Doing Autonomy

Doing Autonomy

Autonomy as a Collective Accomplishment

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

“Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of welcoming difference… Becoming autonomous is a political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master’s rule.”

— subRosa

What would autonomy look like if we watched people doing it? We might see someone teaching a skill without turning expertise into a permanent claim to command. We might see a newcomer questioning a procedure, a participant declining a task without losing membership, or a group revising a decision after an objection. Autonomy becomes observable through the ways people organize their relationships and respond to the differences among them.

subRosa, the cyberfeminist collective that grew out of a reading group Faith Wilding organized at Carnegie Mellon in 1998, offers a point of departure. Autonomy, in the passage above, is not something a person has. It is produced through embodied political practices of collaboration, welcome, and the sharing of knowledge and resources. This shifts attention from the autonomous person as a finished ideal toward becoming autonomous as a continuing undertaking, in which people develop capacities to act while changing the relationships through which access, competence, and authority are organized.

That proposition has particular significance for Critical Interactionism. It invites us to study freedom where it acquires practical form: in the allocation of speaking rights, the explanation of an unfamiliar procedure, the transfer of a skill, the handling of disagreement, and the distribution of resources. A commitment to autonomy must become available in what participants can actually do. Its meaning emerges most clearly when someone attempts an action that others might prefer to prevent.

Two autonomies

subRosa’s usage turns a familiar word inside out. In most of our culture, autonomy means self-possession: the independent individual who owns their labor, their property, and their decisions, and who needs no one. In the homeless services system I worked in for nearly two decades, people are assessed constantly against that standard: whether they can manage money, keep appointments, maintain a unit, live “independently.” This is autonomy as a test administered from above, and failing it has consequences. In subRosa’s terms, it is autonomy enlisted in the service of separation and hierarchy.

subRosa’s autonomy answers to a different order, one in which a person counts as autonomous not by needing no one but by taking part in a commons of skill and welcome. It has older relatives. Cornelius Castoriadis understood autonomy as a collectivity knowingly instituting its own rules rather than receiving them as given; heteronomy is a society that has forgotten it made itself. Carl Boggs (1977) named the movement practice of building, in the present, the social relations a movement hopes for prefigurative politics. On either reading, a skill share is not merely a means to some later autonomy. When it works, it is autonomy, briefly and locally achieved.

The people most often judged against the liberal standard are frequently skilled practitioners of the other kind. On the streets I have watched people share food, information, shelter, and protection under conditions where hoarding would be fatal. The two autonomies are not just different ideas. They are different practices, and they meet, often harshly, at the service counter.

The analogy with gender, and its warning

The phrase “like gender” is useful but requires care. West and Zimmerman (1987) examine gender as an interactional accomplishment organized through accountability. Their argument is not that people can freely choose a performance and thereby escape institutional constraints. Similarly, doing autonomy cannot mean wishing oneself free. An attempted refusal can be sanctioned; a contribution can be ignored; expertise can remain concentrated. The question is how participants establish, defend, or restrict the capacity to determine their activities together, and to whom they are held accountable when they do.

Autonomy in this sense does not require the disappearance of dependence. People need care, tools, time, space, and knowledge they do not possess individually. A practice of freedom reorganizes these dependencies so that receiving assistance does not automatically require obedience, and possessing a resource does not confer unlimited authority over others. The person teaching, supporting, or coordinating remains answerable to those whose activity is affected.

Watching it happen

Consider an illustrative repair workshop. An experienced participant knows how to diagnose a fault and operate a tool. They can complete the task while everyone else watches, or explain the diagnosis and create a supported opportunity for someone else to practice. The second arrangement may distribute competence. Its effects depend on what happens next: whether the learner can ask questions, use the tool again, teach another person, and challenge the expert’s account. Safety limits may be necessary. The issue is whether expertise supports a growing capacity to act or becomes an enduring gate through which all action must pass.

Knowledge shared in this way can become a common resource, but sharing does not automatically equalize power. Instructions may remain unintelligible. A supposedly free activity may require transport, equipment, confidence, or time that participants possess unevenly. Some people undertake the care and maintenance that make everyone else’s autonomy possible while receiving little influence over decisions. Welcoming difference requires examining these conditions rather than assuming that an open invitation has resolved them.

Nor does the rejection of formal hierarchy eliminate informal authority. Jo Freeman’s account of structurelessness shows how unacknowledged arrangements can shelter power from challenge (Freeman 1972–73). A collective may proclaim that everyone is equal while a few experienced members control the agenda, passwords, money, or relationships with outside organizations. The question is whether these powers can be identified, limited, delegated, and revised. Autonomy needs workable ways of organizing responsibility.

The right to disagree is especially revealing. A group may celebrate diversity when differences are easy to accommodate, then treat a disruptive objection as disloyalty. Collective self-direction can also become coercive toward individual members. Participation must leave room for refusal, privacy, and departure, alongside obligations participants have genuinely undertaken.

