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Social Movements

Social Movements

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, RESISTANCE AND SOCIAL CHANGE II: POSSIBILITIES, IDEAS, DEMANDS

Second Annual Conference and Social Change Forum
University of Auckland, New Zealand, 2-4 September 2015

Call
Elites are delighted to be reassured that there never was a crisis and indeed there never will be. No financial crisis, which might interrupt profitability. No ecological crisis, which might despoil their inner compounds. No housing crisis, which might involve them becoming permanent tenants. No food crisis, which might mean that their plates and cups were not brimming over. If there was a crisis then it was a crisis for others, which as usual for the callous meant no crisis at all.

At the same time, we have seen the rise of radical new possibilities, ideas and demands. Democratically elected states contested the technocratic puppets governing them; those who had built nations asked that they no longer be routinely murdered in t he streets; students reclaimed their universities from their twisted administrators; tribunal deliberations confirmed that tangata whenua had never ceded rangatiratanga; mass demonstrations rose against ‘austerity’; economists demanded confiscatory taxes on capital; novelists called the bluff on their illiterate rulers; socialist and feminist parties confronted arms traders.

This conference and social change forum invites participants to share their learning about the possibilities, ideas and demands actually existing in present economic, political and cultural arrangements. The event will be equally scientific and programmatic, combining the most important ideas and analyses of the present with concrete programmes for social change. Rejecting the alternatives of academic conference, political rally and direct action, this meeting intends to be none of these but all, and more.

This meeting will build on the 2014 Social Movements, Resistance and Social Change conference which brought together and provided a mapping of social movements locally and globally. That meeting provided a valuable overview of resistance and social change on behalf of responsibility, sustainability and social equality, the results of which will appear in a forthcoming issue of Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online. The 2014 conference created sustained relationships across the left including the establishment of an eSocSci social movements network for developing and continuing these conversations. The 2015 event will extend this work of mapping and understanding social movements, resistance and social change. Beyond this, it invites discussion around questions of what is possible, what can be thought and what can be demanded today.

Participation
We invite participation in a variety of forms. The three days will provide considerable time for open discussion and debate. We therefore welcome particip ants who would rather not present a formal academic paper but can instead share their experience and learning with others. Participants wishing to attend but not present a paper are invited to email with an indication of interest.

At the same time, we invite formal theoretical and scientific contributions that will provide rigorous analyses of our present conjuncture. Formal papers can deal with any aspect of questions relating to social movements, resistance and social change, but we particularly invite considerations on questions of the new possibilities, ideas and demands that present themselves today. Papers might address, but are not restricted to, the following themes:

  • Founding political acts
  • The shapes and forms of politics
  • Struggles for sovereignty
  • The rise of social movements in Aotearoa and beyond
  • New logics of emancipation
  • Contesting power, contesting knowledge
  • The role of the academy in social movements and activism
  • Why thought matters
  • Logical revolts
  • Science, knowledge, truths
  • The fragility of power
  • Legal struggles and change at the level of the state
  • Art and politics – the aesthetics of politics
  • What ideas can do
  • What we do when we win
  • Thinking beyond capitalism, patriarchy and racism
  • Possibilities for new political subjects
  • Actually existing alternatives within economy and society today
  • Counterhistories and counterfutures

We invite submissions from presenters in the form of an abstract of no more than 500 words. Abstracts are due 15 June 2015 and notification of acceptance will be made by the end of June.

Please email submissions as a document attachment to resistanceandsocialchange@gmail.com

Outcomes
We envisage four principal results of the conference and forum:

To strengthen existing relations and develop new forms of collaboration. Working on social bonds amongst those in resistance movements is our first objective.

To develop concrete programmes for social change, whether in the form of new ideas, social practices, laws and/or institutions. Our goal is to develop all of these, in part and in whole, ultimately in concert together .

Scholarly papers presented at the conference and forum will be invited for consideration for publication in a special issue of the journal New Zealand Sociology. Full length papers should be prepared for the September meeting, after which there will an opportunity to take on board feedback. The deadline for final submissions for the special issue is 31 October 2015.

Conference participants are also invited to consider publishing their work in the new journal Counterfutures: Left Thought and Practice Aotearoa. For further details visit: http://counterfutures.blogspot.co.nz.

Contact
To make an indication of interest in participation, to submit a paper, or for any queries please email resistanceandsocialchange@gmail.com

Nathalie Jaques, Campbell Jones and Shannon Walsh
School of Social Sciences, University of Auckland

 

First Published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/social-movements-resistance-and-social-change-ii-2013-auckland-2-4-september-2015

Movemets of the Social

Movemets of the Social

 

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Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

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Panopticon

Panopticon

WRITING AND RESISTANCE

New Formations

We are pleased to announce the publication of New Formations Issue 83: ‘Writing and Resistance’
For online details see http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/issue/nf83.html

[Please note that the deadline for the next general issue of New Formations is May 31st 2015. For  contributors guidelines see http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/contributors.htm]

Details for this issue:
This issue of New Formations presents a range of exciting new work which spans and connects the fields of cultural studies, literary theory and radical political philosophy. Two contributors are concerned with the specificities of contemporary sexual politics. Three others address the relationships between writing, disclosure and interpretation. A further two texts offer radical philosophical interpretations of emergent political currents in Greece, Spain, Turkey and beyond. While there is no single theme, all the contributions share a concern to bring the most sophisticated theoretical tools available to bear upon the analysis of a range of urgent and emergent political questions. This continues to be the overriding purpose of New Formations: to explore the intersections between culture, theory and politics in order to understand the changing nature of each in the twenty-first century.

