Dimitris Soudias | University of Groningen (original) (raw)

Books by Dimitris Soudias

Syracuse University Press, 2023

In Paradoxes of Emancipation, Dimitris Soudias traces the formation of political subjectivity in ... more In Paradoxes of Emancipation, Dimitris Soudias traces the formation of political subjectivity in times of crisis by attending to the 2011 occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens—the heart of the Greek anti-austerity movement following the debt crisis. Soudias conceives of the Syntagma Square occupation as a lens through which we can critically engage with broader theoretical and political issues: the crumbling promises of the capitalist imaginary, the epistemic “spirit” of neoliberal rationalities, the spatialized practices of navigating precarity and uncertainty, and the prospects for a radically better tomorrow.

By challenging both the romanticization of anti-austerity activism and the reduction of neoliberalism to mere free market thinking, Soudias reveals that the relationship between political subject formation and emancipation in neoliberalism is utterly paradoxical. In their effort to overcome neoliberal rationalities, individuals also partly stabilize them. Interweaving the stories and insights of activists with sociology, geography, and political theory, this book makes bold claims about the future of emancipation by envisioning an “alter-neoliberal critique.” In so doing, Paradoxes of Emancipation presents an illuminating inquiry into how our experiences with capitalist crises lead to profound reevaluations of ourselves that challenge our expectations of the future.

The American University in Cairo Press, 2014

The objective of this study is an analysis of the development of street protests in Egypt between... more The objective of this study is an analysis of the development of street protests in Egypt between 2000-2011. As such, it analyzes the negotiation of the status quo, that is, the relationship between resistance (protesting actors) and authority (the regime and the security forces that represent it) and their interactions in protest events. Seeking to make sense of the emergence of the January 25 uprising, I will show how the ‘Egyptian street’ evolved, served as a space of discontent, and hence was the main arena for negotiating power relations between resistance and authority that ultimately led to Mubarak’s ousting. In short, I want to find out how the Egyptian street, which had been proclaimed “apathetic” and “dead” by observers for so long, developed into a liberated protest space that forced an authoritarian ruler out of office.
.

Papers by Dimitris Soudias

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2024

This paper analyzes how governments instrumentalize the concept of happiness for political ends. ... more This paper analyzes how governments instrumentalize the concept of happiness for political ends. It argues that while happiness is primarily employed as an externally-oriented policy and discourse to attract tourists and desirable migrants, it is equally aimed at changing the expectations of the local population, including brain-drainers. We argue that in the case of Greece, happiness forms a governmental vision to brand the country anew after years of moralizing discourses of guilt, blame, and debt surrounding the financial crisis. First, we outline how the Greek government construes happiness as a commodified experience that the Greek population ought to generate for tourists and desirable migrants (‘live like a local’), but importantly also for itself (‘live like a tourist’). Second, this happiness vision seeks to both encourage the Greek population (in that we want to be happy), but also to discipline it (in that we need to be happy). Thirdly, to justify this vision, its key promoters conceive of a future that requires sanitizing the country’s past and present, camouflage its unpleasant and contentious aspects, and re-narrate it in positive terms. Curiously, however, this is less about envisioning a better future after years of crisis, than about asking the Greek population to be satisfied with the status quo. This way, the happiness vision is an attempt to substitute the unfulfilled promises of the capitalist imaginary vis-`a-vis opportunity, upward social mobility, and overabundance, where happiness arises not by overcoming the precarizing realities of inequality, but from having a positive attitude in navigating them.

European Journal of Social Theory, 2024

Radical critique and praxis today face an unprecedented challenge because neoliberal rationalitie... more Radical critique and praxis today face an unprecedented challenge because neoliberal rationalities partly succeeded in encroaching upon emancipatory ambitions. On the one hand, as critical sociology informs us, this is because many of the utilitarian tenets of neoliberal rationalities have become naturalized in everyday conduct. On the other hand, as pragmatic sociology shows, because neoliberalism has succeeded in incorporating critical activity into its mode of functioning, challenging neoliberalism comes at the cost of its partial reproduction. Against this backdrop, the goal of this article is to reconsider both the role of critique in neoliberalism and the mode of inquiry of critique, in order to map out an 'alter-neoliberal analysis': a normative mode of critical inquiry that seeks to discover what would need to be the case for a future beyond neoliberalism to be conceivable. Building on the inferential logic of abduction, alter-neoliberal analysis (1) defamiliarizes the opaque ways in which neoliberal rationalities encroach upon practices, so as to (2) critique them in ways that curtail their reproduction and (3) radically imagine politico-epistemological positions that are unintelligible to neoliberal rationalities.

