Spatializing Radical Political Imaginaries. Neoliberalism, Crisis, and Transformative Experience in the Syntagma Square Occupation in Greece (original) (raw)

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.