Synopses & Reviews
Illegal migrants who evade detection, creators of value in insecure and precarious working conditions and those who refuse the constraints of sexual and biomedical classifications: these are the people who manage to subvert power and to craft unexpected sociabilities and experiences. Escape Routes shows how people can escape control and create social change by becoming imperceptible to the political system of Global North Atlantic societies.
"A profound and brilliant examination of the power of exodus to create radical interventions in perhaps the three most important and contested fields of society today: life, migration and precarious labour. It is in these fields that the present and future of multitude is at stake. Escape Routes is a toolbox in the hands of multitude."
---Antonio Negri, author of Insurgencies and co-author of Empire and Multitude
"Another world is here! So announce the authors in their preface to a stirring and intellectually inspiring book about the possibility, the necessity and the potency of escape. Rather than seeing social transformation in terms of revolt, event and abrupt shifts, the authors trace escape routes through the ordinary and through everyday practices. Escape Routes is required reading for anyone who believes in the alternative worlds produced alongside neoliberal capitalism."
---Judith Halberstam, University of Southern California, author of In a Queer Time and Place
"A rich variety of work starts with some version of the autonomous thesis, that the everyday actions or resistances of people precede power; they are in fact what constitute and drive power forward. Escape Routes is one of the most original and interesting efforts to build a fuller understanding of the contemporary world, by focussing on processes and mapping out some of the history of modern power and resistance."
---Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America's Future
"This is one of the most original treatments of some of the big questions we confront today. Even familiar subjects gain a new kind of traction as they are repositioned in the authors' sharply defined lens of control and subversion. This is conceptualisation at its best - Escape Routes allows us to see what might otherwise be illegible and it continuously executes reversals of standard interpretations of the present."
---Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of Territory, Authority, Rights
Dimitris Papadopoulos teaches social theory at Cardiff University, UK. He is co-editor of the journal Subjectivity and his work has appeared in various journals including Boundary 2; Culture, Theory & Critique; Darkmatter; and Ephemera.
Niamh Stephenson teaches social science at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her most recent book, Analysing Everyday Experience: Social Research and Political Change (2006), was co-authored with Dimitris Papadopoulos.
Vassilis Tsianos teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He is co-editor of Empire and the Biopolitical Turn (2007) and Turbulent Margins: New Perspectives of Migration in Europe (2007).
Synopsis
This book shows how individuals can resist the methods of power and control used in advanced Western societies by becoming imperceptible to the political system.
The populations of Western countries are highly organized and controlled. Government and society at large categorize people, assigning particular behavioral characteristics to them which delimit their mobility, their labor and their sexuality and reproduction. Behavior outside these accepted norms is punished through judicial or social pressure. This book argues that the most effective form of resistance is for individuals to refuse to accept their position in the system and therefore to become invisible to it.
Escape Routes celebrates the illegal migrant who evades detection, the creators of value through the informal nonmonetary economy, and the people who refuse to accept definitive and limited sexual or gender identities. It is through these seemingly insignificant events and moments in everyday life where people cease to occupy formal categories that individuals can effect real social change.
Synopsis
A practical guide to the growing influence of women on parliamentary legislation across the Commonwealth, and includes a study of how women's rights are promoted.
About the Author
Greg Palast is an investigative journalist whose articles have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation, Salon.com, and numerous other US, British, and international newspapers, magazines, and online publications. He writes the "Inside Corporate America" column for The Observer and is joining BBC-TV's premier news broadcast, Newsnight, as special investigations reporter. He is the winner of the prestigious Financial Times David Thomas Prize, in 1997 and the Industrial Society Investigative Story of the Year, in 1998. He has also been nominated by the UK Press Association as Business Writer of the Year in 1999. In 2000, Salon.com selected his report on the US elections as politics story of the year. He has been the subject of several documentaries, an NPR profile, and an upcoming "60 Minutes" feature. Jerrold Oppenheim has represented Attorneys General, consumers, low-income consumers, labor unions, environmentalists, and industry before utility regulatory commissions and other forums for more than 30 years. His precedent-setting cases include denial of utility plant siting and investment, setting service quality requirements, and abolition of discriminatory pricing, credit and marketing practices. He has lectured and published internationally, including monographs for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) and the National Council on Competition and the Electric Industry. Theo MacGregor was, until 1998, director of the Electric Power Division of the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Energy, the state's utility regulator. She helped develop the rules and regulations by which electricity utilities operate in the market. She now runs MacGregor Energy Consultancy and provides expert analysis to state governments and other organisations about the electric industry.