Table of Contents

Introduction: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement
Chapter 1: Seeing Like a White State
Chapter 2: An Entire World in Motion
Chapter 3: Incarceration as Liberation
Chapter 4: Forcing the Better Argument
Chapter 5: The Techniques of Disavowal
Epilogue: To Build a New World

About the Author

Erin R. Pineda is Assistant Professor of Government at Smith College. Her work has appeared in History of the Present, Contemporary Political Theory, European Journal of Political Thought, Boston Review, and on the London Review of Books blog.

Reviews

"Interweaving counter-history and political theory in a way that speaks to our present moment, Pinedaâs book revolutionizes our understanding of one of the most invoked and iconic, but also most misunderstood examples of civil disobedience. With her remarkably profound, rigorous, and compelling study, Pineda manages to open up new theoretical and political possibilities beyond the unquestioned assumptions that constrain the mainstream understanding of
protest and disobedience. Recovering the radical, indeed revolutionary potential of political contestation, her book should be read by anyone interested in building a new world." -- Robin Celikates, Free
University of Berlin
"Seeing Like an Activist makes an important and original contribution to scholarship on civil disobedience by highlighting activists (in this case in the Civil Rights Movement in the US in the 1960s) as important political thinkers in their own right. Drawing on careful case studies of the "jail, no bail" campaigns pioneered by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the 1963 Birmingham
Campaign led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Pineda shows how the ideas and actions of civil rights activists powerfully contradict the most cherished premises of the philosophical literature
on civil disobedience that purports to draw on their example." -- Juliet Hooker, Brown University
"A powerful account of how acts of courageous defiance can simultaneously assert freedom and expose structures of racial domination, Pineda's incisive study recovers the genuine radicalism of the nonviolent activism of the civil rights movement. Upending received wisdom about nonviolence as a peaceful, constitutional path to social progress, Pineda shows how activists conceived and enacted nonviolence as a decolonizing practice of self-liberation." -- Karuna
Mantena, Columbia University
"Seeing Like an Activist is a tour de force, and a joy to read. It is going to transform how political theorists see civil disobedience, and it offers a master class on how to do truly democratic political theoryDLtheory that grows out of democratic actors' practices, rather than trying to fit those actors into existing theories. Political theorists, historians, philosophers, and really everyone else should all read it. If you want to think
about what nonviolent direct action can mean for democracy, in the past, present, and/or future, you need to read Pineda's book." -- Lida Maxwell, Boston University