spatially oriented academics together
with on-the-ground educators in the invention of a new environmental practice.
There are now whole movements in academia to legitimize “public scholarship”,
as exemplified by the work of Imagining America in promoting knowledge making
about, for, and with diverse publics and communities.8 As practitioners of engaged
learning, this organization directly challenges elitist ideas about publication and
introduces new forms of critical pedagogy that attack the heart of hierarchical
university structures.
As geographers we have an obvious affinity already for representing the world in
visual format through maps. The folks who produce An Atlas of Radical Cartography
(Mogel and Bhagat 2008) have found an especially effective way of bridging
activism and geography through art and design. They employ visual formats to
challenge our perceptions of the world through new representations of relationships
of power and their effects.9 These visual documents provoke debate and suggest
the potential of alternative forms of decentralized organization (eg networks and
federations). Taken together with other creative forms of idea dissemination, they
challenge us to think more about the important role of art, culture, and creative
interventions in social change. They encourage us to consider new venues from
which we might interrogate and disseminate the ideas and practices that emerge
from this special issue of Antipode as well as from any future efforts to promote the
further development of anarchist geography.

Endnotes
1
The search for relevance also led us to many out-of-classroom involvements. In the Pioneer
Valley of western Massachusetts, we formed an anarchist affinity group with an eclectic array
of colleagues that included Murray Bookchin and many notable anarchist feminists such as
Ynestra King and Martha Ackelsberg, among many others.
2
Sam Dolgoff was an anarcho-syndicalist and member of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the
World) who translated Bakunin’s writings and material about the anarchist social revolution
in Spain into English. He also wrote several books, including one on the role of anarchists in
the Cuban revolution.


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3
See volume 10, issue 3 and volume 11, issue 1 of Antipode.
4
I am also reminded of the 1976 Swiss film by director Alain Tanner, For Jonah Who Will Be
25 in the Year 2000. The action takes place in Europe in the aftermath of the 1968 student
protest movements and other forms of radical resistance. The characters, who are in their 20s
and 30s, go about their lives while trying to keep elements of this radical period alive in very
personal and individual ways. The characters who come quickly to mind are a high-school
teacher who shares his theories of class struggle and inequality with his young students by
removing a long sausage from his briefcase and slicing it up to illustrate divisions of wealth;
and a young checkout clerk at a grocery who gives unauthorized Robin Hood-like discounts
to customers she believes deserve a little break. The film poses the question of what happens
to ideals that are soundly dismissed and suppressed by the powers that be. Jonah, the young
son of one of the protagonists, represents the hope that radical ideals can be kept alive and
furthered in small ways even when the status quo seems to be winning. Jonah’s message, like
the later writing of de Certeau (1984), acknowledges the potential for resistance and change
in modest everyday moments.
5
Hampshire gives no grades, only narrative evaluation of portfolios of work, has no tenure,
employs an equity salary model, and allows faculty to teach or co-teach whatever they want
with whomever they want. Students assume a great deal of responsibility for their own
educations and faculty become learners as well as teachers. Interdisciplinarity is the norm,
and so once I arrived in 1977, I was no longer a “geographer”; I reside in the School of Social
Science (recently renamed by faculty as the School of Critical Social Inquiry).
6
See http://www.communityeconomies.org/home
7
One example is an office recently established at the Syracuse University that provides
free GIS mapping and community design services to any non-profit community-based
organization.
8
See http://www.imaginingamerica.com
9
See http://www.an-atlas.com/contents.html

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