Josie Hooker

My research explores Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2013) “multiplication of labour” thesis via militant ethnographic enquiry alongside Barcelona’s present-day experiments in “sindicalismo social” (social unionism).

My research investigates the precise relationships between three major and inter-connected expressions of the post-2008 social movement cycle in Barcelona:

1) Amidst generalising precarity, a resurgent materialist politics expressing emergent social subjectivities that break from traditional working-class identities and their exclusions. In particular, the re-articulation of social reproduction as a sphere of class politics, via struggles over housing, care work and the public sector; and via new forms of “sindicalismo social“, including housing assemblies and unions, new self-organised labour unions in highly deregulated, often feminised and racialised sectors neglected by mainstream unions, and the revitalisation of mainstream unions via social movement alliances

2) The assertion of the politics of race, coloniality, gender and sexuality, and its relationship to the gendering, racialisation and bordering of contemporary class relations under hetero-patriarchal capitalist coloniality

3) The territorial and spatial dimension – that is, struggles over the production of space in, against and beyond austerity urbanism. For example, via the mobilisation of the neighbourhood and municipal scales, or around strategic, spatial circuits of financialised value accumulation such as property and tourism

In so doing, I mobilise and develop decolonial (Quijano 2000; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Dinerstein 2015), feminist (Bhattacharya 2017; Dalla Costa and James 1972; Federici 2012) and spatial (Clare 2018; Gray 2018a; Gray 2018b) perspectives within minor marxisms (Bailey et al. 2018).

I’m committed to collective knowledge production using militant, participatory action, decolonial and feminist research methods and epistemologies.

Founding member of SWDTP Standing Seminar in Critical Theory (2018-present)

Member of SWDTP student-led Participatory Action Research group (2017-18)

Committee member of SWRC (2017-18)