April 19 Wednesday,4:30pm | Oakley Center

How does political agency surface and transpire in constrained settings? With what effects? In his new book, States of Subsistence, José Ciro Martinez examines a set of actions through which bakers manipulate regulations that seek to organize how they provide subsidized bread. Building on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted in Jordan, twelve of which were spent working as a baker, Martínez unpacks how ordinary citizens confound classificatory grids and regulatory strategies while establishing alternative modes of togetherness that make precarity liveable. Foregrounding these compromised practices allows for an exploration of how Jordanians appropriate public resources and refashion their lives amidst the oppressive logics that pervade everyday life. And all while being entangled with the state—subversively, creatively, but inescapably.

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