Affects and Aesthetics of the Undercommons

Commons

AFFECTS AND AESTHETICS OF THE UNDERCOMMONS

Call for Papers: Affects & Aesthetics of the Undercommons
As part of the 8th Art of Management & Organization Conference
1st-4th September 2016 @ Bled, Slovenia
Conference theme: Empowering the intangible: exploring, feeling and expressing through the arts
See: http://www.artofmanagement.org/bled-slovenia-2016/

What affects circulate within the undercommons today (Harney & Moten, 2013)?

What is the relation between affective spaces and aesthetics in the construction of forms of collective intelligence and subjectivities, particularly in the ways this relation is worked with to expand forms of political action? The undercommons are organized through “engaging aesthetic rationality in the process of political transformation, of turning politics into art, everyday life into an aesthetically governed domain” (Katsiaficas 2001) – a “minor politics” (Thoburn 2003): one that is not based upon calling forth an already existing identity or position, but rather a politics based on a continual intensive and affective engagement of constant self-institution.

Might it be possible that we are already enmeshed in a world of unidentified autonomous organizations, a milieu of potential liberation that has remained imperceptible because of a narrow understanding of what organizations are? And might it not be that this imperceptibly, rather than being a condition to be addressed as a problem, could rather be part of building of what Robin D.G. Kelley and James Scott (2002) call an infrapolitical sphere: a space for politics coming out of people’s everyday experiences that do not express themselves as radical political organization at all.

As a conference stream “Affects & Aesthetics of the Undercommons” proposes to explore the these temporary and constantly shifting, yet always renewed, forms of organizing: the organizing that takes beneath and below as well as outside of formal organizations. These relations and their affectivity embody and express the movement of the social imaginary, or the constant process of becoming. Revolutions of everyday life, whether unseen or encoded in a hidden transcript, exists as a privileged location for political analysis and action precisely because it is where forms of collective intelligence, creativity, and social wealth are manifested.

Please send proposals / abstracts to s.shukaitis@essex.ac.uk by December 7th, 2015.
This stream is welcoming of non-standard forms of presentation, performance, and intervention.

Commons

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Ruth Rikowski @ Academia: http://lsbu.academia.edu/RuthRikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Ruth Rikowski at Serendipitous Moments: http://ruthrikowskiim.blogspot.co.uk/

Work and Peer Production

Work

WORK AND PEER PRODUCTION

CALL FOR PAPERS

Journal of Peer Production

Work and Peer Production
Editors: Phoebe Moore (Middlesex University London), Mathieu O’Neil (University of Canberra), Stefano Zacchiroli (University Paris Diderot)

The rise in the usage and delivery capacity of the Internet in the 1990s has led to the development of massively distributed online projects where self-governing volunteers collaboratively produce public goods. Notable examples include Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects such as Debian and GNOME, as well as the Wikipedia encyclopedia. These distributed practices have been characterised as peer production, crowdsourcing, mass customization, social production, co-configurative work, playbour, user-generated content, wikinomics, open innovation, participatory culture, produsage, and the wisdom of the crowd, amongst other terms. In peer production, labour is communal and outputs are orientated towards the further e xpansion of the commons, an ecology of production that aims to defy and resist the hierarchies and rules of ownership that drive productive models within capitalism (Moore, 2011); while the commons, recursively, are the chief resource in this mode of production (Söderberg & O’Neil, 2014).

Peer projects are ‘ethical’ as participation is primarily motivated by self-fulfillment and validated by a community of peers, rather than by earning wages. Their governance is ‘modular’, understood in a design sense (decomposable blocks sharing a common interface), but also in political-economy terms: participants oppose restricted ownership and control by individually socializing their works into commons. Conflicting interpretations of their societal impact have been articulated (O’Neil, 2015). Skeptics view the abjuration of exclusive property rights over the goods they produce as irrelevant, and ethical-modular projects as increasing w orker exploitation: participants’ passionate labour occurs at the expense of less fortunate others, who do not have the disposable income, cultural capital, or family support to engage in unpaid labour (Moore & Taylor, 2009; Huws, 2013). In contrast, reformists, often hailing from a management perspective, suggest that the co-optation of communal labour by firms will improve business practices and society (Arvidsson, 2008; Demil et al., 2015). Finally activists celebrate the abjuration of exclusive property rights, and present ethical-modular projects as key actors in a historical process leading to the supersession of capitalism and hierarchy (Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014).