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2024

This article explores the consequences of fusing market-based and social principles for how 'the ... more This article explores the consequences of fusing market-based and social principles for how 'the social' and solidarity is understood. To do so, I turn to the recently formalized 'Social and Solidarity Economy'(SSE) in Greece. I conceptualize the SSE as a governmental mode of power that attempts to render social and market-based principles as commensurate. I claim this occurs through the codification and proliferation of what we may call 'hybrid-economic practices'such as social impact measurement, and social innovation. Hybrid-economic practices fuse a utilitarian, efficiency-maximizing logic that weighs costs and benefits, with narratives of solidarity and collective social purpose. Based on a qualitative analysis of the SSE law in Greece and interviews with practitioners and policy-makers, I claim that fusing market-based and social principles come at the cost of depleting the political and ethical components of solidarity and 'the social.' Yet, rather than depoliticizing them, I argue hybrid-economic practices more appropriately transmute how solidarity and 'the social' is understood through three mutually constitutive processes: economization, entrepreneurialization, and communitarianization.

Weird Economies, 2023

Metric anxiety describes the feelings and affectivities associated with assessing oneself, and be... more Metric anxiety describes the feelings and affectivities associated with assessing oneself, and being assessed by others, through quantitative valuation practices, especially measurement. Prominent examples include like-buttons, star ratings, view counts, or the number of social media followers; as well as self-tracking health parameters, calorie counts, or running distances.

ENA Institute for Alternative Policies, 2022

Η έννοια της ευτυχίας αποτελεί συχνά θέμα των πρόσφατων κυβερνητικών διακηρύξεων, σηματοδοτώντας ... more Η έννοια της ευτυχίας αποτελεί συχνά θέμα των πρόσφατων κυβερνητικών διακηρύξεων, σηματοδοτώντας μια απομάκρυνση από την ηθικολογία της ενοχής, της ευθύνης και του χρέους που σημάδεψε την κρίση της τελευταίας δεκαετίας. Από τη μια, η ευτυχία χρησιμοποιείται από την κυβέρνηση Μητσοτάκη για να επαναπροσδιορίσει (re-brand) ριζικά την Ελλάδα μετά από μια δεκαετία λιτότητας, ώστε να προσελκύσει «ανθρώπινο κεφάλαιο» (και ξένες επενδύσεις), επιθυμητούς μετανάστες (κυρίως «ψηφιακούς νομάδες») και τουρίστες. Από την άλλη, η έννοια της ευτυχίας λειτουργεί ως μέσο πειθάρχησης του πληθυσμού της χώρας.

ENA Institute for Alternative Policies, 2022

The notion of happiness has been a frequent subject of recent governmental proclamations in Greec... more The notion of happiness has been a frequent subject of recent governmental proclamations in Greece, signaling a departure from the moralizing discourses of guilt, blame, and debt surrounding the crisis of the past decade. Faced with the consequences of the global financial crisis, many governments were looking for ways to justify the massive bailout packages they were putting together, without having to radically challenge the system that made the bailout packages necessary in the first place. The science of happiness works to this end, in that it allows for a reading of the reasons of the crisis as stemming from individual behaviours, rather than systemic failures, which can be corrected with ‘nudges’ — tricks to alter our behaviours to pursue more active and resilient lifestyles. Happiness – and its virtues of comfort, joy, pleasure, or hope – is instrumentalized for political and economic ends. Happiness overlaps with modernization, in that any form of critique against it is thwarted of as miserabilism by those who have always complained, will continue to do so, and cannot be happy. As the promise of the capitalist imaginary (the ability to compete for middle-class belonging and relative economic security, by getting a good education and working hard) has effectively collapsed for the majority of people living in Greece, its legitimacy is under threat. Capitalism, it appears, now operates without the liberal values of ‘fairness’ and ‘opportunity’ that once justified capitalism’s competition and inequality. As we will show, the political imaginary of happiness serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, happiness is used by the Mitsotakis government to radically re-brand Greece after a decade of austerity to attract ‘human capital’ (and foreign investments), desirable migrants (especially ‘digital nomads’) and visitors. On the other hand, happiness is to discipline the Greek population.