CONTENTS

Jeremy Gilbert: Editorial
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/pdfs/nf83_editorial.pdf

David Alderson: Acting Straight: Reality TV, Gender Self-Consciousness and Forms of Capital

Clare Birchall: Aesthetics of the Secret
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/pdfs/nf83_birchall.pdf

Naomi Booth: ‘Bathetic masochism and the shrinking woman’

Elizabeth Coles: ‘Psychoanalysis and the Poem: On Reading in Sándor Ferenczi and D.W. Winnicott’

Costas Douzinas: ‘Notes Towards an Analytics of Resistance’
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/pdfs/nf83_douzinas.pdf

Sarah Kember: Why ‘Write? Feminism, publishing and the politics of communication’

Serhat Karakayali and Özge Yaka: ‘The Spirit of Gezi: The Recomposition of Political Subjectivities in Turkey’

REVIEWS:

James Penney Better tables
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/pdfs/nf83_reviews_penney.pdf

Dhanveer Singh Brar Hieroglyphics of the flesh
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/pdfs/nf83_reviews_singh_brar.pdf

Jade Munslow Ong Women, Crime and Sexual Transgression
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/pdfs/nf83_reviews_munslow_ong.pdf

Caspar Melville Can sociologists write?
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/pdfs/nf83_reviews_melville.pdf

Joseph Darlington That Dawn to Be Alive
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/pdfs/nf83_reviews_darlington.pdf

Elena Tzelepis    Again Antigone
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/pdfs/nf83_reviews_tzelepis.pdf

Jeremy Gilbert
http://www.jeremygilbert.org
@jemgilbert

**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/

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism

CONFERENCE ON NEOLIBERALISM

ISTANBUL UNIVERSITY

The faculty members of the Department of International Relations at Istanbul University, are preparing a conference titled “Political Science in Contemporary World: Neoliberalism, Crises and Social Resistance Movements: Theorizing and Experiencing Politics“.

The conference is scheduled from 10-12 December 2014 in Istanbul. It will be the second of the annual conferences organized by our department.

This year’s conference will focus primarily on late neoliberalism and neoliberalization paths: their impact on various aspects of social formations such as state forms, social classes, social resistance movements, political regimes, rationalities of government and gender regimes.

Prof. Jamie Peck will be the keynote speaker of the conference.

The deadline for submitting abstracts was September 5, 2014 but it has been extended for three weeks.

The web address of the conference is as the following: http://www.politsciconference.org/

We look forward for your submissions.

First published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/conference-on-neoliberalism-at-istanbul-university

**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

Labour

Labour

REFRAMING LABOUR AND WORKERS’ RESISTANCE FOR THE 21st CENTURY

Call for Papers

Working USA special issue

Issue Editors:

Maurizio Atzeni, Loughborough University, UK; m.atzeni@lboro.ac.uk

Immanuel Ness, Brooklyn College, CUNY, New York City; manny.ness@gmail.com

Interpretations of global labour in the age of neoliberal capitalism urgently demands robust and critical historical and comparative analysis. For decades, research on labour collective organisation has focused almost exclusively on workers collectively employed on a stable basis in industrial settings or in the public sector, defended by collective bargaining, represented by trade unions and inserted within relatively stable systems of industrial relations. This view however it has always failed to take into account the transformative potentialities of that vast, rich and meaningful array of ‘precarious’ work experiences and relations that allow the production and re-production of capital as a whole.

Women’s labour in the sphere of social reproduction, low-waged workers who work outside conventional work as subcontractors in global production chains or in the informal economy of the global cities or as crowd workers in the digital economy, migrant workers whose exploited work often lays at the margin of legality, new groups of dispossessed people forced into the labour market, are categories of workers traditionally excluded and neglected by the labour relations literature as labourers; often considered unproductive, unregulated, and thus unrepresentable. Considering the speed of development and intensity of integration of global capitalist processes and the political turn to neoliberalism, which have brought about new (or refreshed old) paradigms to increase workers’ productivity and profits, absent has been the signal importance of these ‘invisible’, precarious workers, today representing not just the vast majority of workers in the global South but also increasingly shaping the social landscape of cities across the world.

Broadening research on this underworld of precarious and not represented workers is important to understand one fundamental dimension of the process of capital accumulation in the global age but it also helps to address deep theoretical concerns, put in evidence by heterodox Marxist currents across the social sciences, originating from the use of narrow conceptions about work and workers:

  • The conventional notion of the working class, based on the industrial, waged worker, has been questioned for not considering how different labour regimes co-exist and contribute to the development of capitalism as a system, especially women engaged in social reproduction.
  • The social organisation and militancy of workers it has been reduced to workers’ resistance to official strikes organised by representative trade unions, the ‘institutionalised form of resistance’, leaving aside the rich history and tradition of workers’ self-organisation. This remains crucial today in framing precarious workers organisation and in setting possibilities for transformative agency.
  • Geographically research concentrated on struggles at the workplace without considering the linkages of these with broader struggles over workers’ daily lives.

In the past 30 years, one sided views of labour has been explicitly based on the political role assigned to the industrial workers. Either from a revolutionary or a reformist perspective this particular section of the working class was considered central to any transformative politics. The advent of neoliberalism has swept away many of the elements upon which this centrality was built, leaving a tabula rasa, politically and theoretically speaking. From an empirical point of view, diversity, heterogeneity, unevenness, unpredictability characterise most workers’ struggles of the 21st century.

Against this theoretical and empirical gap in knowledge, the aim of this special issue is twofold.

It aims to offer insights on the daily lives, organization and resistance of precarious workers, intending these in broader terms, as employed in a range of different sectors, geographical and spatial landscapes, economic environments, and regulatory employment regimes.

It aims to produce new knowledge into the connections between these different workers’ struggles and the specific socio-economic, historical and productive context in which have developed.

