Awards

• Winner of Winner, 2022 Foundations of Political Theory Section First Book Award, American Political Science Association.

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9780197526422

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Seeing Like an Activist is a tour de force, and a joy to read. It is going to transform how political theorists see civil disobedience, and it offers a master class on how to do truly democratic political theory-theory that grows out of democratic actors' practices, rather than trying to fit those actors into existing theories. Political theorists, historians, philosophers, and really everyone else should all read it. If you want to think about what nonviolent direct action can mean for democracy, in the past, present, and/or future, you need to read Pineda's book. * Lida Maxwell, Boston University * A powerful account of how acts of courageous defiance can simultaneously assert freedom and expose structures of racial domination, Pineda's incisive study recovers the genuine radicalism of the nonviolent activism of the civil rights movement. Upending received wisdom about nonviolence as a peaceful, constitutional path to social progress, Pineda shows how activists conceived and enacted nonviolence as a decolonizing practice of self-liberation. * Karuna Mantena, Columbia University * Seeing Like an Activist makes an important and original contribution to scholarship on civil disobedience by highlighting activists (in this case in the Civil Rights Movement in the US in the 1960s) as important political thinkers in their own right. Drawing on careful case studies of the jail, no bail campaigns pioneered by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the 1963 Birmingham Campaign led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Pineda shows how the ideas and actions of civil rights activists powerfully contradict the most cherished premises of the philosophical literature on civil disobedience that purports to draw on their example. * Juliet Hooker, Brown University * Interweaving counter-history and political theory in a way that speaks to our present moment, Pinedas book revolutionizes our understanding of one of the most invoked and iconic, but also most misunderstood examples of civil disobedience. With her remarkably profound, rigorous, and compelling study, Pineda manages to open up new theoretical and political possibilities beyond the unquestioned assumptions that constrain the mainstream understanding of protest and disobedience. Recovering the radical, indeed revolutionary potential of political contestation, her book should be read by anyone interested in building a new world. * Robin Celikates, Free University of Berlin *

Author Information

Erin R. Pineda is Assistant Professor of Government at Smith College. Her work has appeared in History of the Present, Contemporary Political Theory, European Journal of Political Thought, Boston Review, and on the London Review of Books blog.

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