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In this paper, we highlight emergent trends that we have observed from direct participation in civil society organisations, and importantly the potential they have to enact transformative social change. Specifically, drawing on in-depth participation with two community organisations in Leeds in the North of England, we highlight the limits of traditional personas of the social entrepreneur and social activist and tendencies that sit between and beyond them that are more hybrid and messy, but ultimately more disruptive and productive. Through our fieldwork, we identified four aspects to this: 1.) purposeful value-rationality and attempts to explicitly foreground values in the everyday; 2.) relations as co-constructed and interdependent; 3.) the cyclical and transformative nature of practices; and, 4.) the role of storytelling in narrating and supporting alternative future visions. Ultimately, at the heart of the dysfunction of both social entrepreneur and social activist personas is an absence of conscious acknowledgements of how our work is motivated by what we love, and what we feel a loss for; what we have become disconnected from, and what we urgently need to reconnect with beyond individualised notions of social change. We contend that acknowledging these and incorporating them into our social change work can nurture more transformative values, practices, identities and narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radical intellectuals and researchers have become accustomed to a kind of 'ideological comfort zone,' based on the tacit assumption that there must necessarily be a correspondence between the convictions and critical and anticolonial values of scholars and activists, on the one hand, and their concrete behaviour as individuals, on the other hand. It would be great if that were so, of course; unfortunately, this is a naïve oversimplification. This article contains reflections based on three decades of an intense interaction of a geographer born and based in a 'semiperipheral' country (Brazil) with numerous colleagues from his own country as well as many other countries (in the Americas, Europe and Africa). During this time, I have learned a lot about the permanence of subtle forms of colonialism even among 'northern' colleagues recognised by their peers as progressive. However, I have also observed many problems commonly credited to 'colonialism' also at the national and local level in my own country, and this experience has convinced me that the typical indignation on the part of 'southern' progressive intellectuals in the face of 'northern' Eurocentrism is legitimate but rather insufficient - and often a little hypocritical. There are deep-rooted, 'structural' contradictions, so that elements of ethnocentric and/or sociocentric thinking can be often found even in the works and above all behaviour of 'postcolonial,' left-wing social scientists. While geographers certainly cannot be excluded from this critical assessment, geography potentially offers some important tools for the analysis of the problem from a viewpoint broader than it is usually the case: the epistemological lenses of multiscalarity are particularly relevant here. Hence, I would like to provide with this paper a re-assessment of a problem that has been intensely discussed for several decades, but this time from a perspective that clearly benefits from a special attention devoted to spatiality, as perceived by a 'southern' researcher. Moreover, I am also interested in making my ethical-political point of view - the left-libertarian thought and praxis - very explicit, not only for the sake of intellectual honesty but also in order to explore the question about possible specificities of left-libertarians (anarchists, neo-anarchists and libertarian autonomists) vis-à-vis Marxists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The flâneur was a modern literary figure that characterized the relationship of capitalism to urban alienation in 19th-century Paris. Our contention in this paper is that the flâneur can also be seen as an exemplar of a broader archetypical figure that exists across time, in multiple landscapes of capitalism. Following the work of Lauren Berlant on "slow death," we identify this broader archetype as an adept "capitalist coaster"-one whose embodied "art" is the successful making and movement of the self within the maelstrom of capitalist modernity. We describe three examples of this archetype-the flâneur, the hot-rodder, and the slow food activist-arguing that all three personify a particular sort of privileged mobility that enables surviving within contemporary life. Tracing this archetype through time and space, we suggest that attention to the figure of the capitalist coaster is useful for interrogating how privilege produces specific forms of embodied coping within the varied landscapes of capitalism. We argue that attention to this coping is important for understanding the relationship between capitalist resistance and reproduction, as well as the structural conditions that impact the uneven embodied consequences of coping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generations of student visionaries have struggled for racial justice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ruptures I is a zine produced by the feminist geography collective FLOCK, with contributions from collaborators, that highlights this history of struggle. This essay briefly introduces the process, themes, and motivations behind FLOCK's production of this zine and highlights how learning about UNC's history transformed the way we view our campus landscape and remade our relationships with one another. As we strived to illuminate the ways student activists teach us about our university, making the zine became an educational process for our evolving feminist collective. Further, as our collective has shifted and sometimes stalled in the years after we first printed it, the zine has travelled outside our circle and served as a pedagogical object for others. In the spirit of feminist praxis we reflect here on our collective commitments to creating and using the zine to subvert oppressive university hierarchies and also explore the difficulties in sustaining this collective work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]