Within these aims and considering the scope of the journal, we seek submissions from any social sciences discipline concerned with the study of workers and labour using a range of empirical and methodological analyses. The editors however would especially welcome papers that reach theoretical insights in addressing the relevance of certain groups of workers’ experiences or develop their arguments through comparative/historical analysis; focus on global cities and diverse employment regimes, workplaces and daily lives experiences; consider the experiences of workers in strategic sectors of the economy (distribution, transportation, knowledge economy); search for connections of workers struggles in different locations across the global production chain;  or offer insights on new forms of organizing and resistance

 

DUE DATE FOR ABSTRACTS OF 750-1000 WORDS: 15 September 2014

WORD LENGTH: 6000-10,000 words

DUE DATE FOR FINAL SUBMISSION: end March 2015

PUBLICATION DATE: September 2015

INCLUDE NAME, AFFILIATION

WE ENCOURAGE PHD STUDENTS AND ESTABLISHED SCHOLARS TO CONTRIBUTE

 

First published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/call-for-papers-reframing-labour-and-workers2019-resistance-for-the-21st-century

 

**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

Dave Hill

Dave Hill

IMMISERATION, CAPITALISM AND EDUCATION: AUSTERITY, RESISTANCE AND REVOLT – A NEW EDITED COLLECTION BY DAVE HILL

Immiseration, Capitalism and Education: Austerity, Resistance and Revolt

Edited by Dave Hill

Institute for Education Policy Studies

Brighton

http://www.ieps.org.uk

2013

ISBN: 978-0-9522042-3-7

This is an important and astonishing book. It is a Marxist book. It systematically charts and critiques the havoc being wreaked by neoliberal and neoconservative Capitalism on society, on schooling/ schools and on higher education, across five countries: the USA, England, Turkey, Ireland and Greece. Following a theoretical chapter on Immiseration Capitalism, the first part of the book examines in detail the destructiveness and degradation effected by national and transnational Capital within these five societies, and the privatising, marketising, commodifying, degrading and impoverishing impacts within these five countries’ broader society, within/on the schooling system and within / on higher education.

Very importantly, the book goes beyond critique, beyond deconstruction, beyond anger and analysis. In Part Two of the book, leading Marxist analysts and activists from these five countries examine the Resistance to neoliberalising/neoconservatising policy and practice. In each case writers answer the question: What is the ‘Resistance’? Where is the Resistance? How is it Organised? How Successful is it? What are the Barriers to its Effectiveness? How can it be Developed to be more Effective?

In the Third and Final section, writers look to past and contemporary successful examples of Socialist Education, in the former Soviet bloc, and in Latin America, Venezuela. Again, writers, while noting the varied successes of such socialist or Marxist education, always remain critical- and self-critical.

The Conclusion, building on the critique within, summarises, and looks to the future, in terms of building the disparate resistance within schooling, higher education, communities and within the national societies- learning internationally. This book, written by noted and leading Marxist authors and activists, is an important contribution to Marxist education and broader theory- but also a spur to revolutionary anti-capitalist praxis-in education and beyond.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Dave Hill

PART 1: Austerity Capitalism, Immiseration and Education

1. Immiseration Capitalism Curry Malott, Dave Hill & Grant Banfield

2. Austerity Capitalism and Education in Greece Panagiotis Sotiris

3. Austerity Capitalism and Education in Ireland Martin Power, Micheal O’Flynn, Aline Courtois & Margaret Kennedy

4. Austerity Capitalism and Education in Britain Dave Hill, Christine Lewis, Alpesh Maisuria & Patrick Yarker

5. Austerity Capitalism and Education in Turkey Fevziye Sayilan & Nuray Turkmen

6. Austerity Capitalism and Education in the USA Curry Malott & Faith Agostinone-Wilson

PART 2: Activism within/ against Immiseration Capitalism

7. Resistance in Greece Leonidas Vatikiotis and Maria Nikolakaki

8. Resistance in Ireland Micheal O’Flynn, Martin Power, Conor McCabe & Henry Silke

9. Resistance in Britain Joyce Canaan, Dave Hill, & Alpesh Maisuria

10. Resistance in Turkey Kemal İnal & H. Tuğba Öztürk

11. Resistance in the USA Curry Malott & Faith Agostinone-Wilson

PART 3: Peripheries

12. Immiseration Capitalism or Twenty-First century Socialism? Mike Cole & Peter McLaren

13. A view from the post-socialist ‘new periphery’ Bill Templer

14. Conclusion: Capitalism, Resistance and Dave Hill, Bill Templer, Panagiotis Sotiris,

What is to be Done? Grant Banfield & Faith Agostinone-Wilson

 

Price £22 inc post and packaging

Available from: http://www.ieps.org.uk/subscriptionsandpurchasing

Dave Hill is a Marxist academic and political and educational activist. He has fought ten elections in England at local, national and European levels, been an elected trade union regional leader and, when the Labour Party was left-wing, was a Labour Group (Council) Leader. In terms of Direct Action, he has recently been tear-gassed while on anti-government demonstrations in Athens and Ankara and is an activist in TUSC (the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition) and in Left Unity.  He co-founded the Hillcole Group of Radical left Educators in 1989 and chaired it until 2001, founded the Institute for Education Policy Studies (www.ieps.org.uk) in 1989 and set up the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (www.jceps.com) in 2003. Since then, it, a free online peer-reviewed journal, has been downloaded a million times- free of charge. The journal went into print production in 2012 (available for purchase). He is Research Professor of Education at Anglia Ruskin University, England, and Visiting Professor of Critical Policy and Equality Studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and Visiting Professor of Education at  the Universities of Middlesex, London, England, and Athens, Greece.

Dave Hill Book

 

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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

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Terry Wrigley

John Smyth & Terry Wrigley

DISCOURSE, POWER & RESISTANCE IN EDUCATION NEWSLETTER – FEBRUARY 2014

DPR14 – Research and Practice: Exchange and Change

University of Greenwich, UK – 8-10 April, 2014
 
Is it time to remind ourselves what the conference is all about? Click here for the home page. That subtitle Exchange and Change could become a mantra: we exchange – that’s what conferences do, in coffee queues, lectures, presentations, workshops, and late into the small hours  – and change; we ourselves change; we change ourselves; we change one-another; we change the world…. The butterfly effect is good science.

