Anthony Ince
I am a political and social geographer studying the spatial relationships between globalisation, political economy, and everyday political practice. I am especially interested in ways our localised practices in the world may reproduce, contest, transgress, and recast broader social relations, particularly in relation to globalisation, migration and difference.
This broad set of concerns has led me to undertake research with a range of groups, including anarchist-inspired community and workplace groups in London, communities across the UK negotiating the impacts of labour market restructuring, and the complex relationships between political-economic and cultural change and UK fascist groups. Although I focus largely on the UK, much of my research considers the global aspects of everyday political practices across multiple scales, spaces, and networks.
Current Projects:
Urban Riots: a comparative study of Stockholm and London
This project with Ilda Lindell and Thomas Borén (both at Stockholm University) investigates the multiple, contested aftermaths of the London (2011) and Stockholm (2013) riots. Riots tend to be characterised as ruptures from ‘real politics’, however we reposition them as part of a broader continuum of political engagement and action. In doing so, we reassess the role of riots as potential catalysts for shifts in urban policy and everyday practices of community and grassroots agency.
Geographies of Fascism and Anti-fascism
An ongoing interest is the spatial strategies, philosophies and cultures of the far right and those who seek to oppose it. I do this through two current projects:
1. The far-right and the politics of charity: In the context of a rise in populist-right politics, there has been an increase in their engagements with charity (broadly defined). This project is in its early stages, but seeks to explore both empirically and theoretically/ideologically the connections and relations between the two in contemporary Europe. The initial focus is on housing and homelessness activism, which has been exacerbated by austerity and housing crises across Europe in the last decade.
2. Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) and anti-fascist spatial strategy in nineties Britain: Using AFA as a case study, this project uses a combination of archives and retrospective interviews with former activists to investigate the spatial strategies and rationalities of of militant anti-fascism. Such historical insights may help us to reflect on the current political moment.
Anarchist geographies
My main theoretical concerns orbit the application of anarchist theory and practice to geographical imaginations, critically exploring and reframing geographical themes and categories including autonomy, territory and the state. These political and theoretical commitments run throughout my empirical work, as I and others have sought to explore the possibilities of how an anarchist imagination can inform geographical debates and address broader concerns regarding social justice and democracy.
Within this broad interest, I am developing a joint project with Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre (UNAM) named ‘Post-statist Geographies’, exploring the possibilities of geographical imaginations, research agendas, and theoretical frameworks that move beyond the embedded statisms that persist within geographic epistemologies, pedagogies and methodologies.
This broad set of concerns has led me to undertake research with a range of groups, including anarchist-inspired community and workplace groups in London, communities across the UK negotiating the impacts of labour market restructuring, and the complex relationships between political-economic and cultural change and UK fascist groups. Although I focus largely on the UK, much of my research considers the global aspects of everyday political practices across multiple scales, spaces, and networks.
Current Projects:
Urban Riots: a comparative study of Stockholm and London
This project with Ilda Lindell and Thomas Borén (both at Stockholm University) investigates the multiple, contested aftermaths of the London (2011) and Stockholm (2013) riots. Riots tend to be characterised as ruptures from ‘real politics’, however we reposition them as part of a broader continuum of political engagement and action. In doing so, we reassess the role of riots as potential catalysts for shifts in urban policy and everyday practices of community and grassroots agency.
Geographies of Fascism and Anti-fascism
An ongoing interest is the spatial strategies, philosophies and cultures of the far right and those who seek to oppose it. I do this through two current projects:
1. The far-right and the politics of charity: In the context of a rise in populist-right politics, there has been an increase in their engagements with charity (broadly defined). This project is in its early stages, but seeks to explore both empirically and theoretically/ideologically the connections and relations between the two in contemporary Europe. The initial focus is on housing and homelessness activism, which has been exacerbated by austerity and housing crises across Europe in the last decade.
2. Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) and anti-fascist spatial strategy in nineties Britain: Using AFA as a case study, this project uses a combination of archives and retrospective interviews with former activists to investigate the spatial strategies and rationalities of of militant anti-fascism. Such historical insights may help us to reflect on the current political moment.
Anarchist geographies
My main theoretical concerns orbit the application of anarchist theory and practice to geographical imaginations, critically exploring and reframing geographical themes and categories including autonomy, territory and the state. These political and theoretical commitments run throughout my empirical work, as I and others have sought to explore the possibilities of how an anarchist imagination can inform geographical debates and address broader concerns regarding social justice and democracy.
