As well as more organised forms of political contention, I'm committed to understanding the practice of 'everyday resistance': those informal ways that people resist the structures of power they encounter in their daily lives. 

I'm interested in a number of questions: how do activists demonstrate commitment to their political ideals when not directly engaged in political activism? What is the repertoire of everyday resistance non-activists or 'ordinary' people employ? And, how are these repertoires informed by the structures of power they interact with? 

By exploring how people experience, resist, and subvert the systems of power they are subject to, I want to make visible alternative spaces of political contention. In doing so, I hope to learn more about what everyday forms of resistance can tell us about alternative forms of governance; the agency exerted by those who do not engage in formal political processes; and the reach of democratic systems into everyday life. 

This project is in its early stages. I'll be presenting my first paper on this subject at the International Dissidence conference in Frankfurt in March 2017.

Image: Resistance Graffiti in Florence by Cory Doctorow under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Commons