About

Stephen Duncombe is a Professor of Media and Culture at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Department of Media, Culture and Communications at the Steinhardt School of New York University. His scholarly work focuses on the intersection of culture and politics, with a particular emphasis on artistic activism, underground culture, and the role of art in social movements. Duncombe has authored, co-authored, edited, and co-edited ten books, including titles such as Æffect: The Affect and Effect of Artistic Activism, The Art of Activism: Your All-Purpose Guide to Making the Impossible Possible, and White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race. He has also written numerous articles and essays exploring these themes and has lectured internationally, including a debate on the political impact of the arts at the Oxford Union. In addition to his academic contributions, Duncombe is a lifelong political activist. He co-founded a community-based advocacy group in Manhattan's Lower East Side, which received an award for 'Creative Activism' from the Abbie Hoffman Foundation, and worked as an organizer for Reclaim the Streets, an international direct action group. He is the co-founder and Research Director of the Center for Artistic Activism, a research and training institute dedicated to helping activists and artists strategize and create more effectively. His work has been supported by organizations such as the Open Society Foundation, Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Duncombe's educational background includes a Ph.D. in Sociology from the City University of New York Graduate Center and a B.A. in Sociology from SUNY Purchase.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Law
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Psychoanalysis
• Art
• Environmental ethics
• Aesthetics
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Passages to Utopia

  2026-02-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Utopias begin like rites of passage: separation from usual ways of doing things followed by periods of reimagining an alternative. But they do not typically extend into phase 3, reincorporation. Using examples from More's Utopia to Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, from the Occupation of Tahir Square and Indignados Movement to a Queer utopia in the capital city of N. Macedonia, the author imagines a reincorporation phase, whether as a prefiguration of a world to come; training ground for alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and doing in the here and now; performative platform to experiment with possibilities; and/or concrete pathway to institutional change.

  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER THREE Does Artistic Activism Work?

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-05-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Does Artistic Activism Work?

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-05-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Artistic activists may not give evaluation much thought, but they give a lot of thought to what they don’t like about it. It is forced upon them, it measures the wrong things, it discourages experimentation, it demands skills they don’t have, or worse: it’s done by a skilled expert who doesn’t understand what they are trying to do. Given this resistance, what is to be done? Beginning with a brief survey of the field of arts evaluation, and drawing upon interviews with evaluators and artistic activists, I make the case for a new approach to evaluation: a methodology that embraces difference. A methodology that asks questions, rather than gives answers. A methodology that begins with artistic activists themselves.

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• Affect and Effect

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-05-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER ONE How Artistic Activism Works

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-05-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• What Artistic Activism Does

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-05-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  There are many, many ways to think about the social impact of art. Starting with an expanded canon of theorists, I generate a dozen or so analytic categories, or “ideal types,” of ways of thinking about art’s social impact. I add to these theories insights gleaned from my interviews with practitioners, generating further and overlapping analytic categories. Faced with this plethora of theories, I then systematize and simplify these categories, drawing on typologies created by leaders and scholars in the field to move closer to discovering THE authoritative theory of how art and, by extension, artistic activism works. My march toward consolidation comes to a halt with a moment of doubt, followed by an epiphany that the millennium-long search for a definitive answer is blinding us to the glaring reality that there is no consensus as to how art works and there never will be. This multiplicity is not a problem to be solved but a reality that needs to be reckoned with.

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• CHAPTER TWO What Artistic Activism Does

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-05-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• What Is Æffect?

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-05-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this introductory chapter, the reader is introduced to artistic activism, its importance as both an art form and an activist method, and the necessity of its evaluation. Using a series of case studies, historical and contemporary, from the US to China, West Africa to the Western Balkans, the range of artistic activism is demonstrated. Artistic activism is then pulled apart into its constitutive components: <italic>effect</italic>, or the social, often material impact of activism, and <italic>affect,</italic> the emotional, and often personal, charge of the arts. These elements come together in something I call <italic>æffect,</italic> a hybrid word for a hybrid practice. Through the diversity of practices and varied intentions of practitioners, common questions persist: Does artistic activism deliver on what it promises to do? And, how would we know if it does or doesn’t?

  PublisherDOI

• How Artistic Activism Works

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-05-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Underlying any practice that aims at having an impact is a theory of change. In this chapter, major theories of change are explained and a theory of change for artistic activism is developed. Using the writings of Matthew Arnold, Karl Marx, and Gustave Le Bon, I outline Idealist, Materialist, and Affective theories of change. Supplementing these historical theorists, I draw upon the words of live artistic activists to explore how practitioners understand how social change works. Yet, all the artistic activists interviewed do not cleanly line up in Idealist, Materialist or Affective camps. Instead, we see inter-relationships between the three spheres, with “culture” as the mediating factor. “Shifting culture,” “making culture,” “queering culture,” “transforming culture”—this is how artistic activists understand social change. With an assist from Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, the centrality of Culture and culture in influencing ideas, emotions, and actions is used to understand artistic activism as an intervening force within Idealism, Materialist and Affective theories of change.

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• Aeffect

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

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Frequent coauthors

• Andrew Mattson

  8 shared

• Silas Harrebye

  Roskilde University

  7 shared

• Steve Lambert

  University of Chester

  2 shared

• Ying Am

  Lead City University

  1 shared

• Sherry Millner

  Arizona State University

  1 shared

• Clara Jo

  Lead City University

  1 shared

• Tai Dorsett

  University of the West Indies

  1 shared

• Mike Linksvayer

  1 shared

Labs

• Center for Artistic ActivismPI

Awards & honors

• Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (1998)
• Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at Gallatin (2012)