There are just 67 days before the conference. This seems a long time; but the days will race by. Each year around this time the pace quickens as colleagues begin to realize it is time to send their abstracts, make their applications for funding to their institutions, apply for visas, book travel and accommodation, and prepare their presentations – papers, workshops, or posters. The second call for papers is 14 February – Valentine’s Day. As you sniff the bouquets that appear on your doorstep, adjust your bow tie and/or tiara and set out for romance, or, if you are in the UK, as you curl up before the fire to watch what the BBC rather discouragingly announces as highlights of today’s action from the Sochi Winter Olympics, which Team GB was hoping would bring medals, remind yourself that it is time to send your abstract. DPR does not do deadlines, seeing them as just as rigid, joyless and lifeless as they sound. Nevertheless, time is running out.

We have an outstanding and brilliant line up of keynote speakers this year: Richard Pring, then Stefan Collini, then Ivor Goodson. Details are posted on the web pages here, where you will see their pictures, brief biographies and the titles of their keynote presentations.

Just launched is a DPR blog, something we have been wanting for a while. The blog is in its infancy. We hope you will send your comments and your articles for inclusion, and that the blog will provide a forum for vigorous exchange and debate. Another innovation is the DPR Twitter site. Click, tweet, enjoy! We are grateful to John Blewitt for offering to look after the blog, and to James Duggan for taking care of Twitter.

I want to add an appeal which many of you will find familiar: please will you help us to spread the word about the conference? We rely on the goodwill of colleagues to send on information to their friends and colleagues, networks, institutions and mailing lists; perhaps also by using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Academia Edu – etc. One reason that DPR has continued to grow is that colleagues have been willing to give time to this. We will be most grateful if you can help to make the conference known, by forwarding this link to the conference home page, where there are further links to all aspects of the conference.
 
We very much hope to see you at the conference.
With all best wishes
Jerome 
(Jerome Satterthwaite – on behalf of the DPR Management Team)
 
Note: Click here to read this newsletter via the DPR website style.

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

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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

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

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

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

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

The New Left Book Club: https://rikowski.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/the-new-left-book-club-call-for-papers/

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

Crisis

Crisis

CRITICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY RESEARCH NETWORK OF THE EUROPEAN SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

Call for Papers – Mid-term conference

Crisis, Resistance and Rights: Critical Political Economy Perspectives

12-13 September 2014, Vienna

The current crisis reveals one of capitalism’s key contradictions: the relationship between rights, the state and society. Giving primacy to austerity politics, governments appear unable to guarantee basic rights vis-à-vis market forces. These developments constitute fundamental challenges to social reproduction. Governments have for example been pro-active in protecting banks’ rights in foreclosures and housing evictions at the expense of people’s right to housing, or imposed labour reforms marking a retreat of labour rights and rights to decent work. Similar trends can be observed with respect to welfare rights, the right to education, the right to water or democratic rights that go beyond ballot boxes, such as the right to protest and claim public spaces. Of particular importance here is also the political ecology dimension, with a focus on the financialisation of nature, enclosure of commons, and the green economy as a new hegemonic project. Resistance movements and civil society organisations/groups increasingly challenge private property rights and demand collective socio-economic and human rights. Academic discussions of rights have long been a prerequisite of liberal political philosophy and received little attention from critical scholars. What can scholars in law, political economy, political science and sociology contribute to a critical understanding of rights? How does an emancipatory conception of rights look like? What are common rights, and/or rights to commons? How could such conceptions add to a critical understanding of crisis and resistance?

This two-day conference in Vienna seeks to explore interlinkages between crisis, resistance and rights in an open, genial and reflexive manner. We are interested in all of the above plus more, and wish for the conference to cover a wide range of topics. As such, we seek contributions from scholars with an interest in political economy research, regardless of their disciplinary affiliation and whether they are in academia or not. We also hope to attract a diverse range of participants, from a variety of countries and backgrounds. To this end, limited funds will be available for assisting PhD and early career scholars, especially those from Central and Eastern Europe, with their travel and accommodation costs.

Abstracts of around 250 words should be submitted to cpern@criticalpoliticaleconomy.net by no later than 1 March 2014. The applicants will be informed of the selection committee’s decision by 1 April 2014.

 

There is no fee for attending and participating in the workshop. The workshop language will be English.

About CPERN

The Critical Political Economy Research Network (CPERN) promotes and facilitates research aimed at understanding recent transformations of capitalism and capitalist societies. The primary focus is on Europe, but CPERN is in no way restricted to just this part of the world. CPERN’s purpose is to reassert the centrality of political economy perspectives and to promote critical and emancipatory scholarship. It is a hub for interdisciplinary exchange, straddling principally the disciplines of sociology, politics and economics, but also reaching out to geography, social policy and law.

Critical Political Economy Research Network: http://criticalpoliticaleconomy.net/

First published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/cfp-cpern-mid-term-conference-crisis-resistance-and-rights-critical-political-economy-perspectives

 

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Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

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

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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

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

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

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

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

Communisation

Communisation

DPR CONFERENCE NEWSLETTER – OCTOBER 2013

DISCOURSE, POWER AND RESISTANCE IN EDUCATION

DPR14Research and Practice: Exchange and Change
University of Greenwich, UK – 8-10 April, 2014

Dear Colleagues

The conference is taking shape. The first call for papers is 3 December 2013; but abstracts are already coming in. Click here to see the abstracts already accepted, and here for the symposia proposed so far. DPR is democractic; and the conference reflects this, taking shape and developing its agenda as colleagues discuss ideas and as proposals come in. We strongly encourage you to get involved at this early stage by sending in proposals for papers, workshops, posters, exhibition work or performance relating to the issues around exchange and change. Help to shape the conference agenda.

Recently I asked colleagues what DPR meant to them. DPR conferences have been held each year since 2002, a book series has widely published conference themes and issues, for the last five years the journal Power and Education has extended the discussion, and an international network is growing as DPR colleagues work together and share ideas. What is this all about, and why does it matter? Here are some of the answers colleagues gave me:

  • DPR is a space for rebellious thinking and a master class in theory and philosophy around contemporary culture and education
  • DPR is a stimulating environment to be immersed in
  • DPR is a seed bank – a nuclear bunker – where ideas, values, practices, things that really matter can be kept safely alive until the sickness of neoliberalism has gone by
  • DPR is not elitist: it’s a good place to be for researchers and practitioners new and old
  • DPR is serious, but it’s extraordinarily friendly and invigorating.