Within this broad interest, I am developing a joint project with Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre (UNAM) named ‘Post-statist Geographies’, exploring the possibilities of geographical imaginations, research agendas, and theoretical frameworks that move beyond the embedded statisms that persist within geographic epistemologies, pedagogies and methodologies.
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Papers by Anthony Ince
through the study of Anti-Fascist Action (AFA), a militant anti-fascist organisation in the United Kingdom and Ireland that operated at its height between 1989 and 1996. In the literature on activist territorialities, little has been written on practices that confront other non-state territorialities. Likewise, despite a small but growing geographical literature on far right populism, anti-fascism is under-researched. Through archival materials and interviews with former activists, I argue that geographers can understand AFA’s militant anti-fascism as transversal, following Felix Guattari’s theorisation of the term. AFA operated beyond state-centric modes of territoriality, creating malleable pathways between different operational logics, cross-cutting state and non-state forms. Thinking transversally about territory helps to disembed epistemic and ontological framings from dominant statist logics and assumptions, opening up new ways of understanding how movements operate territorially. The paper concludes with reflections for contemporary
antifascisms.
through the study of Anti-Fascist Action (AFA), a militant anti-fascist organisation in the United Kingdom and Ireland that operated at its height between 1989 and 1996. In the literature on activist territorialities, little has been written on practices that confront other non-state territorialities. Likewise, despite a small but growing geographical literature on far right populism, anti-fascism is under-researched. Through archival materials and interviews with former activists, I argue that geographers can understand AFA’s militant anti-fascism as transversal, following Felix Guattari’s theorisation of the term. AFA operated beyond state-centric modes of territoriality, creating malleable pathways between different operational logics, cross-cutting state and non-state forms. Thinking transversally about territory helps to disembed epistemic and ontological framings from dominant statist logics and assumptions, opening up new ways of understanding how movements operate territorially. The paper concludes with reflections for contemporary
antifascisms.
people in three UK communities, this study examines experiences of, and responses to, globalisation in the aftermath of the recession. Departing from established ‘top-down’ understandings, it assesses the local impacts of globalisation and investigates the different forms of connection that exist between communities and global processes. This provides some important new insights into the relationships between global connections, labour markets and communities.
This edited volume proceeds from the perspective that as contemporary global challenges push anarchist agendas back into widespread currency, geographers need to rise to this occasion and begin (re)mapping the possibilities of what anarchist perspectives might yet contribute to the discipline. We develop an exploratory volume, where explicitly and unashamedly anarchist approaches to human geography have been allowed to blossom in all their wonderful plurality. Accommodating a diversity of positionalities demands an unconstrained and eclectic embrace, and accordingly we understand the potentialities of anarchist theory and praxis as protean and manifold. Through this unfolding and variegated approach, we seek to expose readers to a variety of epistemological, ontological, and methodological interpretations of anarchism, unencumbered by the strict disciplining frameworks that characterize other political philosophies, and purposefully open to contradiction and critique.
Included articles:
1. Foreword: Looking Forward / Acting Backward - Myrna Margulies Breitbart
2. Reanimating Anarchist Geographies: A New Burst of Colour - Simon Springer, Anthony Ince, Jenny Pickerill, Gavin Brown & Adam J. Barker
3. Anarchism! What Geography Still Ought to Be - Simon Springer
4. The Pervasive Nature of Heterodox Economic Spaces at a Time of Neoliberal Crisis: Towards a "Postneoliberal" Anarchist Future - Richard J. White & Colin C. Williams
5. In the Shell of the Old: Anarchist Geographies of Territorialisation - Anthony Ince
6. Emotion at the Center of Radical Politics: On the Affective Structures of Rebellion and Control - Nathan L. Clough
7. Anarchy, Geography and Drift - Jeff Ferrell
8. Radicalizing Relationships To and Through Shared Geographies: Why Anarchists Need to Understand Indigenous Connections to Land and Place - Adam J. Barker & Jenny Pickerill
9. Practice What You Teach: Placing Anarchism In and Out of the Classroom - Farhang Rouhani
10. Afterword: Anarchist Geographies and Revolutionary Strategies - Uri Gordon
New ideas and concepts have emerged through this renewed interest in anarchism, which promises to transform the intellectual landscape of geography as we know it. This growing maturity and diversity of anarchist thought, however, has been characterized by a heavy focus on theory. As scholars identifying with anarchist traditions, we feel it is both timely and vitally important to explore critically and in greater depth what these theoretical and conceptual innovations mean for academic praxis – in the empirical, as well as pedagogical and methodological, dimensions of geographical scholarship.