Creative strategies have been central to global social movements. From the theatrics of the 1999 Seattle protests, to the rebel clowns at the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles and the antics of the Yes Men, the crossovers between art and politics have increasingly become more visible and prolific. This book explores an innovative form of creative and communicative politics: the ’performative encounter’, as a strategy for facilitating new ways of being, relating and making worlds. Unlike existing scholarship that frames such encounters in artistic or cultural terms, this book analyzes performative encounters through an organizational lens to accentuate their social-political potential, engaging a wealth of material from autonomist philosophy, political science, performance studies, geography and social movement texts. Intertwining conceptual and ethnographic research, it uniquely maps out one narrative of the encounter, tracing a line through the twentieth century from the Berlin Dadaists, to the Situationist International, to several contemporary German collectives and campaigns, showing how performative encounters intervene in global and local issues such as the privatization of public space and resources, human mobility and the corporatization of education.

Creative strategies have been central to global social movements. From the theatrics of the 1999 Seattle protests, to the rebel clowns at the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles and the antics of the Yes Men, the crossovers between art and politics have increasingly become more visible and prolific. This book explores an innovative form of creative and communicative politics: the ‘performative encounter’, as a strategy for facilitating new ways of being, relating and making worlds. Unlike existing scholarship that frames such encounters in artistic or cultural terms, this book analyzes performative encounters through an organizational lens to accentuate their social-political potential, engaging a wealth of material from autonomist philosophy, political science, performance studies, geography and social movement texts. Intertwining conceptual and ethnographic research, it uniquely maps out one narrative of the encounter, tracing a line through the twentieth century from the Berlin Dadaists, to the Situationist International, to several contemporary German collectives and campaigns, showing how performative encounters intervene in global and local issues such as the privatization of public space and resources, human mobility and the corporatization of education.

Novel collection of essays addressing contemporary trends in political science, covering a broad array of methodological and substantive topics.

A celebrated theorist examines the conditions of work, employment, and unemployment in neoliberalism's flexible and precarious labor market. In Experimental Politics, Maurizio Lazzarato examines the conditions of work, employment, and unemployment in neoliberalism's flexible and precarious labor market. This is the first book of Lazzarato's in English that fully exemplifies the unique synthesis of sociology, activist research, and theoretical innovation that has generated his best-known concepts, such as “immaterial labor.” The book (published in France in 2009) is also groundbreaking in the way it brings Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari to bear on the analysis of concrete political situations and real social struggles, while making a significant theoretical contribution in its own right. Lazzarato draws on the experiences of casual workers in the French entertainment industry during a dispute over the reorganization (“reform”) of their unemployment insurance in 2004 and 2005. He sees this conflict as the first testing ground of a political program of social reconstruction. The payment of unemployment insurance would become the principal instrument for control over the mobility and behavior of the workers. The flexible and precarious workforce of the entertainment industry prefigured what the entire workforce in contemporary societies is in the process of becoming: in Foucault's words, a “floating population” in “security societies.” Lazzarato argues further that parallel to economic impoverishment, neoliberalism has produced an impoverishment of subjectivity—a reduction in existential intensity. A substantial introduction by Jeremy Gilbert situates Lazzarato's analysis in a broader context.

This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of how political scientists have used experiments to transform their field of study.

How tech companies like Google, Airbnb, StubHub, and Facebook learn from experiments in our data-driven world—an excellent primer on experimental and behavioral economics Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments—also known as randomized controlled trials—designed to test the impact of different online experiences. Once an esoteric tool for academic research, the randomized controlled trial has gone mainstream. No tech company worth its salt (or its share price) would dare make major changes to its platform without first running experiments to understand how they would influence user behavior. In this book, Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision making in a data-driven world. Luca and Bazerman describe the central role experiments play in the tech sector, drawing lessons and best practices from the experiences of such companies as StubHub, Alibaba, and Uber. Successful experiments can save companies money—eBay, for example, discovered how to cut $50 million from its yearly advertising budget—or bring to light something previously ignored, as when Airbnb was forced to confront rampant discrimination by its hosts. Moving beyond tech, Luca and Bazerman consider experimenting for the social good—different ways that governments are using experiments to influence or “nudge” behavior ranging from voter apathy to school absenteeism. Experiments, they argue, are part of any leader's toolkit. With this book, readers can become part of “the experimental revolution.”

This interdisciplinary collection provides a set of innovative and inventive approaches to the use of video as a research method. Building on the development of visual methods across the social sciences, it highlights a range of possibilities for making and working with video data. The collection showcases different video methods, including video diaries, video go-alongs, time-lapse video, mobile devices, multi-angle video recording, video ethnography, and ethnographic documentary. Each method is presented through a case study, showing how it can be used in practice. The authors offer pragmatic advice and discuss practical issues, including equipment, techniques and skills, analysis, and presentation. They also show how video methods can be used in a range of different contexts – at train stations, on bicycles, in schools, outdoors, and in museums – to investigate worlds that are visible, audible, tangible, and in motion. In doing so, they illuminate the theoretical possibilities that video methods offer for researching the body, identity, everyday life, affect, time, and space.