 

Here is a quote from the flyer for DPR14: “DPR is political because teaching, learning and research are political: social justice requires that new understandings lead to action. DPR14 sets out to understand and to share the huge diversity of insights that only a truly international conference can bring together; to take courage, with a view to making things change.”

The DPR website has been updated. We hope it will be easy to use and a quick way to find out everything you need to know about the conference, the venue, travel, accommodation, registration and fees. Further information is being added regularly so please keep browsing the site.

Two news items:

1.       Pat Sikes has asked me to circulate information about the 2014 Qualitative Book of the Year Award: Call for Nominations. (Deadline: November 15, 2013). Click here to find out more.
2.       Dorit Kedar has sent information about the publication of her major project: The Book of Inter-religious Peace in Word and Image. Click here to read more.

Please will you help to spread the word about the conference by forwarding this Newsletter to colleagues, networks and institutions you think may be interested. Please contact me if there is any further information you would like, or to discuss a possible contribution to the conference.

With all best wishes
Jerome  (Jerome Satterthwaite – on behalf of the DPR Management Team)

STOP PRESS: Stefan Collini – author of What Are Universities For? (Penguin, 2012) has agreed to be a keynote speaker. For a foretaste of his brilliant wit and comprehensive understanding of contemporary Higher Education, read his Sold Out in the London Review of Books, 24 October 2013.

Note: Click here to read this newsletter via the DPR website.

**END**

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo

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

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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

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

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

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

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

Kevin Anderson

Kevin Anderson

FOUCAULT AND RESISTANCE THROUGH MARX AND MARCUSE – KEVIN ANDERSON

[Vancouver] Casting a Critical Eye on the Foucauldian Concept of Resistance, in Light of Marcuse and Marx, by Kevin B. Anderson

Casting a Critical Eye on the Foucauldian Concept of Resistance, in Light of Marcuse and Marx

Kevin Anderson

Vancouver

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Public Lecture: Kevin B. Anderson
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
7:00 p.m. – SFU Harbour Ctr. Room tba

The Foucauldian concept of specific forms of resistance has come to the fore in radical thought, as seen in terrains as diverse as academic social theory and anarchist activism. It has displaced earlier concepts of emancipation rooted in abstract universals (Marcuse), but at a price. Marx’s emancipatory but concrete dialectic of class and ethnicity goes beyond both of these one-sided perspectives.

Kevin B. Anderson teaches Sociology, Political Science, and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his most recent books are Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (with Janet Afary, 2005) and Marx at the Margins (2010).

See: http://www.internationalmarxisthumanist.org/events/casting-a-critical-eye-on-the-foucauldian-concept-of-resistance-in-light-of-marcuse-and-marx-by-kevin-b-anderson

 

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse

**END**

 

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo (new remix, and new video, 2012)  

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

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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

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

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

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

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

 

Faith Agostinone-Wilson

Faith Agostinone-Wilson

CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF EDUCATION AND WORK: UPDATE 7th JULY 2013

EVENTS

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN SYRIA?

Friday, July 12
7:00 PM – 9:30 PM
Beit Zatoun
612 Markham St, Toronto (walking distance from Bathurst subway station)
Free admission

A public forum on the nature of the Syrian government and the opposition, and on the aims of world powers and regional countries in Syria.

Speakers:
Elias Asad is a Syrian-Canadian and a member of the Communist Party of Canada.
Ali Mustafa is a Toronto-based freelance journalist and photographer who has recently returned from Syria.

Organized by Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly

+++++

WORKSHOP – ACTIVE HOPE: HOW TO FACE THE NUCLEAR AND CLIMATE MESS WE’RE IN WITHOUT GOING CRAZY

Monday July 8
6:30 – 9:30 pm
Please arrive at 6:15 to begin at 6:30 sharp.
Friends House, 60 Lowther, Toronto (St. George subway)
Suggested donation: $2 – 20 (sliding scale) 

This workshop is designed to help us in this time of planetary emergency and the resulting overwhelm and despair that many of us feel. Join us for an evening of dialogue and experiential exercises based on teachings and practices developed by eco-philosopher Joanna Macy and colleagues. You will come away with a sense of the bigger picture and a context for action.

Facilitator: Natalie Zend, M.A., CTDP is a training and facilitation consultant with 14 years’ experience in international development and human rights. She is a member of the Work that Reconnects Facilitators Network and offers the Awakening the Dreamer symposium, compassionate communication, Open Space and other social technologies internationally and in her local community of Toronto.

Contact: angela@cleanairalliance.org

For more info on the Work that Reconnects: http://workthatreconnects.org/

Sponsored by: Greenspiration, Toronto Climate Action Network, Ontario Clean Air Alliance, Voice of Women for Peace, PeaceWorks

+++++

HAS THE GIANT AWOKEN? UNDERSTANDING THE MASS PROTEST MOVEMENT IN BRAZIL

Thursday, July 11
7:00 PM – 9:30 PM
Beit Zatoun
612 Markham St, Toronto (walking distance from Bathurst subway station)
Free admission

Brazil is currently witnessing the largest mass protests to hit the country in over 20 years. Originally organized by the Free Fare Movement (MPL) in Sao Paulo against a planned 10 cent public transit fare hike, the protests quickly spread to Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, and other major cities across the country. At its peak, over 1 million people in over 100 Brazilian cities took to the streets to protest a long list of grievances ranging from political corruption to human rights abuses to World Cup spending.

Who exactly are the protesters taking to the streets? What are the root grievances they want addressed? Why has Brazil erupted now?

Join us for a public forum with four Brazilian activists who will share their perspectives about this exciting moment in Brazilian history.

