Fembot’s Books Aren’t Dead (BAD) interview for May 2014 is now available on the Fembot website. In this BAD interview Magdalena Olszanowski (Ph.D. Candidate, Concordia University) talks with Laura Portwood-Stacer (Visiting Assistant Professor, New York University), author of Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism (Bloomsbury Press, 2013).
You can listen to this interview at: http://fembotcollective.org/blog/2014/05/01/books-arent-dead-lifestyle-politics-and-radcial-activism/
Both the podcast and the transcript for this interview (as well as BAD’s past interviews) will be available for download in the near future. BAD is Fembot’s series of monthly interviews with feminist authors of recent books on media, science, and technology. For those who are interested in participating in the ongoing BAD project please contact the BAD editor, Hye Jin Lee (hye-jin-lee@uiowa.edu) or Carol Stabile (cstabile@uoregon.edu).
About Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism:
Attempts by people to enact their political beliefs in their daily lives have become commonplace in contemporary US culture, in spheres ranging from shopping habits to romantic attachments. This groundbreaking book examines how collective social movements have cultivated individual practices of “lifestyle politics” as part of their strategies of resistance, and the tensions they must navigate in doing so.
Drawing on feminism and other movements that claim that “the personal is political,” the book explores how radical anarchist activists position their own lifestyles within projects of resistance. Various lifestyle practices, from consumption to personal style to sexual relationships, are studied to address how identity and cultural practices can be used as tools of political dissent.
An accessible and provocative text, Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism blends theory with empirical materials to highlight issues that are important not only to anarchists, but also to anyone struggling for social change. This unique analysis will contribute to the development of anarchist theory and practice and will appeal to anyone interested in political activism and social movements.
About the Author:
Laura Portwood-Stacer is the author of Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism (Bloomsbury, 2013), and currently serves as co-editor of the Commentary & Criticism section of the journal Feminist Media Studies. Her research on media, consumer culture, and resistance has been published in New Media and Society, Journal of Consumer Culture, Feminist Theory, Sexualities, Flow, and New Criticals. She is also co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture on Internet Memes, forthcoming in December 2014. For more info on LPS, see lauraportwoodstacer.com<http://lauraportwoodstacer.com> and follow @lportwoodstacer on Twitter.
About the Interviewer:
Magdalena Olszanowski is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. She is a senior research assistant at her supervisor Kim Sawchuk’s Mobile Media Lab, and editorial assistant of open-wi. Her scholarly and artistic work on gender, technology, electronic music, self-imaging, violence, perception, and mobile image-based media has been published and presented internationally. Her research-creation dissertation is focused on the feminist online media histories of the 1990s. She has also been involved in community politics in Toronto and Montreal for several years. (twitter: @raisecain web: http://raisecain.net)
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