By way of combining the methodological practices of autoethnography and informal anarchist analysis of social movements, this project establishes anarchist autoethnography as a way of navigating the unavoidable and irreconcilable tensions between academic research and the ethical commitments of anarchists. By way of this method, I explore some of my interventions – as an anarchist – during the Occupy movement in Phoenix, Arizona from October, 2011 through until mid-2012. I explore the internal movement conflicts that arise when certain individuals, factions and political tendencies attempt to homogeneously define the interests of a heterogenous social movement that happens to employ anarchist principles of organization and includes the participation of anarchists. I focus on the conflicts around decision-making processes, the debates about nonviolence, and attitudes towards policing. Beyond analyzing some of my experiences in Occupy Phoenix, and doing so transparently as an anarchist, I additionally explore how the underlying connection between utopianism and the techniques of maintaining urban social orders shape the experience of movements in cities. I find that the moral strategies of left activists very often mirror the dualist ideologies of utopian urban planners, thus reproducing statist ways of seeing. Against the movement managers of the left, who I argue ultimately end up helping to reproduce the social order of cities, I turn at the end towards an exploration of historical Luddism as exemplars of sabotage. In framing anarchism and Luddism as accomplice tendencies that seek to subvert social order so as to preserve autonomy in capitalist states, I carefully distinguish neoluddism as a separate and undesirable approach to questions of technology and techniques of social control.

Mixed-income housing policy has been an approach to address the problem of concentrated poverty since the 1990s. The idea of income mix in housing is founded on the proposition that economic opportunities of the poor can be expanded through the increasing of their social capital. The current in-depth case study of Vineyard Estates, a mixed-income housing development in Phoenix, AZ tests a hypothesis that low-income people improve their chances of upward social mobility by building ties with more affluent residents within the development. This study combines qualitative and quantitative methods to collect and analyze information including analysis of demographic data, resident survey and in-depth semi-structured interviews with residents, as well as direct observations. It focuses on examining the role of social networks established within the housing development in generating positive economic outcomes of the poor. It also analyzes the role of factors influencing interactions across income groups and barriers to upward social mobility. Study findings do not support that living in mixed-income housing facilitates residents' upward social mobility. The study concludes that chances of upward social mobility are restrained by structural factors and indicates a need to rethink the effectiveness of mixed-income housing as an approach for alleviating poverty.