This last perspective raises a central challenge, which is the avoidance of purely utopian thinking. In other words, how can commons-based peer production reach deeply into daily life? How can ‘already existing non-capitalist economic processes’ be strengthened, ‘new no n-capitalist enterprises’ be built, and ‘communal subjects’ be established (Gibson-Graham, 2003: 157)? An increasingly large free public goods and services sector could well cohabit in a plural economy with employment in cooperatives, paid independent work, and the wage-earning of the commercial sector. However analysis of peer production typically eschews mundane considerations such as living wages, benefits, job security, working conditions, work-induced medical conditions, and debates on labour organization. How can peer production operate as a sustainable practice enabling people to live, if labour and work issues are not formally addressed?

To advance this agenda, the tenth issue of the Journal of Peer Production, titled Peer Production and Work, calls for papers in two linked areas:

*Peer production in a paid work society*
Nowadays firms attempt to monetize crowdsourced labour. The paradigmatic example is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk labourers (popularly known as ‘Turkers’, ‘cloud workers’ or ‘click workers’) who accomplish micro-tasks such as tagging and labeling images, transcribing audio or video recordings, and categorizing products. This extreme modularization of work results in their status being that of independent contractors rather than employees with rights, necessitating novel means of protection and redress (Irani & Silberman, 2013). The so-called ‘sharing economy’ also uses peer production methods, such as the self-selection of modular and granular tasks, to extract ever-more value from the labour of volunteer ‘prosumers’ (Frayssé & O’Neil, 2015). Capitalist firms are also increasingly engaging with ethical-modular organizations, in some cases paying wages to participants. Such labour is thus both ‘alienated’, or sold, and ‘communal’, as workers freely cooperate to produce commons. Do traditional categories such as exploitation and alienation still apply?
Topics may include, but are not limited to:

* Peer production and the global political economy
* Peer production and the rise of precarious work
* Peer workers and possibilities for worker organisation
* Does the autonomy of peer workers cause conflict in firms, and how is it resolved?
* What strategies do firms adopt to co-opt peer production (e.g., ‘hackhathons’)?
* Do tensions around property rights emerge?
* Subjectivity in peer production
* Peer production and intellectual property, coded work

*Paid work in peer production projects*
How does paid labour affect ethical P2P projects? Mansell and Berdou (2010) argue that firms supporting the work of programmers who contribute to volunteer projects, to the commons, will not affect the ‘cooperative spirit’ of projects; nor can this support prevent the results of labour from being socialized into commons. Is this always the case?
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
* How do peer projects deal with the presence of paid or waged labour?
* Is this topic discussed within peer production projects? In what way?
* What benefits do paid or waged workers enjoy in peer projects?
* How does paid labour affect peer production projects?

*Timeline*
300-500 word abstract due: 30 July 2015
Notification to authors: 30 August 2015
Submission of full paper: 31 December 2015
Reviews to authors: 15 February 2016
Revised papers: 30 April 2016
Signals due: 30 May 2016
Issue release: June/⁠July 2016

*Submission guidelines*
Submission abstracts of 300-500 words are due by July 30, 2015 and should be sent to work@peerproduction.net

All peer reviewed papers will be reviewed according to Journal of Peer Production guidelines. See http://peerproduction.net/peer-review/process/
Full papers and materials are due by December 31, 2015 for r eview.
Peer reviewed papers should be around 8,000 words; personal testimonies or ‘tales of toil’ in the Processed World tradition should be up to 4,000 words.

*References*
Arvidsson, A. (2008). The ethical economy of consumer coproduction. Journal of Macromarketing, 8, 326-338.

Demil, B., Lecoq. X. & Warnier, E. (2015). The capabilities of bazaar governance: Investigating the advantage of business models based on open communities. Journal of Organizational Change Management, in press.

Frayssé, O. & O’Neil, M. (2015) Digital labour and prosumer capitalism: The US matrix. Basingstoke: Palgrave, in press.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2003). Enabling ethical economies: Cooperativism and class. Critical Sociology, 29, 123-164.

Huws, U. (2013). The underpinnings of class in the digital age: Living, labour and value. Socialist Register, 50, 80-107.

Irani, L. & Silberman, M. (2013). Turkopticon: Interrupting worker invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Kostakis, V. & Bauwens, M. (2014) Network society and future scenarios for a collaborative economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Mansell, R. & Berdou, E. (2010). Political economy, the internet and FL/OSS development. In Hunsinger, J., Allen, M. & Klastrup, L. (Eds.) International handbook of Internet research (pp. 341-362). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Springer.

Moore, P. (2011). Subjectivity in the ecologies of P2P Production. The Journal of Fibreculture FCJ-119. Online.

Moore, P. & Taylor, P. A. (2009). Exploitation of the self in community-based software production: Workers’ freedoms or firm foundations? Capital & Class, 99-117.

O’Neil, M. (2015). Labour out of control: The political economy of capitalist and ethical organizations. Organization Studies, 1-21.

Söderberg, J. & O’Neil, M. (2014). ‘Introduction’. Book of Peer Production (pp. 2-3). Göteborg: NSU Press.

