ephemera Volume 5:4 Inscribing Organized Resistance

Stephen Dunne, Eleni Karamali, and Stevphen Shukaitis

Thoughts, antagonisms, innovations, demonstrations, elaborations, expectations and refutations. This is all to say, field-notes, from an array of politically engaged, non-objectifying theoretical work projects. Behold, the current issue of ephemera! Foolish is s/he who would seek to encapsulate a supposedly complete or somehow representative spectrum of such concerns within this, or indeed any format. Foolish also are those who would hope to find herein a necessary ‘image of thought’ (Deleuze 1995). It is its conditions of impossibility that emphasize the necessity of a worthy task. A task guided by a certain futility then. Yet it is precisely continuation and openness that constitutes the materially valuable. "[T]he hypothesis understood as provocation (knowledge)" (Tronti-Panzieri 1962), not understood through itself, but as a relation to an other which destabilizes and recomposes and a self which is dispersed and paradoxically reformed. To formulate without hoping to formalize, to formulate the to-be-de-formed. Our task, attempted here through this medium.

The concern(s) at hand are the ways in which social research (re-) creates the distance between the researcher (as subject) and researched (as object), in so doing silencing the voices, needs, concerns, knowledges, and practices of the researched. Critical scholarship, by creating fixed and stable positions, becomes complicit within the very practices it seeks to avoid. To point this out is not to say that any critical scholarly endeavor is not worthwhile, destined to failure from the outset. It is to point out that ‘critical’ endeavors must take the paradox of their existence seriously if the claim towards criticality is not to be sneered at.

::Table of Contents::

Editorial / Introduction by the Issue Editors

::Articles::

Event Horizon – The Free Association

Treasonous Minds: Capital & Universities, the ideology of the intellectual and the desire for mutiny – Dave Eden, Australian National University

Introduction to Colectivo Situaciones – Nate Holdren and Sebastian Touza

Further Comments on Research Militancy. Footnotes on Procedures and (In)decisions – Colectivo Situaciones, Argentina

Grassrooting the Imaginary: Acting Within the Convergence - Paul Routledge, University of Glasglow

Sewing Stories, Knitting Knowledge and Acting Activism: Women’s Leadership, Learning and Critical Investigation Through Drama and Craft - Darlene Clover, University of Victoria

::Notes from the General Intellect::

Beyond Solidarity and Academic Freedom: A Conversation Between Luther Blissett and Karen Eliot

::Reviews::

Nietzsche in the Streets - Ruud Kaulingfreks, University of Humanistics

Gift, She Said - Valerie Fournier, University of Leicester

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