alternative organising

Issue editors: Yousra Rahmouni Elidrissi, Ozan Nadir Alakavuklar, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Christos Giotitsas, Yousaf Nishat-Botero

As we find ourselves in the midst of yet another crisis that undermines the ecological, political and economic bases of our lives, alternative forms of organizing are gaining renewed attention, and calls for a critical engagement with these are becoming more urgent than ever (Chertkovskaya et al., 2020; Johnsen et al., 2017; Phillips and Jeanes, 2018; Stoborod and Swann, 2014). In response to this development, the special issue aims to explore the current challenges, tensions and potentialities opened up by activist forms of organizing. In particular, it seeks to expand on how these are engaged in problematizing dominant power relations and prefiguring a more democratic, ecologically sustainable, and socially just society in the here and now.

From civil society organizations to grassroots initiatives and neighbourhood groups, progressive social movements constitute contentious spaces of reflection, action, and transformation... more

Issue editors: Matthew Wilson and Thomas Swann

It was going to be, we were optimistically told, the anarchist century (Grubacic and Graeber, 2004; Kuhn, 2021). And not just anarchist, but a new anarchism which increasingly looked to prefigurative praxis as its defining principle; the anti-capitalist radicals of the 21^st century were going to be building tomorrow today (Raekstad and Gradin, 2019). This surge in prefiguratively-informed social movements – with prefiguration understood in a substantive form (Gordon, 2018), linked inextricably with the rejection of domination, exploitation and inequality – coalesced with, influenced, and helped provide much needed impetus for the emerging academic discourses of alternative organising (Phillips and Jeanes, 2018). More often than not, academic accounts of any such alternative organising will make at least a passing mention to Occupy, the Zapatistas, the movement of movements. And journals like this one have actively engaged with the possibilities opening up – for... more

In 2001, the first issue of ephemera was published and a new journal was born. Against the growing tide of big publishing houses buying up academic journals, offering administrative support in return for copyright, the central ambition of ephemera has been to ensure open access to peer-reviewed, high quality research for all. ephemera provides its content free of charge, and charges its readers only with free thought. 

For over two decades, ephemera has been dedicated to publishing well-crafted contributions that engage with theoretical and conceptual understandings of the politics of organizing in the broadest sense. In doing this, ephemerahas been a pioneer in introducing alternative and unorthodox themes such as post-growth, affective labour, and financialization of the university as well as producing new critical perspectives on established topics such as anarchism, anonymity, whistleblowing, and corruption.   

Claiming a position from the margins and operating at the borders of organization studies, ephemera has challenged the alienation of academic labor and worked against the de-politicization... more