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First Published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/cfp-journal-of-peer-production-work-and-peer-production

 

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Creative Commons and Education – Are We There Yet?

Information

CREATIVE COMMONS AND EDUCATION – ARE WE THERE YET?
A UKSG event

Website: http://www.uksg.org/webinars/creativecommons
Date: Tuesday 9 June 2015
Time: 1400 BST
Duration: 45 minutes including Q&A (up to 60 minutes maximum if there is sufficient demand for an extended Q&A)

Speaker:
Joscelyn Upendran, Co-founder of Zilpa

Join Joscelyn for a look at Creative Commons licences, their impact and use in education.
This is a free webinar and open to all. If you are interested, but unable to join the live event, please register anyway as a recording will be made available to all who register.

For more information and to register, please visit http://www.uksg.org/webinars/creativecommons

Feedback from May’s webinar: “Open Access is a complex and potentially very contentious area, e.g. academic freedom to publish.  So amongst all the conflicting mandates and policies it was really useful to have the institutional role so clearly delineated – and an action plan to follow up on.” – Candace Guite, University of Stirling
92% of survey respondents would recommend May’s webinar.

Thank you for your attention. I do hope you can join us.
Maria
Maria Campbell
Digital Communications Associate, UKSG
E: maria@uksg.org
UKSG webinars: www.uksg.org/webinars

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Participate! Cultural Transformation and the Partcipatory Agenda

William Morris

PARTICIPATE! CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION AND THE PARTICIPATORY AGENDA

CALL FOR PAPERS

Participate! Cultural Transformation and the Participatory Agenda, 2-3 October, 2015

The University of Southern Denmark (SDU), The Institute for The Study of Culture, in collaboration with Brandts and co-funded by the Velux Foundation.

 

The participatory agenda has been introduced in art and cultural policies in modern, post-welfare societies as a means of social transformation during the last decennial. The agenda has been driven forth by an entangled political, economic and social vision of democratisation, innovation and social integration. Now it is time to ask, what are the inherent paradoxes and ambiguities as this agenda is spelled out at different levels of cultural policies and in different types of art and cultural institutions? What are the dilemmas in real policy implications in and across institutions and in cultural communication practices in terms of professional principles such as arms’ length, quality and objectivity? How do we adapt inventive, collaborative methodologies from which to approach such questions and engage in the actual political rhetoric of ‘social impact’,‘value’ and ‘measurement’. The aim of the conference is to establish a dialogue between theoreticians, politicians, artists and professionals and raise questions of art and culture in relation to democracy, civic learning and empowerment.

 

Key note speakers:

Tony Bennett, Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney. Tony Bennett has written extensively on cultural sociology, on cultural policies and institutions, and on cultural/national heritage and the museum. Among his recent publications is Making Culture, Changing Society, 2013.

Gerald Raunig, Artist, philosopher, Director of Dpt. Kunst & Medien, Zürich University of the Arts and the EIPCP (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies), Vienna. Gerald Raunig has published on art, art institutions and cognitive capitalism, forthcoming is DIVIDUUM: Maschinischer kapitalismus und molekulare revolution, 2015.

Nina Möntmann, Professor and Head of The Department of Art Theory and the History of Ideas, The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Nina Möntmann is an experienced curator, critic and academic engaged in new institutionalism and among her recent publications is Scandalous: A Reader on Art and Ethics, 2013.

Celia Lury, Professor and Director of Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. Celia Lury has been engaged in cultural policies in a broad sense, in global scaling and in inventive and performative methodologies. Among her recent books is Measure and Value (co-edited with Lisa Adkins), 2012.

 

Call for Papers:

Part of the conference will be organized in thematic workshops, and we invite cultural researchers and professionals to deliver an abstract (500 words) before April, 1 (to be proceeded before May, 1) and a final paper before September, 1. Workshops will include:

• Governmentality and New Institutionalism
• Participation, democracy und civic learning
• Participation –challenges in commissioning, curating and facilitating participatory art/culture projects
• Participation and/or/in Audience and Visitor Studies
• Participatory practices in art, media and culture outside institutions
• Critical/ethical practice and the performativity of research methodologies
• Comparative/scaled cultural policies: EU, Nordic, national level etc.
• Cognitive capitalism and creative commons

Contact: Professor Anne Scott Sørensen, Institute for the Study of Culture, SDU, annescott@sdu.dk

 

Abstracts to  be delivered to: participate@sdu.dk

See: http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles//C/9/6/%7BC9622F11-7352-42A7-A751-551B9D0B0CBF%7DKULT.pdf

 

***END***

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Education for the Commons: Pedagogy, Politics, and Potentiality

