Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-first Century

Illegal migrants who evade detection, creators of value in insecure and precarious working conditions and those who refuse the constraints of sexual and biomedical classifications: these are the people who manage to subvert power and to craft unexpected sociabilities and experiences. Escape Routes shows how people can escape control and create social change by becoming imperceptible to the political system of Global North Atlantic societies.

"A profound and brilliant examination of the power of exodus to create radical interventions in perhaps the three most important and contested fields of society today: life, migration and precarious labour. It is in these fields that the present and future of multitude is at stake. Escape Routes is a toolbox in the hands of multitude."
---Antonio Negri, author of Insurgencies and co-author of Empire and Multitude

"Another world is here! So announce the authors in their preface to a stirring and intellectually inspiring book about the possibility, the necessity and the potency of escape. Rather than seeing social transformation in terms of revolt, event and abrupt shifts, the authors trace escape routes through the ordinary and through everyday practices. Escape Routes is required reading for anyone who believes in the alternative worlds produced alongside neoliberal capitalism."
---Judith Halberstam, University of Southern California, author of In a Queer Time and Place

"A rich variety of work starts with some version of the autonomous thesis, that the everyday actions or resistances of people precede power; they are in fact what constitute and drive power forward. Escape Routes is one of the most original and interesting efforts to build a fuller understanding of the contemporary world, by focussing on processes and mapping out some of the history of modern power and resistance."
---Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America's Future

"This is one of the most original treatments of some of the big questions we confront today. Even familiar subjects gain a new kind of traction as they are repositioned in the authors' sharply defined lens of control and subversion. This is conceptualisation at its best – Escape Routes allows us to see what might otherwise be illegible and it continuously executes reversals of standard interpretations of the present."
---Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of Territory, Authority, Rights

Dimitris Papadopoulos teaches social theory at Cardiff University, UK. He is co-editor of the journal Subjectivity and his work has appeared in various journals including Boundary 2; Culture, Theory & Critique; Darkmatter; and Ephemera.

Niamh Stephenson teaches social science at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her most recent book, Analysing Everyday Experience: Social Research and Political Change (2006), was co-authored with Dimitris Papadopoulos.

Vassilis Tsianos teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He is co-editor of Empire and the Biopolitical Turn (2007) and Turbulent Margins: New Perspectives of Migration in Europe (2007).