Harrison Jonathon Lechley-Yuill

In recent years, abolitionist and populist political movements have been the dominant narratives in North American, European and South American politics. This project investigates political resistance at the intersections of abolition, populism and deconstruction. It draws on the similarities between these fields to theorise political resistances that extend beyond governance as their central tenet. The project examines how contemporary forms of activism (from BLM, Trans-activism, communes, indigenous land-resource relations, transformative justice, fugitive living and mutual aid networks) remake logics of violence, dispossession and destitution.

Consequently this project rethinks democracy as a framework for understanding resistances which extend beyond but not without governance. By not delimiting the sphere of resistance, I develop an account of democracy-as-resistance which resists the logics of racial capital, heteropatriarchy, (neo)colonialism, and property.