Assistant Professor of Anthropology and convener of the Prison Justice Initiative at Antioch College, Dr. Jennifer D. Grubbs, has authored a new book, Ecoliberation: Reimagining Resistance and the Green Scare. The book will be released in June, 2021 by McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Disenchanted by indirect forms of protest designed to work within existing systems of corporate and state power, animal and earth liberation activists have turned instead to direct action. In this detailed ethnographic account Jennifer Grubbs takes the reader inside the complicated, intricate world of these powerful and controversial interventions, nuancing the harrowing realities of political repression with the inspiring, clever ways that activists resist.
Grubbs draws on her personal experiences within the movement to offer a thoughtful and intersectional analysis. Tracing the strategies of liberationist activists as they grapple with doing activism under extreme repression, Ecoliberation challenges ubiquitous frameworks that position protestors as either good or bad by showing how activists playfully and confrontationally enact radical social change. Nearly a decade in the making, the book looks back at the notorious period of repression called the Green Scare and draws contemporary connections to the creep of fascism under President Donald Trump.
In stories that are simultaneously heartbreaking, riddled with tension and contradiction, and inspiring, Grubbs proves that whether or not the revolution is televised, it will be spectacular.
Grubbs is an enviro-feminist anthropologist whose research bridges feminist anthropology, environmental communication, and queer studies, both in method and application. Her work examines the creative and confrontational ways in which activists co-create identities of resistance within neoliberal capitalism to dismantle ecological and species hierarchies through the spectacle of protest. Through an intersectional feminist lens, Grubbs’s work attempts to deconstruct the interconnected hierarchies that are used to naturalize and perpetuate systems of violence. Her other publications include “Queering the Que(e)ry of Speciesism” (Journal of Critical Animal Studies), and “Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat” (Defiant Daughters: 21 Women on Art, Activism, Animals, and the Sexual Politics of Meat),.
Ecoliberation: Reimagining Resistance and the Green Scare—currently available for preorder—is part of the “disruptive” Outspoken Series which articulates the intellectual stakes of pressing cultural, social, environmental, economic, and political issues that unsettle today’s world.