Weird Economies, 2022

Glossary Entry for the Weird Economies platform

Greece@LSE, 2021

When SYRIZA drafted law 4430/2016 on the ‘Social and Solidarity Economy and the development of it... more When SYRIZA drafted law 4430/2016 on the ‘Social and Solidarity Economy and the development of its actors’ (SSE), the left-wing governing party found itself in the tricky position of having to satisfy various competing demands. The adopted law can be read as an effort by SYRIZA to reconcile these competing demands, which are about either alleviating market failures by combining social needs provision with market-based principles, or about radically transforming socio-economic relations altogether.

The Sociological Review, 2021

This article examines the formation of political subjectivity in times of neoliberalization and c... more This article examines the formation of political subjectivity in times of neoliberalization and crisis. It does so by following the meaning-making practices of Penelope, a participant of the 2011 Syntagma Square occupation in Athens. The Syntagma Square encampment was at the heart of Greece's anti-austerity movement. Prior to this experience, Penelope says she 'wasn't the most sophisticated person' politically, yet that she 'changed' for the better precisely because of her participation. What does Penelope aspire to and what does she demarcate her self from against the backdrop of austerity neoliberalism, crisis, and her experience in the square? And what remains of her participation experience years on with regard to subjectivity? This article claims that the relationship between subject formation and emancipation under neoliberalism is paradoxical: in her effort to overcome neoliberal rationalities in Greece, Penelope is also unwittingly reproducing them. In disentangling this paradox, this article concludes with a theorization of what I call 'alter-neoliberal critique': against and beyond neoliberalism.

Journal of Digital Social Research, 2021

The ascent of neoliberalism and informational capitalism has been largely successful in privatizi... more The ascent of neoliberalism and informational capitalism has been largely successful in privatizing and re-regulating state-subject-market relations in ways that treat them "as if" they are a market situation. Here, we observe both the increasing commodification of digital forms of knowledge, as well as the commodification of the access to this knowledge. As predominantly non-commercial spaces, libraries serve the vital function of deflecting these developments. In this article, I argue for going one step further and imagining libraries as institutionalized and pedagogical spaces that can negotiate and transgress their institutional limits vis-à-vis public and private resources, discourses, policies, and technologies for the purpose of furthering the commons. In so doing, libraries serve as alter-neoliberal pedagogies, which democratize the construction and deconstruction of knowledge, as well as the access to them. Here, alternative literacies, ways of learning, and ways of being can be prefigured in practice. In imagining these conceptual potentialities of academic and public libraries, this article sets forth an initial agenda toward the commoning library.

Soziopolis, 2020

Die COVID-19-Pandemie hat alle europäischen Länder in eine Krise gestürzt, mit der sie unterschie... more Die COVID-19-Pandemie hat alle europäischen Länder in eine Krise gestürzt, mit der sie unterschiedlich umgegangen sind. Relativ wenig beachtet wurden die Reaktionen und politischen Entwicklungen in Griechenland. Dabei sind sie aus zwei Gründen interessant: Zunächst ist Griechenland von einer über zehn Jahre andauernden Austeritätspolitik schwer gezeichnet, welche die öffentliche Daseinsvorsorge im Namen der wiederherzustellenden Wettbewerbsfähigkeit seiner nationalen Ökonomie dramatisch auszehrte. Deshalb begleitete COVID-19 von Beginn an die Befürchtung, das Virus werde eine in Griechenland bereits existierende Ausnahmesituation drastisch verschärfen. Faktisch verzeichnete das Land jedoch vergleichsweise wenige Virusinfektionen und Todesfälle. Der griechische Premierminister Mitsotakis, schloss bereits Ende Februar, das heißt zu einem Zeitpunkt, an dem kaum ein anderes europäisches Land Maßnahmen zur Pandemiebekämpfung ergriffen hatte, die Schulen und stimmte die Bevölkerung darauf ein, dass sich Griechenland "im Krieg" mit dem Virus befinde. Diese frühzeitige Strategie einer Versicherheitlichung der Krise soll im Folgenden näher betrachtet werden: Wie zu zeigen sein wird, operiert sie mit einer Tendenz zur Ökonomisierung der Pandemie, die eine öffentliche Diskussion der Maßnahmen sowohl unter ethischen als auch politischen Hinsichten von vornherein stark eingrenzt.

