Browsing by Author "Stapp, April Marie"
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- Crises Transformed: The Motivations Behind Engagement in AnarchyStapp, April Marie (Virginia Tech, 2017-06-06)What motivates individuals to take part in anarchistic movements and spaces? For those who do, what occurs during engagement in anarchy? By collecting the oral histories of anarchistic activists, this study indicates how crises, personal and collective, is a not only a motivating factor for why individuals join and engage in anarchistic movements and spaces, but how crises are, in turn, radically transformed through engagement in anarchical practice. To understand this process, this study explores crises through the development of an eco-anarchistic dialectical framework--negate-subvert-create--to indicate how the crises of capital are embodied, consciously negated, subverted politically, and ultimately transformed through engagement in anarchy. Anarchy is accordingly conceptualized as a liminal spatio-temporality that allows individuals to reconnect their selves to their potentials to become something beyond the ecological destructive and dominant social world. These potential are realized through the embodiment of communitas, or collective liminality--a natural communality that individuals reconnect to engaging in anarchy. I end with an exploration of the possible outcomes and potential futures of anarchy by situating the current political, economic, social and ecological crises occurring around the globe within the eco-anarchistic framework developed in this study. Here, I indicate the importance of engaging in care practices and creating care-networks as a necessary outcome and future political practice for anarchistic movements as a way to mitigate and ultimately transform the crises of capital.
- 'Occupying' Anarchism and Discovering the Means for Social Justice: Interrogating the Anarchist Turn in 21st Century Social MovementsStapp, April Marie (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-17)The purpose of this thesis is to take the individual on a journey about what it is like to be engaged in radical anti-systemic activism in the 21st Century. Along this journey the reader will learn about the experiences of what it was like to join the Occupy movement"an anti-systemic movement that began in 2011"through an empirical analysis of learning about and practicing the anarchist(ic) characteristics of the movement"horizontal, non-hegemonic, affinity and consensus-based ways-of-being as a part of your everyday lifeworld. This journey is not only informed by my own personal experience joining the Occupy movement, but it is also informed by my simultaneous experience of maintaining the role of a radical activist-scholar throughout the process. Accordingly, I will explore how this impacted my lifeworld both within and outside of academia, which informed the very framework, analysis, and outcomes produced in this thesis. This project was thus also designed to inform social science research"particularly that on social movements"by reflecting on both social roles experienced in this journey in order to cohesively make sense of the paradoxes created by engaging in discourses about, within, and for the Occupy movement. Of most importance, from an empirical and ontological experience as an Occupier and activist-scholar, this project will help to raise key questions about the frameworks to seek social justice utilized by contemporary anti-systemic social movements in the 21st Century"social movements that are now spreading around the globe.