Education Crisis

EDUCATION FOR THE COMMONS: PEDAGOGY, POLITICS, AND POTENTRIALITY

Call for Book Abstracts: ‘Education for the commons: Pedagogy, politics, and potentiality’

Alexander Means, State University of New York, Buffalo State
Derek R. Ford, Syracuse University
Graham B. Slater, University of Utah

While the common has a long history in Western and non-Western thought, it has recently re-emerged as a prominent theme within social science, law, economics, business, technology, policy, ecology, and activist theories and movements. The reinvigoration of the common across these varied fields can be attributed largely to growing recognition of the need for creative responses to a wide array of global crises that threaten our collective lives and futures. In this sense, the common is often invoked as a challenge to neoliberal hegemony and the destructive expansionary drive of capitalism to enclose what remains of the world’s common resources, labor, and culture for private gain. At the same time, the common is also being taken up as a pragmatic and utopian referent to rethink modern political categories and imagine alternatives to both capitalism (private property) and socialism (public property). This framing of the common as both an analytical concept and normative political ideal has generated fascinating new discussions around the nature of contemporary subjectivity and collectivity as well as new forms of life, labor and value relations, identity, imperialism and neocolonialism, and–what we wish to focus on in this edited collection–education.

The common, we argue in this volume, must be understood as an educational concept. This is another way of suggesting that the common is inherently pedagogical. As an actual and virtual field of material, social, and cultural production, the common is constantly being made, remade, and undone. The fault lines and generative tensions of commoning and enclosing, by enabling or constraining ways of being, knowing, working, and relating, literally teach us. To say that commoning and enclosing are pedagogical relations is to also recognize that they are political relations–that is, the common is always a divided and contested site rich in social and cultural difference and rife with differentials of power. Ultimately, the pedagogical and political dimensions of commoning and enclosing always harbor latent forms of potentiality. As with education itself, the common can never be fully captured or enclosed. Rather the common is an open question: a necessarily hopeful and conflicted condition of our global commonality and interrelation.

This volume is interested in exploring education as a crucial domain of the common. How is it that conflicts over the common raise and answer pedagogical questions concerning geography, class, power, race, gender, institutions, sexuality, value, labor, technology, colonialism, subjectivity, communication, politics, affect, emancipation, and ecology? What can educational theories offer movements for the common, and how can struggles for commons, particularly common educational institutions and practices, inform the development of educational theory and critical social theory more broadly? We are interested in abstracts of no more than 300 words that explore these questions concerning contemporary articulations of education and the common through a variety of themes and topics.

This includes, but is not limited to:

• Privatization and New Enclosures
• Public, Private, and Common
• Values, Value Theory, Value Conflicts
• Precarity, Labor, and Social Reproduction
• Technology, Technoscience, Technopolitics
• New Materialisms
• Aesthetics and Affect Theory
• Queer Theory
• Indigenous Perspectives and Indigeneity
• Decolonial Projects
• Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality, Disability
• Feminism and Feminist Pedagogies
• Critical Race Theory
• Neoliberal Culture and Subjectivity
• Humanism, Transhumanism, and Posthumanism
• Critical Pedagogy and Radical Educational Philosophy
• Cognitive Capitalism, New Media, and Immaterial Labor
• Finance Capitalism, Anti-capitalism, and Post-Capitalism
• Biopolitics, Governmentality, Power, Subjectivity
• Social Movements, Occupations, Radical Imaginations
• Ecoliteracy, Ecopolitics, and Ecopedagogy
• Spatial Theory, Place-Based Education, Border and Mobility Studies
• Critical Disability Studies

If you are interested in contributing to this edited collection for Palgrave Macmillan please submit an abstract by March 31, 2015 of no more than 300 words to: educationforthecommons@gmail.com.

We anticipate final manuscripts being due January 4, 2016 with a late 2016 publication. Manuscripts should be between 6,000-8,000 words.

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Demos: Life in Common

Socrates

DEMOS: LIFE IN COMMON

Banff Research in Culture 2015 – Summer Research Residency

Program dates: June 1, 2015 – June 19, 2015

Application deadline: December 10, 2014

 

Faculty: Alex Hartley, Nina Power, Astra Taylor

Further info, including application information, can be found at:

http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/program.aspx?id=1534

(Contact: Brandy Dahrouge: brandy_dahrouge@banffcentre.ca)

The word demos names ‘the people’, and thus democracy is, at its most basic constitutive level, the shared power of people thinking and acting. Democracy is grounded upon the capacity of the people to narrate and decide the shape of collective life. But the ‘democracy’ we experience and live with today has devolved into practices of state sovereignty and governmentality, a society characterized by social and economic inequality, and an under-represented and disenfranchised electorate. And it seems, too, that hopes in technology as a mechanism that might yet create a new common ground have failed to achieve their promised ends.

