Narrative

Public space is necessary for the construction of a public sphere, which is in turn necessary for the functioning of a democratic society.  Building on the work of urban scholars such as Mike Davis, Don Mitchell, Michael Sorkin, and Setha Low, my work investigates how contemporary urban policies, economic pressures, security concerns, and public dissent shape the production of urban public space and the prospects for a more just society.

            My dissertation, “Dissent in the City: The Spatial Politics of the Mobilization Against the 2008 Republican National Convention,” is an ethnographic account of the way that urban space, to paraphrase Lefebvre, became both the terms and the stakes of struggle surrounding the 2008 RNC in St. Paul, Minnesota. I investigate how the entrepreneurial attempt by the Mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul, to “put the Twin Cities on the map” by bringing a national convention to Minnesota set in motion a complex articulation between police and national security agencies, Republican delegates, liberal anti-war demonstrators, and radical direct action groups in which the public spaces of the city of St. Paul became a deeply contested terrain that pushed liberal discourses of public space and politics to their limits. I argue that Post-9/11 security protocols, inter-urban best-practice networks, and innovative alliances between diverse protest groups produced an illiberal urban geography in which the assumed correspondence between public space and the public sphere was displaced, resulting in authoritarian policing, widespread infringement of First Amendment rights, and a redefinition of civil disobedience which led to eight peaceful activists being charged with “Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism.”   This work contributes to urban, political, and critical geography as well as the inter-disciplinary field of social movement studies through pushing analyses of urban space and politics to consider the fluid and contested nature of the category of “public space.”