Ben Shepard
Benjamin Shepard, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Human Service at New York School of Technology/City University of New York. He is the author/editor of six books including White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic (Cassell, 1997) and From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization (co-edited with Ron Hayduck) (Verso, 2002). The latter work was a non-fiction finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in 2002. His forthcoming works include part two of this study on play: Play, Creativity, and the New Community Organizing (Routledge), The Beach Beneath the Streets: Exclusion, Control, and Play in Public Space (co-written with Greg Smithsimon) (SUNY Press) and Community Projects as Social Activism (Sage). Further his writing has appeared in anthologies including, Democracy, States and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge, 2009), Nobody Passes (Seal Press, 2006), The Encyclopedia of Social Movements (Sharpe, 2004), That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull Press, 2004) Democracy’s Moment: Renewing Democracy for the 21st Century and Teamsters and Turtles: Leftist Movements Today and Tomorrow (both 2002, Roman and Littlefield), and journals including: Working USA, Radical Society, Lambda Book Review, Monthly Review, Sexualities, the Journal of Progressive Human Services, Antioch Review, Monthly Review, and Drain among others. He got his start writing music reviews for Detour and profiles for the Bay Area Reporter in the early 1990s’. He has done organizing work with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), SexPanic!, Reclaim the Streets New York, Times UP, the Clandestine Rebel Clown Army, the Absurd Response Team, CitiWide Harm Reduction, Housing Works, the More Gardens Coalition, and the Times UP Bike Lane Liberation Front and Garden Working Groups. Most all of his work involves the interplay between activist practices, theory, and praxis.
Articles by Ben Shepard
Talking Activism and Writing
Activist and historian Benjamin Heim Shepard discusses the role of play in advancing queer politics in New York City. Shepard’s contributions point towards the relationship between pleasure and play—a valorization of sensuality, humor, and agency in the present tense—as a prospect for political change. WWAN catches up with New York writer and activist Benjamin [...]