Demos: Life in Common invites participants to consider the ways in which we constitute and experience collective life in this century. We seek to bring together artists, writers, researchers, and cultural producers who in their work explore the ways in which we might reinvigorate democratic life today—not just ‘democratic’ in its narrow, political sense, but as life in common in which being and belonging engenders the full flourishing of individuals and communities. What new forms might politics take today—a time that bears little resemblance to those bygone centuries that gave birth to many of our political structures and imaginings? How is collective self-determination mobilized and what do recent events demonstrate about the will of the people and the will of the state? What is the role of new technologies in enhancing or impeding social equality? Might it yet help to create new forms of community and belonging? And how might contemporary cultural, artistic and intellectual activities enliven the belief of the dêmos in its own capacities and possibilities?

“Demos” also names cultural and social practices that suggest other ways in which we might pursue our inquiries during this program. A demo is also an essai—an attempt, a test, an experiment in sound that allows musicians to record their own creative efforts and to share their ideas with others. And, demos are what groups engage in when they want to draw attention to problems and limits that existing structures of government, law or economy can’t address or even apprehend. Demonstrations are a site at which the demos tries to upend the ossified language of culture and politics by upsetting the patterns of the quotidian, taking to the streets and affirming their collective displeasure en masse. Over three weeks, participants will engage in experiments of thinking, action, and making—demos that challenge the self-certainties and pieties of existing structures and practices, and so help to envision and enable renewed forms,of democratic life.

We look forward to receiving compelling and original proposals from thinkers and artists.

Banff Research in Culture 2015

Banff Research in Culture (BRiC) is a residency program designed for scholars and artists engaged in advanced theoretical research on themes and topics in culture. Graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, junior faculty (pre-tenure), activists, writers, and practicing artists from around the world will convene at The Banff Centre for three weeks to contemplate the theme Demos: Life in Common.

BRiC is designed to offer researchers and artists with similar interests from different disciplinary and professional backgrounds, an opportunity to exchange opinions and ideas in a fruitful and intensive environment. Participants are encouraged to develop new research, artistic, editorial, and authorial projects, both individually and in connection with others. Participants will attend lectures and seminars offered by visiting faculty. This program aims to develop new approaches toward the study and analysis ofculture, as well as create lasting networks of scholars and artists who might use this opportunity as the basis for future collaborative work.

Demos: Life in Common is the fifth edition of BRiC following Distributed Intimacies (2014); Dock(ing); or, New Economies of Exchange (2013); The Retreat: A Position of dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), and On the Commons; or, Believing-Feeling-Acting Together (2011). The Banff Centre is a world-renowned facility supporting the creation and performance of new works of visual and digital art, music, dance, theatre,research and writing.

The 2015 edition of BRiC is generously supported by The Banff Centre, the University of Alberta, and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.

Published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/banff-research-in-culture-2015-deadline-reminder-summer-research-residency-call-for-applicants

 

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.co.uk

 

Glenn Rikowski’s latest paper, Crises in Education, Crises of Education – can now be found at Academia: http://www.academia.edu/8953489/Crises_in_Education_Crises_of_Education

Glenn Rikowski’s article, Education, Capital and the Transhuman – can also now be found at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/9033532/Education_Capital_and_the_Transhuman

STIR: Co-ops. Community. and Commons

Social Movments

STIR: Co-ops. Community. Commons.

STIR started as an online magazine and has now launched as a quarterly print magazine that features articles and interviews on the international co-operative movement, the emergence of the commons and collaborative networks, and other community-orientated alternatives in technology, agriculture, food, sports, energy, education and other important aspects of our lives.

We have opened our subscription service with GoCardless for the print edition and it’s £16 for four issues including P&P, and you can subscribe by clicking here.

We are a reader-supported magazine (with no external funding) so please consider supporting our magazine with an annual subscription.

In 2012 we published a crowdfunded book of alternatives, raising over £5000 from 135 crowdfunders.  STIR Vol.1 involved over 160 people who edited, designed, authored, illustrated and funded the collection of articles and interviews.

