Jamila Squire

I studied at King's College London (BA, 2015) and the University of Westminster (MA, 2025) before beginning my PhD at the University of Westminster in 2025. 

My research interests are the intersection of political activism with countercultures, the refusal of work, and alternative media practices including radio and print ephemera. I am a co-founder and contributing editor at Agit Press, which has released titles by the philosopher and media theorist Franco 'Bifo' Berardi and the translator and ethnomusicologist Ed Emery. My writing has appeared in The Wire, e-flux, Real Review and elsewhere.

My PhD research examines the Italian social movement known as autonomia that emerged in the late 1970s, focusing on its political rupture with traditional left structures and critical engagement with emerging information technologies. Challenging the dominant narrative that frames the student and worker uprisings in Italy ’77 as an extension of the events of Paris’ May ’68, this study instead situates autonomia as an early response to a transition to neoliberal global capitalism. 

Drawing on archival research on the thousands of radical newspapers, journals and bulletins produced by the movement during this period, transcripts and recordings from a network of pirate radio stations, and new oral histories, it will explore how militants of ’77 understood emergent forms of information technology, precarity, automation, and immaterial labour. By unearthing the movement of ’77’s forgotten political analyses, this research hopes to reinterpret autonomia not as a final expression of twentieth-century political radicalism, but as one of the first widespread revolts against the neoliberal capitalism we live in today.

This project builds upon previous research into the repression of the Italian movements at the close of the 1970s and the international solidarity movements that emerged in its wake, which traced a network of post-68 autonomist Marxists through Midnight Notes, the Wages for Housework campaign and Zerowork (US); Big Flame (Britain); and in the thought of several French intellectuals, most notably Félix Guattari.