Radical media, politics and culture.
July 11, 2012 - 1:11pm -- stevphen
Announcements
Work

The Metropolitan Factory: Worker’s Inquiry & Creative Labor Today

Minor Compositions is launching a workers’ inquiry into the shaping of creative, cultural, and artistic labor in the metropolis. We are currently searching for accomplices and comrades to take part and further develop this investigation. Description and more information below.

The Metropolitan Factory: making a living as a creative worker
Short survey on creative labor here

Surviving as a cultural or artistic worker in the city has never been easy. Creative workers find themselves celebrated as engines of economic growth, economic recovery and urban revitalization even as the conditions for our continued survival becomes more precarious. How can you make a living today in such a situation? That is, how to hold together the demands of paying the rent and bills while managing all the tasks necessary to support one’s practice? How to manage the tensions between creating spaces for creativity and imagination while working through the constraints posed by economic conditions?

June 20, 2012 - 8:09am -- stevphen
Announcements
Culture

Artpolitik Site Launch

Inspired by the Institute for the Future of the Book, Minor Compositions is launching a digital form for the forthcoming book Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of Fragmentation by Neala Schleuning.

Over the next month the entirety of the draft manuscript will be posted here: http://artpolitik.digress.it.

Comments and discussions will be integrated into revisions of the book before it is printed later this year (which will, as with all other Minor Compositions titles, be available for free download).

June 9, 2012 - 4:03am -- stevphen
Announcements
Events

Occupy Research Collective Convergence: Activism & Research Ethics
June 30th London

10:00-17:00 Saturday June 30th
Pearson Building, University College London, Bloomsbury, London, WC1E 6BT (enter from Gower Street).
See here for directions.

• Are you researching Occupy or contemporary social movements?
• Are you involved in Occupy or other forms of activism?
• Are you interested in using research to take action towards creating other possible worlds?
• Are you keen on research which respects activism?

This one day convergence will focus on the ethics of researching within-and-beyond the Occupy movement. We would like this to be the beginning of an ongoing conversation about the ways in which research can complement, inform, challenge and present social movements and radical politics.

June 4, 2012 - 9:28am -- jim
Announcements
Independent Media

Insurgent Notes No. 6 Now On-Line

Issue No. 6 of the on-line journal is now up at Insurgent Notes.

Comment/critique welcome.

List of articles follows.
Editorial: In This Issue
Eurocrisis: Washington vs. Berlin, Raffaele Sciortino
Greek Crisis, Children of the Gallery
Wildcat Strikes in Vietnam, H.S.
Chilean Student Movement, Carlos Lagos P. and Jorge Budrovich S.
March 29 General Strike in Spain, C.V.
Jurassic Park in Paris: The Melenchon Phenomenon, Interview with Yves Coleman

Book Reviews:
Love and Capital, John Garvey
CLR James on Pan-Africanism, Matthew Quest
Marxism Without Marx, Gary Roth
African Awakenings, Ben Fogel

May 28, 2012 - 3:10pm -- stevphen
Announcements
Independent Media

CFP Affinities Challenging the rhetoric of non-State actors, political violence and ‘terrorism
Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action

Affinities, a journal of contemporary radical politics, is now accepting submissionproposals from individuals or collectives interested in contributing to a special edition focused on non-State actors, political violence and ‘terrorism.’ The purpose of this special edition of Affinities is to reengage critical anti-authoritarian scholarship with themes that challenge Statist attempts to control discourses around violence. Who is a terrorist?

What is terrorism? When does resistance become violence? How does one label direct action movements? This special issue seeks to create space for an evolving discourse beyond the ‘violence versus non-violence,’ debate. How can we move stagnant conversations about tactical efficacy, the ethics of non-violence, the strategy of economic sabotage and direct action forward?

May 4, 2012 - 8:05am -- jim
Announcements
Events

Report from France:
Recent Developments in the Class Struggle

Friday, May 11, 2012, 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM
The New School, Room 716, 6 East 16th Street, NYC

The speakers are militants of the Groupe d'Action pour la Recomposition de l'Autonomie Proletarienne (GARAP), based in Paris but with some members elsewhere in France. Founded recently, this small formation and its revolutionary perspective are primarily inspired by anti-statist and anti-authoritarian Marxism. Its members are blue, white-collar and unemployed workers, as well as students.

The group believes that the struggle of the proletariat in France is contained by the left and far-left parties (in the first case, the Stalinists and the Social Democrats and, in the second case, the Trotskyists)--the latter being well placed in institutions and especially at every level of the major trade-union federations. Only struggles that confront those forces of containment have the potential of confronting capital effectively.

April 12, 2012 - 8:04am -- stevphen
Announcements
Events

Digital Legacies of the Avant-Garde April 14/20 Paris-New York

The Digital Legacies of the Avant-Garde is a two-day international conference that examines the continuing influence of avant-garde concepts and practices on contemporary digital culture. Born from a partnership in transnational media between Eugene Lang College and the American University of Paris, the conference will be held in Paris on April 14 and in New York on April 20.

April 11, 2012 - 6:21pm -- jim
Announcements
Events

Sixth Annual New York City Anarchist Book Fair
Judson Church, Saturday, April 14, 2012

http://anarchistbookfair.net/

New York City, a center of anarchist life, culture, struggle, and ideas for 150 years, will host its 6th annual NYC Anarchist Book Fair, a one-day exposition of books, zines, pamphlets, art, film/video, and other cultural and very political productions of the anarchist scene worldwide, on April 14, 2012 at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan.

March 28, 2012 - 2:32pm -- jim
Announcements
Events

Colloquium -- Foucault/Deleuze: A Neo-Liberal Diagram

Start: 9 Mar 2012 - 10:00am
End: 9 Mar 2012 - 5:30pm
Timezone: Etc/GMT-5
Location:

Ryerson University, Rogers Communication Centre, room 202
Toronto, Canada

Foucault/Deleuze: A Neo-Liberal Diagram

Friday, March 9, 2012

Ryerson University, Rogers Communication Centre, room 202

This colloquium brings together some of the most respected and
promising scholars of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to discuss
how their work has served to inform a diagrammatic critique of
contemporary political economy, finance capital, and the possibilities
for progressive social change. The colloquium will investigate how
contemporary critics of neo-Liberalism (Stengers, Stiegler, Lazzarato,
Bifo, Esposito, Marrazi and others) have developed new theoretical
trajectories out of the seminal works and posthumously published
interviews, essays, and lectures of Foucault and Deleuze.

Organizer: Greg Elmer, gelmer@ryerson.ca, hosted by the Infoscape
Centre for the Study of Social Media, Ryerson Unviersity

March 28, 2012 - 4:49am -- Anonymous Comrade (not verified)
Announcements
Independent Media

Issue 1 of Lateral online now

Lateral is the publishing platform for the Cultural Studies Association (CSA). Its aims are to support, leverage, and organize the capacities of those affiliated with CSA to develop critical forms of publishing that are commensurate with innovative approaches to knowledge making, political intervention, and material forms of cultural expression. Lateral focuses on providing a place of experimentation in the range of material forms so that the knowing, feeling, sensibility ascribed to the cultural can find an elastic and sustainable outlet for expression. In short, Lateral is interested in recasting both the form and content of what cultural studies can be. Lateral is an online and open access journal published under the Creative Commons license. Lateral is organized in research threads; Issue 1 consists of four threads: Theory and Method, Mobilisations, Interventions and Cultural Policy, Universities in Question and Culture Industries. Patricia Ticineto Clough, Randy Martin and Bruce Burgett compose its curatorial board; design editor is Jamie “Skye” Bianco.