Becoming Vigilant: Self-Consciousness and Collective Resistance in the Americas

As both reactionary movements and progressive social change sweep across the Americas, a better understanding of the everyday formation of resistance, both in individual and collective terms, is needed. This panel suggests that a precondition for collective resistance, whether to a particular policy, a project of capitalist extraction or social change more generally, requires a heightened and shared attentiveness towards the issue. Individual actors and social groups need to be alert towards a specific problem or process, which they conceive of as a latent or immanent threat. In this context, becoming vigilant about certain issues carries the potential for political self-formation and collective resistance.
This panel explores the emergence of collective political resistance through the conceptual lens of vigilance, which we define as a focused attentiveness of non-state actors towards a specific goal. What role does vigilance play in the making of political resistance? How do individual practices of vigilance inform broader projects of collaboration and activism? In how far are ideas about the self and ideas about community interlinked by a shared, if temporary, alertness to specific problems? Which social imaginaries about political opponents or about the state fuel watchfulness and which problems arise from these practices?

Organizers: Tim Burger, LMU Munich, and Ingo Rohrer, University of Freiburg
Discussant: Natalia Buitron, University of Cambridge
Chair: Anna Meiser, LMU Munich (A10)

Presenters:
Eveline Dürr, LMU Munich (B06)
Vigilance as conceptual framework to explore self-consciousness and collective resistance

Ingo Rohrer, University of Freiburg
Taking care and being self-aware: Subjectivities of resistance in the Latinx punk and hardcore scenes of California

Sara Bellezza, FU Berlin
Contesting border deterrence mechanisms in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands: Individual and collective practices of vigilance

Tim Burger, LMU Munich (B06)
Bringers of change or reactionary force? Being vigilant about return migration between California and the Azores

Jonas Bauschert, LMU Munich (A10)
Indigenous guardians of the Amazon rainforest: New forms of collaboration and the transformation of local vigilance practices

Date

Conference: June 12-June 15, 2024

Panel: June 12, 2 p.m. (local time)

Location

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

Bogota, Colombia