And local autonomy is always negotiated against texts written elsewhere. Dorothy Smith (2005) taught us to follow the documents that coordinate local activity with translocal ruling relations. A free meal in a park is shaped by an ordinance; a skill share that incorporates as a nonprofit inherits a board, bylaws, insurance requirements, and reporting obligations, and often a hierarchy along with them.

Three capacities

This suggests that autonomy can be investigated through three connected capacities: access to the means of acting, influence over the conditions of participation, and opportunities to challenge or revise the exercise of authority. These are analytical dimensions, not a scale that gives a group a single freedom score. An organization may widen access to knowledge while concentrating budget decisions, or distribute decision-making while relying on inequitable unpaid labor. Such differences are part of the phenomenon. They also echo the sequence of recognition, voice, and traction I have used to study how equality is done: access without influence is recognition without voice, and influence without the power to revise is voice without traction.

A single workshop does not dissolve proprietary control or transform the larger economy. Its political significance depends on whether competence, resources, and decision-making become more widely available and whether that availability can endure. Local freedom is fragile when it depends on one exhausted organizer or a resource that can be withdrawn without consultation.

Doing autonomy names the practical work through which people acquire some authority over the relationships shaping their lives. subRosa’s vision gives that work a direction; empirical inquiry must establish its mechanisms, limits, and consequences. The decisive question is what happens when someone learns enough to act, differs enough to object, or refuses enough to disturb the familiar order. Can the relationship change? Autonomy becomes credible when the answer is available in practice.

Research Proposal

Doing Autonomy: A Comparative Study of Skill-Sharing and Collective Self-Governance

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

1. Purpose and Research Problem

This exploratory qualitative study will examine how community groups produce, sustain, and restrict autonomy through everyday activity. Organizations may describe themselves as collaborative, horizontal, or empowering while retaining uneven control of knowledge, resources, and decisions. Conversely, explicit roles and bounded authority may help participants coordinate activity and protect rights. The project will investigate these differences rather than assuming that informal organization is liberating or that formal organization is inherently authoritarian.

The study asks: through which interactional and organizational practices do participants gain access to skills and resources, influence decisions, and contest authority? It will also examine how these capacities become durable, whose labor sustains them, and where an apparent redistribution of power remains incomplete. A secondary aim is to examine how the collective autonomy practiced in these settings compares with the individual self-sufficiency that service institutions require of the same people. The objective is a grounded account of doing autonomy, not a verdict on whether any organization fulfills an ideal.

2. Conceptual Framework

Critical Interactionism will connect close analysis of encounters with the institutional arrangements shaping them. subRosa supplies the political proposition that autonomy can be enacted through collaborative practices; Castoriadis and the prefigurative-politics tradition (Boggs 1977) locate it within a longer history of collective self-institution. West and Zimmerman (1987) provide a disciplined analogy concerning situated accomplishment and accountability. Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology and conversation analysis direct attention to how participants make actions recognizable and respond to them. Smith’s (2005) institutional ethnography supports tracing how texts, permissions, budgets, and rules coordinate conduct across occasions. Freeman’s analysis of informal power guides attention to arrangements that remain influential because their operation is difficult to name or challenge.

These traditions retain distinct purposes. The feminist and anarchist arguments for collective freedom supply normative questions; interactional analysis supplies methods for examining practical organization. Neither the gender analogy nor participants’ declarations will establish in advance that autonomy has been achieved.

3. Research Questions

RQ1. How do novices become entitled to ask questions, handle tools, make proposals, and teach others, and how is expertise invoked and contested?

RQ2. How are disagreement and refusal received, and do they carry membership costs?

RQ3. Who performs preparation, maintenance, coordination, and care, and does this labor bring decision-making influence or only more responsibility?

RQ4. Which external texts (ordinances, permits, insurance and liability requirements, fiscal-sponsorship and grant conditions) and which internal ones (agendas, rules, rosters) coordinate the groups’ activities, and how are they activated in practice?

RQ5. For participants who also deal with service institutions, how do they navigate the contrast between institutional demands for self-sufficiency and the collective autonomy practiced in the group?

4. Working Expectations

Three working expectations will orient inquiry without predetermining findings. Skill-sharing should widen practical autonomy when learners gain later opportunities to act without the original expert’s continuing permission. Collective decision-making should support autonomy when proposals and objections receive consequential consideration, including reasoned rejection and accessible review. Open participation should remain uneven where the material and procedural costs of belonging are left unaddressed. Each expectation will be revised if observed cases contradict it.

5. Design, Sites, and Access

The core design is a six-month comparative study of two Santa Barbara County settings with recurring collaborative activity: a repair or skill-sharing collective, and a mutual-aid group with explicit commitments to shared decision-making, ideally one in which people with lived experience of homelessness participate as members rather than only as recipients. These are candidate settings, not confirmed partnerships. Selection will depend on voluntary access, recurring opportunities to observe both learning and governance, and sufficient contrast in how expertise and resources are organized.