Contention. The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest, 2020

This article seeks to make sense of why participants in square occupations point to the transform... more This article seeks to make sense of why participants in square occupations point to the transformative character of their experience. Drawing from narrative research on the 2011 occupa- tion of Syntagma Square in Athens, I argue that the transforma- tive quality of the occupation lies in the spatialized emergence and practice of radical political imaginaries in these encampments, which signify a demarcation from and an alternative to the neo- liberalizing of everyday life in Greece. By scrutinizing the spatial demarcation between the “upper” and “lower” parts of the Syntagma Square occupation, one can think more carefully about the condi- tions of possibility for the emergence of the radical imagination.

Contention. The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest, 2020

Introduction to Special Section: The Spatiality of Protest in Contention: The Multisdisciplinary ... more Introduction to Special Section: The Spatiality of Protest in Contention: The Multisdisciplinary Journal of Social Protest.

Middle East – Topics and Arguments, 2015

With Andrea Fischer-Tahir. This article introduces META issue #5 on "periphery", discussing relat... more With Andrea Fischer-Tahir. This article introduces META issue #5 on "periphery", discussing relationships between processes of peripherialization, agency, and knowledge production.

Middle East – Topics and Arguments, 2015

On January 25th, 2011 thousands of pro-testers took to the streets of major cities in Egypt—refer... more On January 25th, 2011 thousands of pro-testers took to the streets of major cities in Egypt—referred to as the “day of wrath”—to express their grievances and frustration with the ruling regime, ultimately leading to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak after three decades in power. The street, as a socially construct-ed space of discontent, had become the central locus of political change. In this paper, I will tackle the question of how and why policing strategies in Cairo failed to contain protesters, eventually leading to the withdrawal of security forces on January 28th. I will analyze the interactions between security forces and protesters in protest events during the uprising, focusing on policing strategies, tactical repertoires, and spaces of resistance. Through this, I hope to offer a way of looking at the politics of territorialization and space production in protest, and by extension, the negotiation of power relations between authority and resistance actors.

Book Chapters by Dimitris Soudias

Riots and Militant Occupations Smashing a System, Building a World - A Critical Introduction Edited by Alissa Starodub and Andrew Robinson, 2018

This chapter rethinks the spatiality of square occupations. It reflects on how space, place, pre... more This chapter rethinks the spatiality of square occupations. It reflects on how space,
place, presence, and territoriality are constituent conceptual notions of square occupations' spatiality. Building on de Certeau's notion of 'Making Do' and drawing heavily from Syntagma and Tahrir as examples, what follows is an elaboration on the ways in which policing strategies and protest tactics are tabulating and imposing, or diverting and manipulating, space.

Präsenz und implizites Wissen Zur Interdependenz zweier Schlüsselbegriffe der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, 2014

With Christoph Schumann

Reports by Dimitris Soudias

YPC Policy Report, 2014

The goal of this report is to summarize and analyze key survey findings in regard to insecurity a... more The goal of this report is to summarize and analyze key survey findings in regard to insecurity and security provisions within each of Yemen’s twenty-one governorates. Before delving into the internal institutional arrangements and conflicts within Yemen’s military-security services (during the period prior to and during the 2011 mass protests), this report will briefly assess the most significant security threats the country has been facing. These prerequisites will allow for the disentanglement of prevalent conflicts and the configuration of conflict-relevant (armed) actors. Furthermore, this report will elaborate on the security developments of each governorate for the time between 2011 and 2013. This will help the reader understand the perceptions of survey respondents toward particular actors, police work, and security.

https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-77108-7

Syracuse University Press, 2023

In Paradoxes of Emancipation, Dimitris Soudias traces the formation of political subjectivity in ... more In Paradoxes of Emancipation, Dimitris Soudias traces the formation of political subjectivity in times of crisis by attending to the 2011 occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens—the heart of the Greek anti-austerity movement following the debt crisis. Soudias conceives of the Syntagma Square occupation as a lens through which we can critically engage with broader theoretical and political issues: the crumbling promises of the capitalist imaginary, the epistemic “spirit” of neoliberal rationalities, the spatialized practices of navigating precarity and uncertainty, and the prospects for a radically better tomorrow.

