Emily Brissette | Bridgewater State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Emily Brissette

Humanity & Society, 2023

Within the field of US social movement studies, there is periodic concern that the work produced ... more Within the field of US social movement studies, there is periodic concern that the work produced by scholars is not more widely read and used by activists and organizers, yet there is little attention given to how epistemological norms within the field produce and maintain the disconnect between mainstream US social movement studies and movements on the ground. In this paper we trace the major contours of the problem: the positivism that saturates the field's tendency towards abstraction and model building; the implicit normative commitment to a liberal-pluralist social order which eclipses radical voices; and the refusal to engage seriously with the organic knowledge production that takes place within every movement. We also highlight exemplary theorizing that has emerged out of active struggles and argue that the humanistic study of social movements must begin from a place of intellectual humility, decentering academic expertise and recognizing that scholars have much to learn from organic intellectuals in movements today.

Social Movement Studies, 2022

Sociologists have studied charisma almost exclusively as a form of authority, following Weber's o... more Sociologists have studied charisma almost exclusively as a form of authority, following Weber's original conceptualization. While there have been many elaborations on Weber's work, the full richness of charisma as a concept has remained unexplored and its potential applicability to radically egalitarian movements limited. This paper offers a more democratic conceptualization of charisma by putting Weber's classic theorization into conversation with Hannah Arendt's theory of action. It argues that charisma is best understood as a latent capacity to act, a quality that is not exclusive to a few extraordinary individuals but rather is quintessentially and universally human. Using the US draft resistance movement during the Vietnam War as a case study through which to develop this conceptualization, the paper centers the charismatic act and explores the conditions of existential distress that elicit such acts and the conditions of (emergent) political community that enable and are constituted by them.

Theoretical Criminology, 2020

While arraignment is meant to serve as a check on arbitrary state power, actualizing defendants’ ... more While arraignment is meant to serve as a check on arbitrary state power, actualizing defendants’ rights to due process, it is also a key site wherein individuals come face to face with the state. This paper theorizes the epistemic violence inherent in that encounter and embedded in routine court practices. Drawing on ethnographic observations of misdemeanor arraignments, this paper explores how the state produces and marshals knowledge of the accused: interpellating most defendants into a degraded subject position, actively silencing their attempts to know otherwise, and making racialized moral evaluations of their worthiness. Together these practices constitute epistemic violence, inflicting injury through their assault on defendants’ dignity and personhood and through their justification and reproduction of more material harms.

Humanity and Society, 2018

Social movement scholars have shown renewed interest in the question of violence over the past tw... more Social movement scholars have shown renewed interest in the question of violence over the past two decades. They have focused particularly on the conditions which give rise to “violent protest,” and in doing so, have emphasized the direct, immediately visible, forms of violence that occur within the space of protest events. Curiously, they have not paid much attention to the forms of structural and epistemic violence that often give rise to protest in the first place. Drawing on the work of peace researcher Johan Galtung (1969, 1990) among others, I want to offer a rethinking of violence at Occupy Oakland that shifts the focus from the protest event to the forms of violence inherent in existing distributions of resources and regard. While Occupy Oakland may have made headlines because of spectacular moments of violent protest, it sought to address more quotidian forms of structural and epistemic violence in Oakland, including the ongoing foreclosure crisis and capitalist notions of property and personhood. Through examining how Occupy Oakland engaged these different forms of violence, I highlight the need to move beyond a focus on violence as event to look more critically at the violent processes circumscribing daily life and struggles for social change.

Critical Sociology, Apr 22, 2016

The movements against the Vietnam and Iraq Wars gave rise to analogous resistance efforts, in the... more The movements against the Vietnam and Iraq Wars gave rise to analogous resistance efforts, in the form of draft resistance and counter-recruitment, respectively. Despite their many similarities, the draft resistance and counter-recruitment movements emerged in distinct historical eras marked by very different ‘state imaginaries,’ or assumptions about the nature of the state and people’s relation to it. Drawing on original archival work, this paper excavates these state imaginaries and examines how they conditioned activists’ subjectivities in each era. More specifically, this paper argues that the 1960s were marked by an imaginary of the state based on consent, which positioned draft resisters as complicit citizens and engendered a sense of personal responsibility for the war. This state imaginary was displaced in the neoliberal era by an imaginary of the state as an alien and invasive force, which positioned counter-recruitment activists (or their children) as potential prey and impelled efforts at self-defense.

Interface: a journal for and about social movements, Nov 2013

This paper explores the relationship between neoliberalism and the contemporary movement against ... more This paper explores the relationship between neoliberalism and the contemporary movement against military recruitment. It focuses on the way that the counter-recruitment movement is constrained by, reproduces, and in some instances challenges the reigning neoliberal common sense. Engaging with the work of Antonio Gramsci on ideological struggle (what he calls a war of position), the paper critically examines three aspects of counter-recruitment discourse for whether or how well they contribute to a war of position against militarism and neoliberalism. While in many instances counter-recruitment discourse is found to be imbricated with neoliberal assumptions, the paper argues that counter-recruitment work around the poverty draft offers a significant challenge, especially if it can be linked to broader struggles of social transformation.

Rethinking Marxism, Apr 2013

In recent decades a powerful discourse has taken hold, celebrating the struggle of civil society ... more In recent decades a powerful discourse has taken hold, celebrating the struggle of civil society against the state, and many have attempted to read the Occupy movement through that lens. This essay draws on Marx's critique of liberalism in “On the Jewish Question” to denaturalize the neoliberal imaginary implicit in such readings and to suggest an alternative account that foregrounds the prefigurative nature of the movement as an attempt to create freedom in community with others.

