The War on the Social Factory
The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley
Published on 30. April 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
296 pages
978-0-8101-4664-8 (ISBN)
Description
This is a narrative of struggle and solidarity and a collective toolkit for grassroots opposition to the twenty-first century's militarization of care. Social activist and researcher Annie Paradise presents here an ethnography of the mothers and community matriarchs whose children have been murdered by police across the San Francisco Bay Area as they develop and practice autonomous, creative forms of resistance. The War on the Social Factory: The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley maps local families' struggles to reclaim their households and their communities-to create a social infrastructure for care outside state- and market-determined modes of "security." Practices such as sustained vigil, testimony, and insurgent knowledges are shown here to be part of interconnected justice campaigns to demilitarize and decarcerate communities in the face of the multiple forms of violence enacted under late capitalist racial patriarchy. Paradise examines the expanding carceral processes of enclosure, criminalization, dispossession, expropriation, and disposability that mark the neoliberal "security" regime across the Silicon Valley and counterinsurgent strategies of mutual aid and co-generative, dynamic resistance to those forces.
Reviews / Votes
"Far from utopian, a world without policing is being made every day in the community struggles for care recounted here with such urgency and insight. The War on the Social Factory is an exemplary model of collaborative research grounded in the life-affirming battles against the death-dealing system of the carceral state." -Dan Berger, author of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family's Journey"A powerful indictment of the direct and manufactured forms of state violence that threaten the lives of many Black and brown people in the San Francisco Bay Area, Annie Paradise's compelling ethnography is also a testament to the critical insights and perseverance of the women activists-mothers and others-who bear witness to it and pursue alternative visions of justice and community safety." -Eric Porter, author of A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport
"As state violence in service of racial patriarchal capitalism escalates-seemingly unabated-The War on the Social Factory offers crucial insights into community resistance. This collective ethnography draws on a rich history of struggle and strategizing toward new horizons of community safety. A must-read for our times." -Nancy A. Heitzeg, coauthor of Carceral Con: The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Evanston
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
272 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8101-4664-8 (9780810146648)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Annie Paradise is a member of the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, a transterritorial research collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she collaborates with the Universidad de la Tierra Califas and Universidad de la Tierra Oaxaca, and she is also a member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.
Content
introduction: war on the social factory Part I
1. Mesha and Idriss: Security, Care, and Insurgent Knowledges
2. Oscar and Lovell: The Battle for Fourteenth and Broadway
Part II
3. Derrick Gaines: Community Policing and Countercartographies
4. Kayla Moore: Gaia, Escraches, and Direct Action
5. Alex Nieto: Disinformation and the Domestication of War
6. Asa Sullivan: Social Death and the Prose of Counterinsurgency
Part III
7. Justice Campaigns
8. Spaces of Encounter
A Note on Methodology: Convivial Research, Collective Ethnography, Insurgent Learning
1. Mesha and Idriss: Security, Care, and Insurgent Knowledges
2. Oscar and Lovell: The Battle for Fourteenth and Broadway
Part II
3. Derrick Gaines: Community Policing and Countercartographies
4. Kayla Moore: Gaia, Escraches, and Direct Action
5. Alex Nieto: Disinformation and the Domestication of War
6. Asa Sullivan: Social Death and the Prose of Counterinsurgency
Part III
7. Justice Campaigns
8. Spaces of Encounter
A Note on Methodology: Convivial Research, Collective Ethnography, Insurgent Learning