By challenging both the romanticization of anti-austerity activism and the reduction of neoliberalism to mere free market thinking, Soudias reveals that the relationship between political subject formation and emancipation in neoliberalism is utterly paradoxical. In their effort to overcome neoliberal rationalities, individuals also partly stabilize them. Interweaving the stories and insights of activists with sociology, geography, and political theory, this book makes bold claims about the future of emancipation by envisioning an “alter-neoliberal critique.” In so doing, Paradoxes of Emancipation presents an illuminating inquiry into how our experiences with capitalist crises lead to profound reevaluations of ourselves that challenge our expectations of the future.

The American University in Cairo Press, 2014

The objective of this study is an analysis of the development of street protests in Egypt between... more The objective of this study is an analysis of the development of street protests in Egypt between 2000-2011. As such, it analyzes the negotiation of the status quo, that is, the relationship between resistance (protesting actors) and authority (the regime and the security forces that represent it) and their interactions in protest events. Seeking to make sense of the emergence of the January 25 uprising, I will show how the ‘Egyptian street’ evolved, served as a space of discontent, and hence was the main arena for negotiating power relations between resistance and authority that ultimately led to Mubarak’s ousting. In short, I want to find out how the Egyptian street, which had been proclaimed “apathetic” and “dead” by observers for so long, developed into a liberated protest space that forced an authoritarian ruler out of office.
.

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2024

This paper analyzes how governments instrumentalize the concept of happiness for political ends. ... more This paper analyzes how governments instrumentalize the concept of happiness for political ends. It argues that while happiness is primarily employed as an externally-oriented policy and discourse to attract tourists and desirable migrants, it is equally aimed at changing the expectations of the local population, including brain-drainers. We argue that in the case of Greece, happiness forms a governmental vision to brand the country anew after years of moralizing discourses of guilt, blame, and debt surrounding the financial crisis. First, we outline how the Greek government construes happiness as a commodified experience that the Greek population ought to generate for tourists and desirable migrants (‘live like a local’), but importantly also for itself (‘live like a tourist’). Second, this happiness vision seeks to both encourage the Greek population (in that we want to be happy), but also to discipline it (in that we need to be happy). Thirdly, to justify this vision, its key promoters conceive of a future that requires sanitizing the country’s past and present, camouflage its unpleasant and contentious aspects, and re-narrate it in positive terms. Curiously, however, this is less about envisioning a better future after years of crisis, than about asking the Greek population to be satisfied with the status quo. This way, the happiness vision is an attempt to substitute the unfulfilled promises of the capitalist imaginary vis-`a-vis opportunity, upward social mobility, and overabundance, where happiness arises not by overcoming the precarizing realities of inequality, but from having a positive attitude in navigating them.

European Journal of Social Theory, 2024

Radical critique and praxis today face an unprecedented challenge because neoliberal rationalitie... more Radical critique and praxis today face an unprecedented challenge because neoliberal rationalities partly succeeded in encroaching upon emancipatory ambitions. On the one hand, as critical sociology informs us, this is because many of the utilitarian tenets of neoliberal rationalities have become naturalized in everyday conduct. On the other hand, as pragmatic sociology shows, because neoliberalism has succeeded in incorporating critical activity into its mode of functioning, challenging neoliberalism comes at the cost of its partial reproduction. Against this backdrop, the goal of this article is to reconsider both the role of critique in neoliberalism and the mode of inquiry of critique, in order to map out an 'alter-neoliberal analysis': a normative mode of critical inquiry that seeks to discover what would need to be the case for a future beyond neoliberalism to be conceivable. Building on the inferential logic of abduction, alter-neoliberal analysis (1) defamiliarizes the opaque ways in which neoliberal rationalities encroach upon practices, so as to (2) critique them in ways that curtail their reproduction and (3) radically imagine politico-epistemological positions that are unintelligible to neoliberal rationalities.

