Kropotkin never became an “-ism,” and those who read and walked with him never became Kropotkinists. Instead, the anarcho-communist biogeographer spread ideas that circulated too widely to attach to his name, from mutual aid to direct action. This seminar will take Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) as a starting point to explore the kaleidoscopic expansion of the social opened by his work. We invite contributions that engage directly with his writings on any subject –- ecology, anthropology, prisons, the commune form, women’s emancipation, literary fiction, internationalism, people’s history, decentralized production, the federation of urban and rural cooperatives –- as well as broader legacies of his work and collaborations. We are especially interested in papers that follow Kropotkin’s refusal of rigid distinctions between anarchism and Marxism, humankind and other natures, revolutionary rupture and everyday continuance, academic and popular expertise. We welcome everything from analyses of the revolutionary memoir and theoretical reflections on the commune to historically situated accounts of Kropotkin’s geological expeditions and critiques of his relation to indigenous knowledges. Our aim is to bring together a group of contributors who collectively reflect the wide range of Kropotkin’s work, and, in that sense, the scope of anarcho-communism.

Possible topics include:

1. Mutual aid and direct action

2. The commune form (peasant, settler, native, intentional and/or the Paris Commune and the federation of communes)

3. Popular culture and print media (anarchist journals, lecture tours, newspaper articles, manifestos, propaganda, revolutionary memoirs)

4. Critique of prisons

5. Critique of Dialectics; questions of method

6. Geography, evolutionary biology, cosmology

7. Abundance ecologies; decentralization; abolition of division between city and country

8. Medievalism

9. Comparative ethnology and anthropology, "savage" and "barbarian" social form

10. Kropotkin in Dialogue with Élisée Reclus, James Guillaume, Mikhail Bakunin, Vladimir Lenin, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Lucy Parsons, etc.

11. Exile and Utopia