For some time now I have been dropping (subtle?) hints about another project in my life. It’s now time to come clean admit what I am doing. Some university colleagues at the Dept. of Peace and Development Studies and at the History of Ideas and Theory of Science and I have formed the Resistance Studies Network at Göteborg University.
While the whole thing is in its infancy the idea is to develop the topic of resistance studies and eventually establish it as a legitimate field of research and as a subject in its own right. Resistance has been studied before but usually it is about technical resistance (ohm and stuff) or the Belgian resistance of WWII but the subject has not been studied as a topic of its own.
The idea is to find and define the concept of resistance. To attempt to understand the nature of resistance. When is resistance resistance? When is resistance legitimate? Resistance to what? The questions seem endless…
Anyway right now we have a web page, blog, wiki pages and a mailing list. Next term we start seminars and text discussions. This will be followed by publications and conferences. Ah, academia… So far there is a natural inclination for hands on “action research” so there may even be some prison time (not sure if this will help you get tenure…)