Taking the bus daily and demonstrating on Sunday: Reflections on the formation of political subjectivity in an urban world

Abstract

This paper explores the reasons behind people’s engagement in political action, particularly the marginalized and threatened. Using the example of the marches against immigration reform in the USA, the paper follows immigrant women in an effort to understand what made them participate in those demonstrations despite risks of deportation, lack of experience in demonstrating and fear. Based on fieldwork with domestic workers in Los Angeles, we suggest that in a condition of urbanity (understood as a historically situated condition characterized by a mode of living based on interdependencies, mobility, uncertainty and speed), there is much continuity between everyday life and political events. Everyday life is constituted by personal biographies, which we define as the accumulation of experience and emotional trajectories. Most social movement theories tend to emphasize the extraordinariness of political events, focusing on ruptures with everyday life. In this paper, we argue that radical urban theory ought to remain closer to the feelings experienced in political practice, bringing the obvious continuities into theoretical development.

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