What people think about STIR:

“STIR has now become a print-based magazine, which is a sign of its success in reaching more people. STIR is one of the few magazines that captures the emerging sensibilities of commoners and commons activism, so it is well worth your support.” — David Bollier

“Most publications with a purpose are shaped by the moment in which they were first dreamed up: in this case, I’d say, the moment of Transition Towns and Occupy.” — Dougald Hine

“Alongside New Internationalist, STIR is turning into the closest thing we have to a radical co-operativist magazine in the UK.” — Sion Whellans, Calvert Print Co-operative

“It fills a gap for me between activist news of Red Pepper and rich analyses of the New Left Review and I really appreciate the activist oriented essays.” — Dr.Malcolm Maclean, University of Gloucester

About STIR: http://stirtoaction.com/about/

Home page: http://stirtoaction.com/

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.co.uk

Glenn Rikowski’s latest paper, Crises in Education, Crises of Education – can now be found at Academia: http://www.academia.edu/8953489/Crises_in_Education_Crises_of_Education

Glenn Rikowski’s article, Education, Capital and the Transhuman – can also now be found at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/9033532/Education_Capital_and_the_Transhuman

The Materiality of the Immaterial

THE MATERIALITY OF THE IMMATERIAL: ICTs AND THE DIGITAL COMMONS

Call for Papers: The Materiality of the Immaterial: ICTs and the Digital Commons

See: http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/announcement/view/23

Special issue of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique

Online @ http://www.triple-c.at

Abstract submission deadline: January 15, 2015

Guest Editors:

Vasilis Kostakis, Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia), P2P Lab (Greece);

Andreas Roos, Human Ecology Division, Lund University (Sweden)

With an escalating environmental crisis and an unprecedented increase of ICT diversity and use, it is more crucial than ever to understand the underlying material aspects of the ICT infrastructure.  This special issue therefore asks the question: What are the true material and socio-environmental costs of the global ICT infrastructure?

In a recent paper (Fuchs 2013) as well as in the book Digital Labour and Karl Marx (Fuchs 2014), Christian Fuchs examined the complex web of production relations and the new division of digital labour that makes possible the vast and cheap ICT infrastructure as we know it. The analysis partly revealed that ICT products and infrastructure can be said to embody slave-like and other extremely harsh conditions that perpetually force mine and assembly workers into conditions of dependency. Expanding this argument, the WWF reported (Reed and Miranda 2007) that mining in the Congo basin poses considerable threats to the local environment in the form of pollution, the loss of biodiversity, and an increased presence of business-as-usual made possible by roads and railways.  Thus ICTs can be said to be not at all immaterial because the ICT infrastructure under the given economic conditions can be said to embody as its material foundations slave-like working conditions, various class relations and undesirable environmental consequences.

At the same time, the emerging digital commons provide a new and promising platform for social developments, arguably enabled by the progressive dynamics of ICT development. These are predominantly manifested as commons-based peer production, i.e., a new mode of collaborative, social production (Benkler 2006); and grassroots digital fabrication or community-driven makerspaces, i.e., forms of bottom-up, distributed manufacturing. The most well known examples of commons-based peer production are the free/open source software projects and the free encyclopaedia Wikipedia. While these new forms of social organisation are immanent in capitalism, they also have the features to challenge these conditions in a way that might in turn transcend the dominant system (Kostakis and Bauwens 2014).

Following this dialectical framing, we would like to call for papers for a special issue of tripleC that will investigate how we can understand and balance the perils and promises of ICTs in order to make way for a just and sustainable paradigm. We seek scholarly articles and commentaries that address any of the following themes and beyond. We also welcome experimental formats, especially photo essays, which address the special issue’s theme.

Suggested themes

Papers that track, measure and/or theorise the scope of the socio-environmental impact of the ICT infrastructure.

Papers that track, measure and/or theorise surplus value as both ecological (land), social (labour) and intellectual (patent) in the context of ICTs.

Understanding the human organisation of nature in commons-based peer production.

Studies of the environmental dimensions of desktop manufacturing technologies (for example, 3D printing or CNC machines) in non-industrial modes of subsistence, e.g. eco-villages or traditional

agriculture, as well as in modern towns and mega-cities.

Suggestions for and insights into bridging understandings of the socio-economic organisation of the natural commons with the socio-economic organisation of the digital commons drawing on types of

organisations in the past and the present that are grounded in theories of the commons.

Elaboration of which theoretical approaches can be used for overcoming the conceptual separation of the categories immaterial/material in the digital commons.

 

References

Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Fuchs, Christian. 2014. Digital labour and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge.

Fuchs, Christian. 2013. Theorising and analysing digital labour: From global value chains to modes of production. The Political Economy of Communication 1 (2): 3-27, online at: http://www.polecom.org/index.php/polecom/article/view/19.

Kostakis, Vasilis and Michel Bauwens. 2014. Network society and future scenarios for a collaborative economy. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Reed, Erik and Marta Miranda. 2007. Assessment of the mining sector and infrastructure development in the congo basin region. Washington DC: World Wildlife Fund, Macroeconomics for Sustainable Development Program Office, 27, online at: http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/congobasinmining.pdf

 

Schedule

Submission of abstracts (250-300 words) by January 15, 2015 via email to [log in to unmask]

Responses about acceptance/rejection to authors: February 15, 2015.