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2024

This article explores the consequences of fusing market-based and social principles for how 'the ... more This article explores the consequences of fusing market-based and social principles for how 'the social' and solidarity is understood. To do so, I turn to the recently formalized 'Social and Solidarity Economy'(SSE) in Greece. I conceptualize the SSE as a governmental mode of power that attempts to render social and market-based principles as commensurate. I claim this occurs through the codification and proliferation of what we may call 'hybrid-economic practices'such as social impact measurement, and social innovation. Hybrid-economic practices fuse a utilitarian, efficiency-maximizing logic that weighs costs and benefits, with narratives of solidarity and collective social purpose. Based on a qualitative analysis of the SSE law in Greece and interviews with practitioners and policy-makers, I claim that fusing market-based and social principles come at the cost of depleting the political and ethical components of solidarity and 'the social.' Yet, rather than depoliticizing them, I argue hybrid-economic practices more appropriately transmute how solidarity and 'the social' is understood through three mutually constitutive processes: economization, entrepreneurialization, and communitarianization.

Weird Economies, 2023

Metric anxiety describes the feelings and affectivities associated with assessing oneself, and be... more Metric anxiety describes the feelings and affectivities associated with assessing oneself, and being assessed by others, through quantitative valuation practices, especially measurement. Prominent examples include like-buttons, star ratings, view counts, or the number of social media followers; as well as self-tracking health parameters, calorie counts, or running distances.

ENA Institute for Alternative Policies, 2022

Η έννοια της ευτυχίας αποτελεί συχνά θέμα των πρόσφατων κυβερνητικών διακηρύξεων, σηματοδοτώντας ... more Η έννοια της ευτυχίας αποτελεί συχνά θέμα των πρόσφατων κυβερνητικών διακηρύξεων, σηματοδοτώντας μια απομάκρυνση από την ηθικολογία της ενοχής, της ευθύνης και του χρέους που σημάδεψε την κρίση της τελευταίας δεκαετίας. Από τη μια, η ευτυχία χρησιμοποιείται από την κυβέρνηση Μητσοτάκη για να επαναπροσδιορίσει (re-brand) ριζικά την Ελλάδα μετά από μια δεκαετία λιτότητας, ώστε να προσελκύσει «ανθρώπινο κεφάλαιο» (και ξένες επενδύσεις), επιθυμητούς μετανάστες (κυρίως «ψηφιακούς νομάδες») και τουρίστες. Από την άλλη, η έννοια της ευτυχίας λειτουργεί ως μέσο πειθάρχησης του πληθυσμού της χώρας.

ENA Institute for Alternative Policies, 2022

The notion of happiness has been a frequent subject of recent governmental proclamations in Greec... more The notion of happiness has been a frequent subject of recent governmental proclamations in Greece, signaling a departure from the moralizing discourses of guilt, blame, and debt surrounding the crisis of the past decade. Faced with the consequences of the global financial crisis, many governments were looking for ways to justify the massive bailout packages they were putting together, without having to radically challenge the system that made the bailout packages necessary in the first place. The science of happiness works to this end, in that it allows for a reading of the reasons of the crisis as stemming from individual behaviours, rather than systemic failures, which can be corrected with ‘nudges’ — tricks to alter our behaviours to pursue more active and resilient lifestyles. Happiness – and its virtues of comfort, joy, pleasure, or hope – is instrumentalized for political and economic ends. Happiness overlaps with modernization, in that any form of critique against it is thwarted of as miserabilism by those who have always complained, will continue to do so, and cannot be happy. As the promise of the capitalist imaginary (the ability to compete for middle-class belonging and relative economic security, by getting a good education and working hard) has effectively collapsed for the majority of people living in Greece, its legitimacy is under threat. Capitalism, it appears, now operates without the liberal values of ‘fairness’ and ‘opportunity’ that once justified capitalism’s competition and inequality. As we will show, the political imaginary of happiness serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, happiness is used by the Mitsotakis government to radically re-brand Greece after a decade of austerity to attract ‘human capital’ (and foreign investments), desirable migrants (especially ‘digital nomads’) and visitors. On the other hand, happiness is to discipline the Greek population.