Speakers:
Mariana Faraz Duarte is a community development and health practitioner concerned with social justice and participatory decision-making mechanisms. She is doing her PhD in Public Health at University of Toronto.
Rubem Silva is a youth activist involved in housing and students’ social movements in Brazil. Currently, he is doing an exchange program in Public Health and Sexual Diversity Studies at University of Toronto.

*We will also hear (via Skype) from two activists in Rio de Janeiro who are involved in the protest movement on the ground.

Endorsed by: Greater Toronto Workers Assembly, Centre for Social Justice, Toronto New Socialists, Socialist Project, Socialist Action

+++++

THEATRE, PEDAGOGY AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY: BOOK LAUNCH AND PLAY READING

Friday July 12
7:00-9:00pm
Aluna Theatre studio
1 Wiltshire Ave. Unit 123, Toronto

Aluna Theatre in partnership with Latin American Researchers of Ontario (LARO) is pleased to invite the public to the book launch of Como Integrar Artes Escénicas y Ciencias Sociales en el Aula / How to Integrate Scenic Arts and Social Sciences in the Classroom: A Pedagogic Experience Based on Historic Memory, written by Jorge Arcila.

The event will also feature a reading and bilingual (English/Spanish) performance of “Real Mother” a scene from the play Harriet’s House/La Casa de Harriet, by Tara Goldstein. Harriet’s House is a play about love, loss, and adoption in a Canadian lesbian family.

The book, “How to Integrate Scenic Arts and Social Sciences in the Classroom” analyzes the research journey of a group of 16 teenagers who collectively explored historical memory through practices of process drama.

Jorge Arcila holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Toronto and a Masters in Political Studies from La Pontifica Universidad Javeriana, Colombia. Tara Goldstein is a professor at the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, University of Toronto.

This event is dedicated to the memory of OISE/UT Professor Roger Simon and Arlan Londono, Colombian artist, curator and scholar who recently passed away.

+++++

SEMINAR:  ABLEISM AND THE QUESTION OF THE HUMAN

Tuesday, July 30
1:00-5:00 pm
OISE, 252 Bloor Street West (St. George subway), Toronto
5th Floor, Room 5-280

This conversation promises to provoke questions regarding the meaning of “human” that can be revealed in everyday assumptions of ability. How, for example, do medical, legal, or educational forms of engaging those who are typically excluded do more than confirm the normative order of ableism or, worse, reproducing human degradation?

This free, public, accessible seminar brings us together with Drs. Dan Goodley from Sheffield University, UK; James Overboe, Waterloo University; Anne McGuire, New College, University Toronto along with Rinaldo Walcott and Tanya Titchkosky from OISE with Lead Discussant Dr Kirsty Liddiard, Post-Doc fellow from Ryerson University.

+++++

NEWS & VIEWS

REFORM REKINDLED

By Mark Brenner, Labor Notes

The sight of tens of thousands of striking teachers and their allies marching through the streets of Chicago last fall had a back-story, a little-discussed trend in organized labor—reform movements.

Read more: http://www.labornotes.org/2013/06/reform-rekindled

+++++

LABOUR IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA AND CANCER

By Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson, The Bullet

A recent book, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, makes the reasonable point that, “the price of austerity can be measured in human lives.” Austerity programs have obvious negative impacts on well being when public health programs are cut but it also creates poor health in less obvious ways through the stress of a labour market involving high unemployment and a decimated safety net. A quick glance at the history of the United States can help demonstrate that it is not only recent austerity programs that kill but, rather, that when economic policies favour the business community, death and disease will follow. In fact, a reasonable case could be made that ill health and early death are more a result of economics and politics than germs and genes.

Read more: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/845.php

+++++

SHORTAGE OF PERSONAL SUPPORT WORKERS IN ONTARIO HOME CARE FEARED

By Shawn Jeffords, Toronto Sun

TORONTO – For 28 years Millie Hickson has risen at 4 a.m.

She dresses in her scrubs and gets into her truck and hits the road. She visits her first client at 6 a.m.

Millie is a personal support worker, the glue that holds Ontario’s troubled home care system together. She will spend the next 10 hours bouncing from client-to-client.

But Millie says there is never enough time. Not for anyone.

Read more: http://www.torontosun.com/2013/06/29/shortage-of-personal-support-workers-in-ontario-home-care-feared

+++++

NEW REPORT – IT ALL BEGINS WITH SPACE: MAXIMIZING USE OF PUBLIC ASSETS FOR ENGAGED AND HEALTHIER NEIGHBOURHOODS

The SPACE Coalition and Social Planning Toronto present new research on the importance of having access to safe places for youth (and all residents) to gather and play.

Access to space connects the pieces with regard to human development from 0 to 20 years old (and beyond). When you provide the space for children and youth to learn, play and build their resilience you provide the space for them to grow into Toronto’s healthy, self-reliant, dynamic leaders of tomorrow. Much has been accomplished through the provision of community use policies and programs. However, many barriers to accessing space still exist and service provision remains a patchwork, unable to meet complex neighbourhood needs due to escalating costs and an overall lack of space in neighbourhoods that need it most. The report release coincides with that of the City of Toronto’s Toronto Youth Equity Framework, which also notes that the provision of space is central to meeting the needs of Toronto’s youth.

Read the report: http://spacecoalition.ca/wp-content/uploads/Toronto-Report-Final5.pdf

+++++

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE STANDARDIZED

By Owen Davis, Waging Nonviolence

The ground under education reform is beginning to shift. Families, chafing under years of state and mayoral control, are demanding a return to democratic processes. There’s the feeling of something lurching under the public education system, and with it our understanding of how resistance should look in the years to come. As high school students take to the streets, unions must do the same or fade into irrelevance.

Read more: http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/the-revolution-will-not-be-standardized/

+++++

VIDEO: DEMOCRACY AGAINST CAPITALISM

From LeftStreamed

Toronto — 24 June 2013.

A presentation by Brian Roper, author of The History of Democracy – A Marxist Interpretation.

