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panel
Stealing Survival / Interrupting Enclosure
keywords:
police/ policing
reproduction
resistance
What does it mean to ‘steal’ public education? Or to ‘steal’ food when you are hungry? How do everyday people, in working to secure the basic necessities of life amidst the profound insecurity that racial capitalism requires, subvert the legal, political, economic, spatial, and ideological structures that uphold private property? How do these subversions help us understand and locate contemporary mechanisms and logics of enclosure as they operate in the Global North? This roundtable explores these questions by examining contemporary instances in which people lay claim to things like housing, education, and food outside of legal or approved channels,---the significance of those claims, and the political subjectivities that are constructed along the way. Through case studies that focus on food, housing, education, and transportation, we ask, how do these claims make visible, interrupt, contest, and/or de-stabilize enclosure and what political futures do they illuminate? As scholars of race, colonialism, gender, and labor have long established, these interruptions, refusals, and contestations-- through marronage, encampment, strike, and mutual aid--forge formations of kinship and social relations outside of the structures of property and the nuclear family. Building upon this work, this roundtable queries how these alternative formations are likewise policed, why, and the relationship of policing of these interruptions to enclosure to the continued production of hierarchical group differentiation articulated through race.