Paul Chatterton
Paul Chatterton is a writer, research and scholar-activist based in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds. He is committed to engaged, participatory forms of teaching and learning, as well as action-oriented forms of collaborative enquiry. He is course director of a Masters Programme in Geography called ‘Activism and Social Change’ (see www.activismsocialchange.org.uk) and is also founder member of Trapese, a popular education collective which undertakes workshops and training on direct democracy, campaigning skills and advice for grassroots projects. He has led fieldtrips to the Chiapas region of Mexico, where he used to live and volunteer for two years, spending time with colleagues and students in indigenous communities.
His current research interests focuses on three areas. The first is an exploration of the kinds of values, spaces and citizenship which emerge from contemporary protest groups, especially those focused on climate disobedience. The second involves an exploration of urban development and the turn towards increasingly privatised and corporatised city centres. The third explores how groups broadly defined as anti-capitalist/alter-globalist, develop, share and transmit their ideas, especially in relation to tactics and strategies for building alternatives.
In terms of his research activity, in 2009 he hosted a Leverhulme funded ‘artist in residence’ in the School of Geography during which the artist, Jai Redman, developed a collaborative project with staff and students called ‘Leeds Plan B’ (www.leedsplanb.org.uk). He has co-managed two Economic and Social Research Council grants including Autonomous Geographies’ (see www.autonomousgeographies.org) which explored the ways in which social activists and community groups developed self-managed models for organising social and economic life beyond the welfare state, and ‘Urban nightscapes’ which focused upon the growing evening or night-time economy in cities which developed a socio-spatial, and political-economy informed, analysis of the production, regulation and consumption of urban nightlife.
Recent publications include research papers in peer reviewed journals such as Progress in Human Geography, Urban Studies, Acme, Antipode, the Journal of Geography in Higher Education and Geoforum on topics such as Argentina’s popular uprising, teaching freedom and defiance in Geography, and being a public-scholar. He has also written an activist handbook collaboratively with Trapese published by Pluto Press called ‘Do It Yourself: A handbook for changing our world’ (see www.handbookforchange.org). He was one of the founding members of the ‘Participatory Geographies Working Group’ and is currently co-editor of Antipode ‘A Radical Journal of Geography’, and Senior Deputy Editor for ‘City: analysis of urban trends, culture theory, policy action’.
In his extra-curricular life, Paul is one of the founders of the Common Place social centre in Leeds (www.thecommonplace.org.uk), secretary of LILAC, a co-operative co-housing, ecological project aiming to build 20 homes in inner city Leeds (www.lilac.coop), a volunteer for Leeds Asylum Seekers Support Network, and a trustee of a local charity, Oblong Resource Centre. In the summer of 2009 he was convicted of obstructing a coal train going to Drax power station in a mass protest against the reckless and life threatening burning of fossil fuels in Yorkshire and its direct link to anthropogenic climate change. Luckily, he was conditionally discharged..
All his work and projects can be found at www.paulchatterton.com