Nishant Shah, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Sumandro Chattapadhyay (eds.): Digital Activism in Asia (2015)

“The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn. From flash-mobs in Taiwan to feminist mobilisations in India, from hybrid media strategies of Syrian activists to cultural protests in Thailand, we see the emergence of political acts that transform the citizen from being a beneficiary of change to becoming an agent of change. In co-shaping these changes, what the digital shall be used for, and what its consequences will be, are both up for speculation and negotiation.

Digital Activism in Asia marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being refracted through the ICT4D logic, or the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself, but shaped by multiplicity, unevenness, and urgencies of digital sites and users in Asia.

This reader crowd-sources critical tools, concepts, analyses, and annotations, self-identified by a network of change makers in Asia as important in their own practices within their own contexts.”

Publisher meson press, Lüneburg, July 2015
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 9783957960511
273 pages

Publisher

PDF (9 MB, updated 2015-8-13)

Keller Easterling: Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (2014)

“Extrastatecraft controls everyday life in the city: it’s the key to power – and resistance – in the twenty-first century.

Infrastructure is not only the underground pipes and cables controlling our cities. It also determines the hidden rules that structure the spaces all around us – free trade zones, smart cities, suburbs, and shopping malls. Extrastatecraft charts the emergent new powers controlling this space and shows how they extend beyond the reach of government.

Keller Easterling explores areas of infrastructure with the greatest impact on our world – examining everything from standards for the thinness of credit cards to the urbanism of mobile telephony, the world’s largest shared platform, to the “free zone,” the most virulent new world city paradigm. In conclusion, she proposes some unexpected techniques for resisting power in the modern world.”

Publisher Verso, 2014
ISBN 1781685878, 9781781685877
252 pages

Project website

Reviews: Self (AR 2014), Wark (2014), Garrett (Antipode 2015), Chan (Art Papers 2015), Owens (Icon 2015), Coggan (Oculus 2015), Harwood (Artforum 2015), Barber (CAA 2018).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (added on 2019-7-8)
EPUB, EPUB (3 MB, updated on 2019-7-8)

thresholds, 41: Revolution! (2013)

“What actions are prompted by revolution in the space of the city? Which publics take part in this struggle, and who are the agents that mobilize it? And after a revolution has subsided, how is it remembered, represented and memorialized? thresholds 41: REVOLUTION! turns to the history, design, and cultural production of the public realm as a site of dissensus. Rather than focusing on a specific revolutionary time and place, we have strived to include different periods and regions, organizing contributions in terms of the relations they establish between sites, actors, and contexts. In the essays and designs featured in these pages, political struggle often shifts established roles—agitators create new types of public space, designers become activists and fundraisers, individual figures fade in favor of collectives or groups, and actions are best remembered through misrepresentation. How do we write revolution, who writes it and for whom? And, in turn, how does urban conflict inform writing, design, and cultural production at large? Our authors, designers, and artists open up revolution as subject, as event, and as historiographical problem—a problem complicated by discrete actions, multiple publics, critical practices, and the politics of display and remembrance.”

Contributors: David Gissen, Robin Adèle Greeley, Britt Eversole, Arindam Dutta, Diane E. Davis and Prassana Raman, Mark Jarzombek, Thérèse F. Tierney, Kenneth Ip, Nasser Rabbat, Reinhold Martin, Tunney Lee and Lawrence Vale, Andrés Jaque Architects + Office for Political Innovation, Santiago Cirugeda + Recetas Urbanas, Nomeda Urbonas and Gediminas Urbonas, The Yes Men, Ateya Khorakiwala, Simone Brott, Andrés Estefane, Kelly Presutti, Mechtild Widrich, