Description
Abstract:This paper aims bringing to bear a phenomenological perspective on critical theories of embodied protest through an account of bodies in motion, more particularly collective walking in public space. Focusing on racialized citizens inhabiting and navigating public spaces and on anti-racist protests, it contrasts the notion of the precarious body, central to critical theorists like Judith Butler (2015, 2020), with an alternative phenomenological understanding, locating the political significance of the body in spontaneous movement (Hannah Arendt 1958, 1971) and competence (Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1945).
It is argued that attending to either precariousness or mobile-capable bodies reveals distinct dimensions of radical democratic struggles. While precariousness addresses the unequal distribution of social-material conditions, it tends to overshadow the shared lived experience of freedom among citizens countering inhibitions of free movement, often motivated by their disproportionate exposure to precarious conditions in the first place. From a phenomenological perspective, public action is permitted by capable and mobile bodies. It is argued that public space opens the power of “we-can” bodies by soliciting citizens’ movement among others in public space and their engagement in shared projects, according to their bodily capacities. Pluralistic interaction, aiming to maintain or create free spaces of movement, is presented as the political practice of freedom par excellence, exemplified by radical democratic walking practices in the Black civil rights movement and its intersections with the nascent disability rights movement on the one hand and the Black Lives Matter movement on the other. The second part of this paper takes the phenomenology of walking from the plane of protest to democratic citizenship more generally, probing the hypotheses that the lived experience of free embodied movement is key to democratic freedom and to public space per se.
| Period | 30 Aug 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | OZSW annual conference 2024 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Eindhoven, NetherlandsShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |