Liz Mason-Deese

is an editor at Viewpoint Magazine, a member of the Counter-Cartographies Collective, and a member of the translation collective Territorio de Ideas. She is a long-time translator of, and participant in, feminist movements in Latin America.

Living in Freedom: Notes on Colectivo Situaciones and MTD Solano’s Hypothesis 891

Liz Mason-Deese January 17, 2023

Today, when the term “militant research” is regularly used in academic articles and texts, it is worth returning to the question of the purpose and practice of research militancy. Ultimately, as Hipotesis 891 highlights, research militancy is not primarily about another way of doing research, or least research that assumes academia as its main site of enunciation. Rather, it is about another way of doing politics, that does not follow a predetermined line or presume to know the answers a priori, but that sees research as part of the political process itself.

From #MeToo to #WeStrike: A Politics in Feminine

Liz Mason-Deese March 7, 2018

What will it take to move from #MeToo to #WeStrike? As the Latin American movements have shown, it is in the practice of this politics in feminine that a new collective subjectivity is born. It is not our experiences of violence that define who we are, but our struggle against violence that defines a collective we.

Striking for Ourselves

Liz Mason-Deese February 23, 2017

The strike allows us to find each other, and to together constitute a new collective subject, bringing our bodies together in a common action and shared territory. Just as women’s labor takes many forms, so does the women’s strike: a work stoppage, a walkout, a march, a picket, a blockade, a shopping boycott, collectively refusing gender roles.

From Decomposition to Inquiry: Militant Research in Argentina’s MTDs

Liz Mason-Deese September 25, 2013

As the newly poor and unemployed found themselves abandoned by traditional political institutions, they turned to multiple forms of investigation to understand the conditions in which they found themselves, and to develop more effective forms of action and organization.

Tags: Inquiry

The Neighborhood is the New Factory

Liz Mason-Deese September 10, 2012

The movements of the unemployed, which first emerged in Argentina in the mid-1990s, challenge traditional representations of the unemployed as lacking political agency and revolutionary potential. While many Marxists and labor organizers have maintained the latter position, Argentina’s recent history paints a different picture: the militant organization of the unemployed across the country was instrumental in overthrowing the neoliberal government in 2001 and steering the course the country would take following the economic crisis. Movements of the unemployed in Argentina are redefining work through their organizational practice, discourses around labor, and active creation of different forms of production and reproduction.