Selected authors will be expected to submit their full documents to tripleC via the online submission system by May 15, 2015:

http://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions

Expected publication date of the special issue: October 1, 2015.

About the journal

tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique is an academic open access online journal using a non-commercial Creative Commons license. It is a journal that focuses on information society studies and studies of media, digital media, information and communication in society with a special interest in critical studies in these thematic areas. The journal has a special interest in disseminating articles that focus on the role of information in contemporary capitalist societies. For this task, articles should employ critical theories and/or empirical research inspired by critical theories and/or philosophy and ethics guided by critical thinking as well as relate the analysis to power structures and inequalities of capitalism, especially forms of stratification such as class, racist and other ideologies and capitalist patriarchy. Papers should reflect on how the presented findings contribute to the illumination of conditions that foster or hinder the advancement of a global sustainable and participatory information society. TripleC was founded in 2003 and is edited by Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval.

 

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.co.uk

 

Glenn Rikowski’s latest paper, Crises in Education, Crises of Education – can now be found at Academia: http://www.academia.edu/8953489/Crises_in_Education_Crises_of_Education

Glenn’s article Education, Capital and the Transhuman has also recently been added to Academia, and can be found at: https://www.academia.edu/9033532/Education_Capital_and_the_Transhuman

 

Pirates and Privateers

The Black Rock

PIRATES AND PRIVATEERS

Krisis: Journal of Contemporary Philosophy

**Call for Papers: Extended Deadline**

Krisis presents a special issue in December 2014 on Pirates and Privateers. Contributions may be up to 7000 words (including references). If you would like to contribute, please send us a proposal of about 500 words. Abstracts are due 29 June 2014, and will be send to info@krisis.eu. We will notify you before 1 July about acceptance of your proposal. The deadline for final contributions is 15 September.

 

Pirates & Privateers

When the King asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied: ‘The same as you do when you infest the whole world; but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber, and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor’ (St. Augustine)

We see these government agencies as among the most skilled players in this game (Eric Grosse, Google VP of security engineering)

The idea that in an ever globalising world the sovereignty and centrality of the nation state is declining is so well established that it has become a truism. Yet state agencies such as the NSA are in the process of reestablishing their grip on today’s network societies. So perhaps the proclaiming of the end of the state (not in terms of its national scope but as to the essence of its function) was premature. This raises the following questions: What is or will be the role of the state-function (national or international) in this globalised social-economic landscape? Will it be able to secure its de jure and de facto sovereignty by enforcing the distinction between pirates and privateers through law, i.e. by authorising neoliberal but restricting alternative appropriations of the commons? And is this state power a necessary condition for, or instead a limit to, the implementation of neoliberal principles? These questions are important because the distinction between pirate and privateer has substantial practical consequences in terms of the distribution of power.

Neoliberal privatisation – e.g. the exodus of financial capital from the welfare state system – is sanctioned by state. It is in the process of realising its particular solutions to the crises of the nation state, creating the conditions of its own legitimacy, in the form of gated communities, tax havens and special economic zones protected by private security firms. Seemingly bypassing state sovereignty, whilst simultaneously sanctioned by it, they are contemporary privateers.

Is this type of privatisation the destiny of this historical junction or are there alternatives? The institutionalised left does not seem to think so as it continues to defend the welfare system as a place of last resort against the powers of neoliberal globalisation. However, in the margins of the neoliberal project various different solutions are being experimented with. Insofar as these are not sanctioned by state, these are today’s pirates. Think of: torrent sites (The Pirate Bay comes to mind), hacker communities tied to international criminal syndicates, new local and digital currencies (Bristol Pound, Bitcoin, Litecoin), new forms of digital activism (Anonymous), counter-banking (OccupyBank, Timebank), anonymising networks (TOR’s Hidden Wiki and Silk Road), freestates and micronations (Principality of Sealand), eco-communities or hacker colonies (calafou.org) and alternative internets (GNUnet).

How can or should we think about and critically evaluate the distinction between privateers and pirates in political-philosophical terms? What is the utility, in this particular context, of the conceptual and normative schemas still operative in political philosophy today? If not a return to a Hobbesian state of nature, yet also short of being a Commonwealth; if not the emergence of a post-state, anarchist or libertarian utopia, nor a technologically updated 1984 in which the state function has become absolute; how to understand and conceptualise the ambiguous in-between?

Krisis welcomes interdisciplinary answers to such questions, and encourages approaches that engage political-philosophical reflections on issues of state sovereignty, law and justice, to the above mentioned case-studies (or others). We also invite speculative approaches to future scenarios: will the conflict between neoliberal and ‘alternative’ solutions take place in ever more deterritorialised, technocratic networks beyond state control? Will we witness the proliferation of large self-regulative parallel systems, of password-protected enclaves, local communication ecologies and gated communities? Will the state be reduced to ‘one of the players in this game’, or will strategic shifts in its constitution as an apparatus in conjunction with neoliberalism secure its function as a sovereign mediator?