Weird Economies, 2022

Glossary Entry for the Weird Economies platform

Greece@LSE, 2021

When SYRIZA drafted law 4430/2016 on the ‘Social and Solidarity Economy and the development of it... more When SYRIZA drafted law 4430/2016 on the ‘Social and Solidarity Economy and the development of its actors’ (SSE), the left-wing governing party found itself in the tricky position of having to satisfy various competing demands. The adopted law can be read as an effort by SYRIZA to reconcile these competing demands, which are about either alleviating market failures by combining social needs provision with market-based principles, or about radically transforming socio-economic relations altogether.

The Sociological Review, 2021

This article examines the formation of political subjectivity in times of neoliberalization and c... more This article examines the formation of political subjectivity in times of neoliberalization and crisis. It does so by following the meaning-making practices of Penelope, a participant of the 2011 Syntagma Square occupation in Athens. The Syntagma Square encampment was at the heart of Greece's anti-austerity movement. Prior to this experience, Penelope says she 'wasn't the most sophisticated person' politically, yet that she 'changed' for the better precisely because of her participation. What does Penelope aspire to and what does she demarcate her self from against the backdrop of austerity neoliberalism, crisis, and her experience in the square? And what remains of her participation experience years on with regard to subjectivity? This article claims that the relationship between subject formation and emancipation under neoliberalism is paradoxical: in her effort to overcome neoliberal rationalities in Greece, Penelope is also unwittingly reproducing them. In disentangling this paradox, this article concludes with a theorization of what I call 'alter-neoliberal critique': against and beyond neoliberalism.

Journal of Digital Social Research, 2021

The ascent of neoliberalism and informational capitalism has been largely successful in privatizi... more The ascent of neoliberalism and informational capitalism has been largely successful in privatizing and re-regulating state-subject-market relations in ways that treat them "as if" they are a market situation. Here, we observe both the increasing commodification of digital forms of knowledge, as well as the commodification of the access to this knowledge. As predominantly non-commercial spaces, libraries serve the vital function of deflecting these developments. In this article, I argue for going one step further and imagining libraries as institutionalized and pedagogical spaces that can negotiate and transgress their institutional limits vis-à-vis public and private resources, discourses, policies, and technologies for the purpose of furthering the commons. In so doing, libraries serve as alter-neoliberal pedagogies, which democratize the construction and deconstruction of knowledge, as well as the access to them. Here, alternative literacies, ways of learning, and ways of being can be prefigured in practice. In imagining these conceptual potentialities of academic and public libraries, this article sets forth an initial agenda toward the commoning library.

Soziopolis, 2020

Die COVID-19-Pandemie hat alle europäischen Länder in eine Krise gestürzt, mit der sie unterschie... more Die COVID-19-Pandemie hat alle europäischen Länder in eine Krise gestürzt, mit der sie unterschiedlich umgegangen sind. Relativ wenig beachtet wurden die Reaktionen und politischen Entwicklungen in Griechenland. Dabei sind sie aus zwei Gründen interessant: Zunächst ist Griechenland von einer über zehn Jahre andauernden Austeritätspolitik schwer gezeichnet, welche die öffentliche Daseinsvorsorge im Namen der wiederherzustellenden Wettbewerbsfähigkeit seiner nationalen Ökonomie dramatisch auszehrte. Deshalb begleitete COVID-19 von Beginn an die Befürchtung, das Virus werde eine in Griechenland bereits existierende Ausnahmesituation drastisch verschärfen. Faktisch verzeichnete das Land jedoch vergleichsweise wenige Virusinfektionen und Todesfälle. Der griechische Premierminister Mitsotakis, schloss bereits Ende Februar, das heißt zu einem Zeitpunkt, an dem kaum ein anderes europäisches Land Maßnahmen zur Pandemiebekämpfung ergriffen hatte, die Schulen und stimmte die Bevölkerung darauf ein, dass sich Griechenland "im Krieg" mit dem Virus befinde. Diese frühzeitige Strategie einer Versicherheitlichung der Krise soll im Folgenden näher betrachtet werden: Wie zu zeigen sein wird, operiert sie mit einer Tendenz zur Ökonomisierung der Pandemie, die eine öffentliche Diskussion der Maßnahmen sowohl unter ethischen als auch politischen Hinsichten von vornherein stark eingrenzt.