Brian Roper is a long-time activist on the socialist left in New Zealand and an Associate Professor in Politics at the University of Otago. He is the author of Prosperity for All? Economic, Social and Political Change in New Zealand since 1935 (Cengage, 2005) and The History of Democracy — A Marxist Interpretation (Pluto Press, 2012). He maintains a blog at http://briansroper.blogspot.ca

Moderated by David McNally.

Watch the video: http://www.socialistproject.ca/leftstreamed/ls181.php

+++++

HOW ONE CITY’S GRASSROOTS ACTIVISTS DID THE ‘IMPOSSIBLE’ AND PUSHED BACK THE POLITICIANS’ AUSTERITY AGENDA

By Mark Vorpahl, Alternet

On June 20, Oregon’s Portland City Council unanimously voted to approve a budget that had been one of the most grassroots-contested examples of austerity in recent memory.

Weeks earlier, in a vote to approve the framework of this budget on May 29, the City Council’s long-maintained show of consensus was broken when Commissioner Amanda Fritz voted “No.” (More on her vote later). However, by the final budget vote last Thursday she had been compelled to change her mind.

So what worked in Portland to move things towards a better outcome? For starters, Mayor Hales and the City Council’s pursuit of austerity was met with a public outpouring of opposition at public budget hearings. The resistance culminated on April 11 when over 400 protesting participants surprised the City Council and overwhelmed their staff.

Read more: http://www.alternet.org/activism/portlands-austerity-resistance-movement-sparks-changes-city

+++++

JOBS/INTERNSHIPS

LABOUR BEAT REPORTER, RABBLE.CA

In partnership with the Canadian Auto Workers union, rabble.ca is pleased to announce our second annual Labour Beat Co-op Placement. The placement will provide the successful candidate with unique opportunities to develop a grounding for reporting on national labour issues. The internship will involve access to meetings, conferences, media briefings and interviews with leaders in the labour movement, and may include shadowing rabble’s Parliament Hill reporter to committees and scrums.

Applications for the Labour Beat reporter are due July 23rd and the position is for 12 hours a week for 26 weeks. This is a paid internship, sponsored by the Canadian Auto Workers.

For more info and to apply: http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/rabble-staff/2013/07/announcing-co-op-placement-opportunity-labour-beat-reporter

+++++

FRENCH-LANGUAGE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT ANIMATOR(S), FOODSHARE

FoodShare Toronto is seeking one full-time, or two part-time, French Language Community Development Animator(s) to implement the community development work plan of the Toronto Partners for Student Nutrition, made up of Toronto Public Health, the Toronto District School Board, Toronto Catholic District School Board and Conseil scolair Viamonde, Toronto Foundation for Student Success, the Angel Foundation for Learning, FoodShare Toronto, and St. Felix Centre. The Community Development Animators are promoters of healthy eating in the school and community environments, with a strong understanding of student and youth nutrition programs. They establish new and support existing sustainable student nutrition programs through community development and engagement.

For more info and to apply: http://www.foodshare.net/careers#animator

++++++++++
++++++++++

ABOUT CSEW (CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF EDUCATION & WORK, OISE/UT):

Head: Peter Sawchuk
Co-ordinator: D’Arcy Martin

The Centre for the Study of Education and Work (CSEW) brings together educators from university, union, and community settings to understand and enrich the often-undervalued informal and formal learning of working people. We develop research and teaching programs at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (UofT) that strengthen feminist, anti-racist, labour movement, and working-class perspectives on learning and work.

Our major project is APCOL: Anti-Poverty Community Organizing and Learning. This five-year project (2009-2013), funded by SSHRC-CURA, brings academics and activists together in a collaborative effort to evaluate how organizations approach issues and campaigns and use popular education. For more information about this project, visit http://www.apcol.ca

For more information about CSEW, visit: http://www.csew.ca

Global Economic Crisis

Global Economic Crisis

 

**END**

 

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjxeHvvhJQ (live, at the Belle View pub, Bangor, north Wales); and at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo (new remix, and new video, 2012)  

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

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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

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

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

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

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

Alternative Education

Alternative Education

DISCOURSE POWER RESISTANCE CONFERENCE: DPR14, APRIL 8-10, 2014

Discourse Power Resistance

DPR is an annual international conference that has been held each Spring since 2002. The conferences began with a focus on the social, economic, political and cultural forces that shape education policy and practice world-wide. Over the years this broad focus has been maintained; but what has established the international reputation of DPR has been the on-going critical analysis of issues of social justice, and the commitment to enable silenced and marginalized voices to be heard: discourse, power, resistance.

DPR14 – Research and Practice: Exchange and Change

University of Greenwich, UK 8-10 April, 2014

At least in the humanities and social sciences, research needs to be reciprocal: asking questions, we are called in question, the researcher researched; and the outcome is mutual understanding one of another. The otherness of strangers, our essential strangeness one to another, brings us together to new insights which are never complete but always shared: to research is to be, in John Donne’s word, involved. Research should be mutual exchange.

All well and good! But if anything is to come of this deepened understanding – this coming together – it needs to be political. Research – exchange – is not enough. DPR is political because teaching, learning and research are political: social justice requires that new understandings lead to action. DPR14 sets out to understand and to share the huge diversity of insights that only a truly international conference can bring together; to take courage, with a view to making things change. This is the praxis Karl Marx had in mind: Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

How can a conference change anything? Let us say it again: we come together, we share our ideas and questions and concerns; we take courage, because we need courage to challenge and change bad practice, tired conformity. We have left on the website the abstracts that were accepted for 2013 and from the two previous years, so as to demonstrate the conferences’ on-going commitment to sustained critical analysis leading to constructive change.

Presentations at the conference will take the form of papers, workshops, performances, exhibitions, and posters. The conference brings together a range of practitioners, researchers, policy-makers, learners and teachers, with ideas to share about research and practice, through single or joint presentations or as a contribution to any of the symposia that will be taking shape. Please keep an eye on the DPR web pages for further details.