Book Chapters by Emily Brissette

Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution, 2017

Social Sciences for An Other Politics: Women Theorising Without Parachutes, 2016

In order to make sense of contemporary prefigurative movements and their transformative potential... more In order to make sense of contemporary prefigurative movements and their transformative potential, we need a more expansive notion of politics and a more nuanced understanding of ‘the state’ than that found in most North American social movement theory. In this chapter Brissette traces critics’ failure to register the political nature of prefigurative politics to an underlying conceptual framework that defines politics in relation to existing state structures and reifies the state as a bounded entity distinct from society. Drawing on Marx’s theorization of the state as abstraction to contest this reification, Brissette locates the political nature of prefigurative movements in the process of constituting collective life as a community-in- freedom beyond the state.

In: Social Sciences for an Other Politics: Women Theorising without Parachutes, edited by Ana Cecilia Dinerstein. London: Palgrave, 2016.

Books by Emily Brissette

Provides a ground-breaking and provocative approach to social and political change ▶ Critiques ca... more Provides a ground-breaking and provocative approach to social and
political change
▶ Critiques capitalist-colonial-patriarchal society by delineating
alternative realities
▶ Transcends academic boundaries and binary divisions between
knowledge and practice
This book opens up a unique intellectual space where eleven female scholar-activists
explore alternative forms of theorising social reality. These‘Women on the Verge’
demonstrate that a new radical subject– one that is plural, prefigurative, decolonial,
ethical, ecological, communal and democratic- is in the making, but is unrecognisable
with old analytical tools. Of central concern to the book is the resistance of some social
scientists, many of them critical theorists, to learning about this radical subject and to
interrogating the concepts, methodologies and epistemologies used to grasp it. Echoing
the experiential critique of capitalist-colonial society that is taking place at the grassroots,
the authors examine how to create hope, decolonise critique and denaturalise society.
They also address the various dimensions of the social (re)production of life, including
women in development, the commons, and nature. Finally, they discuss the dynamics of
prefiguration by social movements, critiquing social movement theory in the process.This
thought-provoking edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of gender
studies, social, Marxist and Feminist theory, postcolonial studies and politics.

Course Syllabi by Emily Brissette

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that man shall bear the ... more Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that man shall bear the chain without caprice or consolation but so that he shall cast off the chain and pluck the living flower.

This course will introduce you to sociology as a way of seeing and making sense of the social wor... more This course will introduce you to sociology as a way of seeing and making sense of the social world. As a field of study, sociology lays claim to some of the same ground that history, economics, political science, and psychology (among others) each covers; what makes sociology different from these other disciplines is both its breadth and the sorts of questions it asks. In this course, we will focus on understanding the latter: what does it mean to look at the world sociologically? That is, rather than trying to give you a taste of everything sociologists study (impossible in one semester!), this course will engage you in thinking sociologically, in learning to ask sociological questions about your own experiences and the larger social world around you. We will do this largely by focusing on major axes of inequality in contemporary American society (class, race, gender and sexuality), examining how social structures shape individual lives, social relations, and forms of meaning-making.

Mail box: 410 Barrows Office hours: Thursdays 10-12, 487 Barrows or by appointment Coming on the ... more Mail box: 410 Barrows Office hours: Thursdays 10-12, 487 Barrows or by appointment Coming on the heels of the revolts of the Arab Spring and rebellions against austerity policies in Spain, Wisconsin and elsewhere, the Occupy movement-with its tents, general assemblies, strange hand gestures and human mic-captured the national imagination and spread quickly throughout the US. Despite the claims that the movement had no demands, it put issues of economic inequality and human need on the table. How do we make sense of this movement-where it came from, what it looked like, what it meant, where it went or where it might yet go? How do we think about the tactical questions it raised (what's effective? what's legitimate protest?

Mail box: 410 Barrows Office hours: Thursdays 12:30-2:30 or by appointment; 487 Barrows This cour... more Mail box: 410 Barrows Office hours: Thursdays 12:30-2:30 or by appointment; 487 Barrows This course will explore the mutually constitutive relationship between gender and warhow gender is mobilized in and structures war, and how war in turn serves as a crucible for reshaping or reinforcing our cultural notions of gender-with a primary focus on the current US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We will begin by examining how gender and war are articulated with/in state-formation, nationalism, and imperialism (in both its historical and contemporary forms) in order to then explore Western representations of and engagement with the Middle East. From there the course shifts to consider the line between war and daily life in the US, tracing some of the many ways in which our society is organized to (re)produce the material and ideological infrastructure of war, through a process known as militarization. In the concluding section of the course, we will think about the ethics of, and difficulties associated with, peace activism and feminist solidarity across cultural and national lines.

Thesis Chapters by Emily Brissette

The movement against the Vietnam War began modestly, with a measure of hope and expectation that ... more The movement against the Vietnam War began modestly, with a measure of hope and expectation that the government would listen to reason, that the people had access to the state and could exert moral and political influence. As the years and the war dragged on, the movement continued to grow and to escalate, despite increasing disillusionment and frustration. In contrast, the movement against the Iraq War came together quickly and massively in the space of months, peaking in the spring of 2003, and then largely receding from public view. The movement continued in a localized form, employing a variety of tactics, but the intensity and vibrancy of 2003 or of the later years of the Vietnam War were altogether lacking. The central question that my dissertation seeks to answer is: why was the movement against the Vietnam War able to grow steadily over many years, despite increasing disillusionment, while the movement against the Iraq War disappeared quickly from public view despite its initial intensity and historicity? More than just a question of quantitatively different trajectories, this is a question about the qualitatively different character of each movement as well, a question about each movement's constellation of forces; sense of efficacy and possibility; style and voice.

Other Writing by Emily Brissette