Contention. The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest, 2020

This article seeks to make sense of why participants in square occupations point to the transform... more This article seeks to make sense of why participants in square occupations point to the transformative character of their experience. Drawing from narrative research on the 2011 occupa- tion of Syntagma Square in Athens, I argue that the transforma- tive quality of the occupation lies in the spatialized emergence and practice of radical political imaginaries in these encampments, which signify a demarcation from and an alternative to the neo- liberalizing of everyday life in Greece. By scrutinizing the spatial demarcation between the “upper” and “lower” parts of the Syntagma Square occupation, one can think more carefully about the condi- tions of possibility for the emergence of the radical imagination.

Contention. The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest, 2020

Introduction to Special Section: The Spatiality of Protest in Contention: The Multisdisciplinary ... more Introduction to Special Section: The Spatiality of Protest in Contention: The Multisdisciplinary Journal of Social Protest.

Middle East – Topics and Arguments, 2015

With Andrea Fischer-Tahir. This article introduces META issue #5 on "periphery", discussing relat... more With Andrea Fischer-Tahir. This article introduces META issue #5 on "periphery", discussing relationships between processes of peripherialization, agency, and knowledge production.

Middle East – Topics and Arguments, 2015

On January 25th, 2011 thousands of pro-testers took to the streets of major cities in Egypt—refer... more On January 25th, 2011 thousands of pro-testers took to the streets of major cities in Egypt—referred to as the “day of wrath”—to express their grievances and frustration with the ruling regime, ultimately leading to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak after three decades in power. The street, as a socially construct-ed space of discontent, had become the central locus of political change. In this paper, I will tackle the question of how and why policing strategies in Cairo failed to contain protesters, eventually leading to the withdrawal of security forces on January 28th. I will analyze the interactions between security forces and protesters in protest events during the uprising, focusing on policing strategies, tactical repertoires, and spaces of resistance. Through this, I hope to offer a way of looking at the politics of territorialization and space production in protest, and by extension, the negotiation of power relations between authority and resistance actors.

Riots and Militant Occupations Smashing a System, Building a World - A Critical Introduction Edited by Alissa Starodub and Andrew Robinson, 2018

This chapter rethinks the spatiality of square occupations. It reflects on how space, place, pre... more This chapter rethinks the spatiality of square occupations. It reflects on how space,
place, presence, and territoriality are constituent conceptual notions of square occupations' spatiality. Building on de Certeau's notion of 'Making Do' and drawing heavily from Syntagma and Tahrir as examples, what follows is an elaboration on the ways in which policing strategies and protest tactics are tabulating and imposing, or diverting and manipulating, space.

Präsenz und implizites Wissen Zur Interdependenz zweier Schlüsselbegriffe der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, 2014

With Christoph Schumann

YPC Policy Report, 2014

The goal of this report is to summarize and analyze key survey findings in regard to insecurity a... more The goal of this report is to summarize and analyze key survey findings in regard to insecurity and security provisions within each of Yemen’s twenty-one governorates. Before delving into the internal institutional arrangements and conflicts within Yemen’s military-security services (during the period prior to and during the 2011 mass protests), this report will briefly assess the most significant security threats the country has been facing. These prerequisites will allow for the disentanglement of prevalent conflicts and the configuration of conflict-relevant (armed) actors. Furthermore, this report will elaborate on the security developments of each governorate for the time between 2011 and 2013. This will help the reader understand the perceptions of survey respondents toward particular actors, police work, and security.

https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-77108-7

2nd GSN network conference. Universities of Amsterdam and Oxford

This event is the second conference organized by the “Greek Studies Now” Cultural Analysis Networ... more This event is the second conference organized by the “Greek Studies Now” Cultural Analysis Network.

The conference brings together scholars from all career stages whose work is (partly) situated in Modern Greek Studies, with a particular emphasis on graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and early career scholars. It will offer young scholars the opportunity to showcase their work, give and receive feedback, and create networks leading to further collaborations and joint projects.

By inviting speakers situated in Modern Greek studies alongside speakers working (partly) in other fields, we will explore how cases from modern and contemporary Greek culture, literature, politics, and history can be brought to bear on broader theoretical, cultural, social debates. We will ask how Modern Greek studies could be repositioned through an engagement with such global debates and through comparative perspectives.

We aim at inclusivity and diversity in speakers and audiences and at stimulating interdisciplinary dialogues that will take scholars outside the comfort zones of their disciplines.