The target corpus is approximately 24–30 observed sessions and 12–16 voluntary interviews, adjusted to the organizations’ schedules and the quality of access. Sampling will include established participants, newcomers, facilitators, and people responsible for logistical or care work. Where feasible and independently consented, interviews will also include people who have reduced or ended their participation, whose accounts may reveal barriers that a study of continuing members would miss.

A possible second phase, contingent on the first and undertaken only at a community’s invitation and on terms it sets, would extend the study to a self-organized community of unhoused people.

6. Data Collection

Participant observation will document teaching, shared work, meetings, newcomer orientation, resource allocation, and ordinary disputes or misunderstandings.

Recording. Audio or video will be used only where all recorded participants agree; video will be limited to occasions where embodied conduct is essential to the analysis. Recordings will be transcribed using Jeffersonian conventions.

Interviews will examine experiences of learning, influence, obligation, disagreement, and access. They will be treated as situated accounts and compared with observed activity, not used as transparent substitutes for it.

Textual tracing. With permission, the study will examine agendas, minutes, instructional materials, participation rules, and task rosters, and will map the external ordinances, permits, and funding conditions that touch each site. It will follow selected proposals or access problems across encounters and documents: for example, a request for tool access voiced in a workshop, discussed in a meeting, entered into a rule, and implemented differently later. Following such sequences shows whether an initial opportunity becomes a durable capacity.

7. Analytical Strategy

Analysis will begin with collections of comparable episodes: requests for explanation, opportunities to practice, proposals, refusals, challenges to expertise, and attempts to correct decisions. Transcribed sequences will be examined for what participants make relevant and how subsequent responses accept, modify, defer, or block an action. Detailed conversation-analytic claims will be made only from recordings adequate to support them; unrecorded observations will contribute ethnographic evidence at a different level of precision.

Analysis will connect these sequences to control of tools, money, space, schedules, information, and care work, distinguishing restrictions grounded in safety or genuine collective obligations from restrictions that unnecessarily concentrate control. Contrary cases will be central: a formal role may protect participation; a skill share may reproduce dependence; a dissenting contribution may receive serious consideration without changing the outcome. The study will not count every accepted proposal as autonomy or every rejected one as domination. Cross-case comparison will identify mechanisms and limits without claiming causal proof.

8. Ethics and Researcher Position

Organizational permission will not substitute for individual consent. Participants may decline recording or interviews without losing access to group activities. Recording will pause when consent cannot be maintained, and sensitive support encounters will be excluded. Data will be stored securely, identifying details removed, and quotations reviewed for the risk of identification through distinctive events. Some participants may be vulnerable to enforcement; no data will be gathered on practices participants ask to keep private.

My commitments to equality and collective action, and my long history in the local service system and advocacy networks, will be made explicit; they shape what I can see and what participants will tell me. Field notes will distinguish description, interpretation, and normative assessment. Participants will be invited to correct factual errors and discuss emerging interpretations, without being given the power to suppress well-supported criticism. Any existing organizational role I hold will be kept separate from recruitment and consent. As an independent scholar, I will secure ethics review through a partner institution before fieldwork begins.

9. Feasibility and Timeline

Month 1: ethics review, access, consent procedures, sampling, pilot observation, initial textual mapping.

Months 2–4: fieldwork and concurrent analysis.

Month 5: follow unresolved sequences; participant discussions of emerging findings.

Month 6: comparison and writing.

The schedule is provisional and assumes regular activity in both settings. Required resources include researcher time, local travel, secure recording and storage, transcription support, and modest interview compensation budgeted independently of group leaders. A numerical budget will follow confirmed access. If access supports only one site or insufficient recordings, the study will be reframed transparently as a case study or ethnographic pilot.

10. Outputs and Contribution

Planned outputs are a journal article developing the concept of doing autonomy (for example, in Symbolic Interaction or Qualitative Sociology); a concise practitioner brief offering evidence-based questions for evaluating participation, skill transfer, and accountability; findings discussions with participating groups; and essays for Doing Modernity and Our Neighbors on the Streets. Public sharing of recordings or identifiable transcripts will not be presumed.

The project’s contribution is a testable account of the practical relationships connecting knowledge, participation, and power. It will clarify when collaboration expands people’s capacities to direct their activities, when collective arrangements reproduce exclusion, and what organizational work makes gains endure. Its ambition is to make autonomy more observable, and its democratic claims more answerable to the people whose lives are organized through them.

References

Boggs, Carl. 1977. “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers’ Control.” Radical America 11 (November).

Castoriadis, Cornelius. [1975] 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Freeman, Jo. 1972–73. “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17: 151–165. First published in The Second Wave 2(1), 1972.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Smith, Dorothy E. 2005. Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.

subRosa. [Source of epigraph to be confirmed; candidate: subRosa. 2002. “Introduction: Practicing Cyberfeminisms.” In Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices, edited by María Fernández, Faith Wilding, and Michelle M. Wright. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.]

West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1(2): 125–151.