My interdisciplinary research program is motivated by a desire to understand and strengthen social movements working towards social and ecological justice. My research aims to improve the internal function of social movements so that they can better overcome external constraints, such as the concentrated economic power of elites, and more effectively address pressing challenges like climate change, white supremacy, settler colonialism, heterosexism, and economic inequality. My work cuts across three main areas – political theory, social movement strategy, and political economy – in order to develop an integrated and critical understanding of the challenges social movements face.
I am currently writing a book -- Radical Mindfulness -- that inquires into the root causes of injustice, asking why injustices along the axes of race, class, gender, sexuality, and species continue to persist. This work is centered on a generally overlooked explanation for unjust social relations, one that emphasizes the political force of existential resentment, especially the fear of death. My contention is that existential resentment plays a primary role in the recurrence of unjust social relations and that until social movements begin incorporating strategies that can transform existential fears, injustice will persist. My research has been focused on the transformative potential of mind/body practices such as mindfulness meditation within the context of social movements.
Thinkers I am engaging for this work include James Baldwin, Chogyam Trungpa, Audre Lorde, Michel Foucault, John Mohawk, Leanne Betasamosake Simpon, Ernest Becker and William Connolly. In 2015 I published a journalistic article - "Zen and the Art of Social Movement Maintenance" - based on this research in Waging Nonviolence. I also contributed the essay "Micropolitics and Collective Liberation: Mind/Body Practice and Left Social Movements" to a recent symposium on "Mindfulness and Politics" in the journal New Political Science. The essay "Georges Bataille, Chogyam Trungpa, and Radical Transformation: Theorizing the Political Value of Mindfulness" was recently published by the Arrow: Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture, and Politics.
Other related works include "Is a Fear of Death at the Heart of Capitalism" in the Arrow; "Learning to Love Us-Versus-Them Thinking" in openDemocracy; and "Lessons from the Frontlines of Anti-Colonial Pipeline Resistance" in Waging Nonviolence. I was recently interviewed by CBC Radio about the political effects of mindfulness.
I am also working on a co-authored book on the fossil fuel divestment movement (with Jessica Dempsey and Emilia Belliveau). This project is funded as part of a SSHRC partnership grant: 'Mapping the Power of the Carbon-Extractive Corporate Resource Sector.' Preliminary work on this project has been published with Corporate Knights, DeSmog.ca, The Leap, openDemocracy, the National Observer, and the Tyee.ca. This research has been covered by the Huffington Post and the Atlantic. I recently co-authored a book chapter (with Jessica Dempsey and Peter Gibbs) on the divestment movement in the book A World to Win: Contemporary Social Movements and Counter-Hegemony.
Below is a list of other recent writings (with open access links):
Rowe, J. & Peredo, A & Sullivan, M. & Restakis, J. (2017). Co-operative development, policy, and power in a period of contested neoliberalism: The case of Evergreen Co-operative Corporation in Cleveland, Ohio. Socialist Studies 11:2.
Rowe, J. & Peredo, A. & Restakis, J. (2017). How the NDP and Greens and Grow BC's Cooperative Economy. The Tyee.
Smith, T.L. & Rowe, J. (2017). Pipelines as Sun Tunnels: Visualizing Alternatives to Carboniferous Capitalism. C-Theory.
Rowe, J. et al. (2017). First Nations Show Leadership in Pipeline Debates. Times Colonist.
Rowe, J. (2017). Upstream and Downstream: The Sacred Importance of Joining Contemplative Practice and Political Engagement. The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture, and Politics.
Collard, R. & Dempsey, J. & Rowe, J. (2016). Re-Regulating socioecologies under neoliberalism. S. Springer, K. Birch, and J. MacLeavy (Eds.), The Handbook of Neoliberalism. New York: Routledge.
Rowe, J. & Carroll, M. (2015). What the left can learn from Occupy Wall Street. Studies in Political Economy 96:1, pp. 145–166.
Rowe, J. & Carroll, M. (2014). Reform or radicalism: Left social movements from the Battle of Seattle to Occupy Wall Street. New Political Science 36:2, pp. 149–171.