Erica Michelle Lagalisse is a research fellow at the LSE International Inequalities Institute under the supervision of Dr. Beverley Skeggs, engaged in multi-sited ethnographic research on classed dynamics surrounding “conspiracy theory” in left social movement spaces.  She is author of Occult Features of Anarchism – With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples (2019), a historical study that explores the gendered cosmology of the modern Left to build an anti-colonial critique of anarchism, and comments on the cultural production of “conspiracy theory” in the process.  Now also available in Italian at D Editore, and forthcoming in French at Éditions du remue-ménage.

Lagalisse’s current manuscript is based on her doctoral thesis “Good Politics”: Property, Intersectionality, and the Making of the Anarchist Self.  This work explores anarchist networks that cross Québec, the United States and Mexico to examine contradictions within indigenous solidarity activism and settler “anarchoindigenism”. The ethnography throws into relief the idiosyncrasies of university-educated Anglo-American leftists, and draws on anthropological, feminist and critical race theory to show how they have pre-empted the black feminist challenge of “intersectionality” by recuperating its praxis within the logic of neoliberal self-making projects and property relations.

Whilst completing her PhD in Social Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada (2016), Lagalisse held a visiting researcher appointment at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social (CIESAS) in Oaxaca, Mexico, and a U.S.-Canada Fulbright Fellowship at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as doctoral scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (FRQSC). 

Further writing may be found in Signs – Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the Journal of Ethnobiology, Essays on Anarchism and Religion Vol. II, and Contesting Publics: Feminism, Activism, Ethnography co-authored with Sally Cole, Lynne Phillips and Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan at Pluto Press.