**

The first issue of Krisis in 2014 is online, and we start off with a wide variety of articles, essays, letters and reviews. What does it mean that gender and race are socially constructed? And how are we to understand the reality of the social relations of oppression with which sexism and racism go hand in hand? In a dossier on Sally Haslanger’s important book Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (2012) these and other related questions are discussed in the form of three critical commentaries by Titus Stahl, Arianna Betti and Mari Mikkola and an extensive reply by Haslanger herself.

In addition, this issue contains articles on the relation between science, politics and society by Huub Dijstelbloem, and on the possibilities and meanings of emancipation in Jacques Rancière’s political thought by Ruth Sonderegger. An essay by Daniël de Zeeuw looks back at the political theory and strategy of Occupy, and Jan-Willem Duyvendak and Merijn Oudenampsen enter into a discussion about the sociological significance of recent political and cultural changes in the Netherlands.

Last but not least, the book reviews of this issue cover recent publications on climate skepticism (in the review essay by Chunglin Kwa), migration (Rogier van Reekum discusses Mezzadra & Neilson’s Border as Method, 2013) Rancière’s aesthetics (Aukje van Rooden reviews his latest publication Aisthesis. Scenes from the aesthetic regime of art, 2013), and the practical role of standards (a review of Laurence Bush’ Standards. Recipes for reality, 2011, by Koen Beumer).

In order to keep the reading of this journal free of charge, we would appreciate your support.

 

Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy: http://www.krisis.eu/index_en.php

 

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

The Politics of Common Ground

Aesthetics

THE POLITICS OF COMMON GROUND

Seminar: The Politics of Common Ground

Tuesday April 29th @ 3-5PM, Room LTB B

University of Essex, Colchester Campus

For this seminar Professor Jeremy Gilbert will discuss his new book: Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism.

Common Ground explores the philosophical relationship between collectivity, individuality, affect and agency in the neoliberal era. Jeremy Gilbert argues that individualism is forced upon us by neoliberal culture, fatally limiting our capacity to escape the current crisis of democratic politics.

The book asks how forces and ideas opposed to neoliberal hegemony, and to the individualist tradition in Western thought, might serve to protect some form of communality, and how far we must accept assumptions about the nature of individuality and collectivity which are the legacy of an elitist tradition. Along the way it examines different ideas and practices of collectivity, from conservative notions of hierarchical and patriarchal communities to the politics of ‘horizontality’ and ‘the commons’ which are at the heart of radical movements today.

Exploring this fundamental fault line in contemporary political struggle, Common Ground proposes a radically non-individualist mode of imagining social life, collective creativity and democratic possibility.

Professor Jeremy Gilbert is a writer, researcher and activist whose work has appeared in various British, continental, American and Australian publications and has been translated into French, Spanish and German. His most recent book is Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (Pluto 2013) and he has co-authored books on the philosophy of dance music and the relationship between culture and politics in Blair’s Britain as well as publishing numerous articles on cultural theory, politics and music.

Sponsored by the Centre for Work, Organization, and Society

This seminar is part of an ongoing workshop series on artist collectives.

For more information contact Stevphen Shukaitis: sshuka@essex.ac.uk

 

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academic.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskpoint.blogspot.com

Common Ground

Communisation

COMMON GROUND

Interview and Discussion with Lawrence Grossberg

 

Dear Friends

I’ve written and introduction to / summary of my latest book, Common Ground,for the Compass website.

It’s here: http://www.compassonline.org.uk/collectivity-in-an-age-of-individualism/

At the same time, I’ve published on my blog a copy the long discussion of the book and its themes between myself and Lawrence Grossberg.

It’s here: http://jeremygilbertwriting.wordpress.com/2014/04/02/common-ground-a-discussion-with-lawrence-grossberg-about-my-latest-book/

 

Please pass on to anyone who might be interested

Thanks!

Jeremy Gilbert

http://www.jeremygilbert.org
@jemgilbert

 

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski at Academia: http://independent.academic.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskpoint.blogspot.com

Crisis in Ukraine

Crisis in Ukraine

CRISIS IN UKRAINE

Forum hosted by John McDonnell MP

Revolution or Reaction? Crisis in Ukraine

‘Eyewitness Report by Ukrainian Socialist

VOLODYMYR ISHCHENKO

COMMONS: Journal of Social Criticism

MONDAY 10th MARCH

6:00 PM Committee Room 12,

House of Commons

Via main St Stephens entrance,

Westminster tube

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‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski at Academia: https://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski