Introduction to Special Issue on Anarchism

The following articles were presented at the NAASN conference held in March of 2015. NAASN is an acronym for the North American Anarchist Studies Network, an informal association of scholars interested in what has broadly been labeled “anarchist studies.” Inspired by the Anarchist Studies Network (ASN) based in the British Isles, NAASN seeks to bring together people to share their work at an annual gathering somewhere in the geographical area currently called North America. NAASN also functions year-round as a mutual aid system for researchers and writers. NAASN never charges any fees and is purely user controlled. For the last six years, ad hoc, autonomous, and self-motivated organizing committees have formed to host each conference. These organizing committees release the call for papers and accept all submissions. These groups are also responsible for finding the space for the event and putting together the conference guide, which organizes the submissions into panels and schedules them. During the actual conference, they are the ones who, along with a few spontaneous volunteers, make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible. For NAASN 2015, I had the pleasure of taking part in the five-person organizing committee. Having recently moved to the Bay Area I felt very lucky for the opportunity to help host such a gathering of radical scholars. Other members of our little group included Charles Weigl, Andrej Grubacic, Dana Williams, and Hilary Gordon.

In keeping with the open and fluid spirit of anarchism, NAASN does not limit topics of discussion but rather encourages participants to present on a broad and diverse number of themes from the historical to the contemporary to the utopian. This includes topics of current interest and importance as well as biography, historiography, and other forms of research. In the most recent conference, presentations ranged from traditional panels of individual papers to workshops and other alternative formats. The first NAASN conference was held in Hartford, Connecticut in early 2009. At this gathering it was agreed that we would rotate the location in order to allow people from a variety of places to both host and attend the conference. After Hartford, NAASN met in Toronto (Ontario, Canada), San Juan (Puerto Rico), New Orleans (Louisiana, United States), Surrey (British Columbia, Canada), and this last march in San Francisco (California, United States), all without the guidance, funding, or directive of any centralized body or group. Having attended past conferences, I knew we had high standards to uphold.

The location of the next NAASN gathering is yet to be determined, but it is likely to be in Mexico or Canada, as there is a preference to move the gatherings into different national territories to diversify attendees and points of view. The importance of moving the location was underlined at past conferences, when anarchist scholars from the Global South (or on certain governmental lists) were denied visas to enter the United States or Canada. At the 2015 conference, border crossing was less of an issue, largely because we had the luxury of a well-wired environment with Wi-Fi and projectors and could accommodate virtual presentations from those who were not able to travel to the conference. We were thus able to include presentations from contributors located not only across North America but also as far away as China and Europe.

Indeed, the location of NAASN 2015 represented something of a break from tradition. NAASN has held most conferences outside of formal academic spaces. In Hartford it was hosted in an old synagogue; in Toronto it was held in a union hall; in San Juan we were hosted at the Ateneo Puertorriqueño. The decision to hold the 2015 conference at an academic institution reflected first and foremost the nature of the invitation to San Francisco. Andrej Grubacic is a professor at the California Institute for Integral Studies (CIIS), and in the fall of 2014 he notified the network that he had access to numerous rooms, including a large central hall that we could use for a conference during the school’s spring break. Free access to such infrastructure...