See: http://www.dprconference.com/

If you have suggestions, or ideas for a contribution you would like to discuss, please contact the conference organizer,

Jerome Satterthwaite
jnsatterthwaite@gmail.com

 

**END**

 

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjxeHvvhJQ (live, at the Belle View pub, Bangor, north Wales); and at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo (new remix, and new video, 2012)  

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

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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

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

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

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

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

 

Luddites

Luddites

SUBJECTS AND PRACTICES OF RESISTANCE

CALL FOR PAPERS

For two inter-linked, consecutive workshops under the theme of Subjects and Practices of Resistance to be held 9-11 September 2013 at University of Sussex.

The first workshop (9-10 Sept) is on Discipline(s), Dissent and Dispossession and the second on Counter-Conduct in Global Politics(10-11 Sept).  The workshop convenors encourage attendance at both workshops.  However, paper proposals should specify the intended workshop and which days participants would be able to attend.

The workshops are generously sponsored and supported by the BISA Poststructuralist Politics Working Group (PPWG) and the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) at the University of Sussex

 

Workshop 1: Discipline(s), Dissent and Dispossession

9-10 September 2013

Contemporary struggles against dispossession – from the 2011 Occupy movement to ongoing land rights conflicts in the Ecuadorian rainforest – not only remind us of existing forces of domination and exploitation, but also challenge the ready-made concepts and frameworks through which such struggles are often interpreted.   Building on a previous project – “Disciplining Dissent”* – this workshop aims to open up discussion on the intersections between the politics of resistance and the politics of knowledge. How might we conceptualise dissent or resistance in ways that are sensitive to the social and epistemic relations within which anti-systemic struggles are embedded? How might we frame the complementarity and tensions between political dissent and intellectual critique? How might available concepts and frameworks occlude the complex interplay between resistance and repression, discipline and dissent, obscuring what is at stake politically in existing practices of struggle?

We welcome contributions that consider these themes from diverse theoretical perspectives and academic disciplines, including international relations, international political economy, sociology, philosophy, geography and anthropology.

Questions that might be addressed include (but are not limited to): how is dissent rendered intelligible in ways that serve to contain, nullify or depoliticize struggles; the politics of knowledge in political dissent; the place of normative political critique in the absence of universal categories or emancipatory blueprints; the ways in which dissenting communities are building their own theories of dissent or are theorising out of their own dissenting practices; the forms of subjectivisation incited, subverted or arrested through practices of dissent and/or their relation to the types of dissenting subjects assumed by intellectuals and experts; the ways in which academic disciplines interpret, appropriate and discipline both dissent and critique; the nature and purpose of academic critique at a moment of austerity and economic “crisis”.

It is hoped that the workshop will serve as a basis for a journal special issue, as well as for further collobarations around these themes.

Abstracts of approx. 300 words should be sent to L.Coleman@sussex.ac.uk and cait@sussex.ac.uk by 31 May 2013 (please indicate whether or not you plan to attend both workshops).  

Convenors:

Lara Montesinos Coleman, University of Sussex

Doerthe Rosenow, OxfordBrookesUniversity

Karen Tucker, University of Bristol

*published as Lara Montesinos Coleman and Karen Tucker (eds.), Situating Global Resistance: Between Discipline and Dissent (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012) and as a special issue of Globalizations 8:3 (2011).

 

Workshop 2: Counter-Conduct in Global Politics: Theories and Practices

10-11 September 2013

Resistance, and its study, is on the rise. Protesting, agitating, dissenting, and occupying inter alia have received increased attention and theorisation in the past tumultuous decade since 11 September 2001. However, such academic and public attention has tended to focus on the visible and politically discernible practices of dissent against sovereignty, economic exploitation, dispossession and other forms of oppression. Little systematic attention has been paid to potentially less visible practices of resistance or those who do not participate in an expressly political register but that attempt to resist ‘power that conducts’ (Foucault 2007). To this end, the workshop has four main aims. First, to theoretically develop, refine and critically interrogate the concept and theorisation of ‘counter-conduct(s)’, a term that, until recently, has received scant attention within the social sciences. We encourage the further critique, development and modification of Foucault’s initial attempts to understand subjects’ ‘possible inventions’ as counter-conduct (1982, 2007). Second, to provide a space in which empirical, multi-disciplinary investigations of counter-conduct in a variety of thematic areas and spaces of global politics can be presented. Third, to facilitate reflection on the variable and contingent forms of counter-conduct, examining its close relationship with conducting power and revealing the processes of invigilation of resistance and adjustment of conducting strategies. Finally, to reflect on the methodological implications and issues, which affect the study of the variegated practices of counter-conduct.

We welcome contributions that consider these themes not only from a Foucaultian perspective but also that bring diverse theoretical perspectives  — and views from a variety of academic disciplines, including politics, international relations, international political economy, sociology, political theory and philosophy, geography and anthropology – to bear on the study of counter-conduct.

Format: consisting of longer paper presentations, followed by substantial constructive feedback from discussants and audience, the format of the Counter-Conduct in Global Politics workshop aims to facilitate intensive and extensive engagement among participants with a view to producing article length contributions to a significantly placed journal special issue. Given the lack of systematic focus on practices and subjects of counter-conduct, it is hoped that such a special issue will engender further debate and consideration of the study of counter-conduct in global politics and potentially act as a reference for postgraduate and doctoral research as well. Abstracts of approx. 250 words should be sent to L.Odysseos@sussex.ac.uk and cait@sussex.ac.uk by 31 May 2013 (please indicate whether or not you plan to attend both workshops).

Convenors:

Carl Death, University of Manchester (as of August 2013)

Helle Malmvig, Danish Institute of International Studies

Louiza Odysseos, University of Sussex

 

Centre for Advanced International Theory

Department of International Relations

University of Sussex

Falmer

East Sussex

BN1 9SJ

cait@sussex.ac.uk

T 01273 876615

Website: 

Revolt

Revolt

www.sussex.ac.uk/cait

Follow us on Twitter @SussexCAIT

 

**END**

 

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjxeHvvhJQ (live, at the Belle View pub, Bangor, north Wales); and at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo (new remix, and new video, 2012)  

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

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

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

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

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

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