Kevin Suemnicht

KEVIN SUEMNICHT, then a graduate student at University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois, was awarded funding in August 2020 to aid research on ‘There Is No Word for What We Must Become”: Social Movement in Southern Illinois,’supervised by Dr. Molly Doane. Renamed ‘There Is No Name for What We Must Become: Social Movement in Southern Illinois’ the grantee concluded that the Carbondale Spring was a project to unite various efforts to escape the dominant economy through immediate forms of communal economic and political life. Interlocuters understood their participation in ways that reflected the different positions of the interlocutors relative to class, the economy, and racial differences. In the course of research, the grantee concluded that the Carbondale Spring was a project to unite various efforts to escape the dominant economy through immediate forms of communal economic and political life. The organization failed to defund the police or to reallocate the money toward these projects, and this project suggests that the difficulties of doing so transcend democratic imperative and lay within the structure of the municipal government itself. For interviewees, climate change represents a deep-seated existential challenge which provokes anxiety, uncertainty, and shame among all those who consciously oppose the forward march of this civilization toward self-induced extinction.