Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Longtime social movement scholar Frances Fox Piven reflects on her involvement in Columbia’s 1968 occupation, the need for protest movements to imitate each other, and why campus protests make sense for students demanding an end to Israel’s war on Gaza.
Just last month, social movement scholar Frances Fox Piven predicted “waves of mass protest” in the US. She was right. In an interview with Jacobin, Piven discusses why disruption must be central to protests, the thorny questions of violence and property destruction, and how organizers should and should not see their role in the streets.
Longtime social movements scholar Frances Fox Piven on organizing the unemployed under coronavirus, where the Bernie Sanders movement goes from here, and why breaking rules and disrupting business as usual are central to making social change.
Frances Fox Piven on the failure of welfare reform and the promise of new movements.
We are at the beginning of a new period of mass protests that will reshape American politics.