Podemos in a campaign meeting in Madrid, December 2015. Demotix/Jose_Hinojosa. All rights reserved.
Our guest editors, Simona Rentea and Joan Pedro-Carañana, are academics and social activists based in Madrid, Spain.
Simona is a political scientist and IR scholar trained in Romania and the UK. Having grown up through the early days of the Romanian post-totalitarian transition, she became interested in processes of radical social transformation and began asking questions about the role and limits of imagination in shaping up transformative politics, first in her Manchester PhD and then her postdoctoral years at Aberystwyth, in Wales. While in the UK, she was involved with struggles in defence of public education and the campaigns against the rise in university fees and cuts in higher education. Since arriving in Spain, Simona has started a new project on anti-austerity movements in southern Europe looking in particular at the role of affective states in the transversal practices of large-scale social mobilisations, such as 15-M and 22-M. She took part in 22-M Marchas de la Dignidad in 2014 and has been following the development of Podemos since its inception, participating in circulo meetings and municipal platforms’ assemblies, particularly in Andalusia.
