fuck – Sarah B. Gelbard

10 February 2018

Presented at: Curating Resistance: Punk as Archival Method, Los Angeles CA

Sometimes you can’t design your research. Sometimes the city is what happens while you’re busy making plans. What are the linkages between tactical approaches to punk place-making and punk knowledge-making? As a doctoral candidate researching punk space in the city, specifically as it intersects with formal urban planning processes, I find striking analogies between my academic struggles and punk place-making. The qualitative-(re)turn in the social sciences has extended legitimacy to a variety of alternative research methods. In the process of formalization and institutionalization, in many instances the underlying conceptual and ethical arguments for the diversification of methodological approaches are buried if not entirely lost. Continue reading “Ask a punk: from informality to anti-formality and anti-authority and when to say fuck” →

Presented at: Association of American Geographers 2017 Annual Meeting, Boston MA
Session: Anarchist Political Ecology: Theoretical Horizons and Empirical Axes III – Urban Anarchism

Abstract: While the appropriation and transformation of undesirable space into punk space present ways to “fuck the man,” punk claims to space are neither absolute nor stable. The freedom to use and transform space outside the mainstream and its regulatory structures also makes these spaces vulnerable to dominant social and economic systems that define property and determine its value. When the desirability of different spaces throughout the city shifts, pressure is placed on the residents who no longer conform. Like many “undesirables” in cities, punks are perpetually forced to adapt, integrate, or re-make both space and place in increasingly marginal parts of the city. Punk space repeats a battle of fucking the man and being fucked by the man. Currently in Ottawa Ontario, there is also vocal and divisive critique from a feminist artist collective questioning whether men are really the ones being fucked. Continue reading “Fuck the man: punk space and feminist counter-resistance” →