On Democracy at Risk
A Conversation with H.L.T. Quan
& Alan Gómez
Friday, April 5, 2024 at 1:30 p.m. AZ (2:30 p.m. MT)
Virginia G. Piper Center | Hybrid via Zoom
About this Event
How can we re-imagine community and solidarity in an age of increasingly fragmented democracy? Join Associate Professors H.L.T. Quan and Alan Gomez from the School of Social Transformation to discuss concepts of justice, freedom, and new approaches to creating resistance, drawing on themes from Quan's new book, Become Ungovernable: An Abolition Feminist Ethic for Democratic Living.
About the Speakers
H. L. T. Quan is a political theorist and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Her research & teaching focus on radical thought and praxis, including feminist consciousness, utopian thought, speculative living, data justice, movements for justice, and the Black Radical Tradition.
Alan Eladio Gómez is a historian, Southwest Borderlands Scholar and associate professor of justice and social inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the School of Transborder Studies and the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts.
About Quan's New Book
Become Ungovernable is a provocative new work of political thought setting out to reclaim 'freedom', 'justice' and 'democracy', revolutionary ideas that are all too often warped in the interests of capital and the state.
Revealing the mirage of mainstream democratic thought and the false promises of liberal political ideologies, H. L. T. Quan offers an alternative approach: an abolition feminism drawing on a kaleidoscope of refusal praxes, and on a deep engagement with the Black Radical Tradition and queer analytics.
With each chapter anchored by episodes from the long history of resistance and rebellions against tyranny, Quan calls for us to take up a feminist ethic of living rooted in the principles of radical inclusion, mutuality and friendship as part of the larger toolkit for confronting fascism, white supremacy and the neoliberal labour regime.
Other works by
H.L.T. Quan
About Gómez's Work
Gómez is the author of The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico: Chicana/o Radicalism, Solidarity Politics & Latin American Social Movements (University of Texas Press, 2016). Bringing to life the stories of political teatristas, feminists, gunrunners, labor organizers, poets, journalists, ex-prisoners, and other revolutionaries, The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico examines the inspiration Chicanas/os found in social movements in Mexico and Latin America from 1971 to 1979. Drawing on fifteen years of interviews and archival research, including examinations of declassified government documents from Mexico, this study uncovers encounters between activists and artists across borders while sharing a socialist-oriented, anticapitalist vision.
His research has also been published in Radical History Review, Latino Studies, Kalfou, African Identities, and edited volumes Behind Bars: Latino/as and Prison in the United States (Palgrave, 2009), and Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964-1982 (Routledge, 2011). A second book manuscript, 'With Dignity Intact': Rebellion, Justice, and Power in the U.S. Federal Prison System, 1969-1974 (under contract, University of Nebraska Press) is on its way, as well as a manuscript, "Autonomy, Ungovernability and the Everyday Politics of the UNAM Strike, 1999-2000."
Other works
featuring
Gómez's research
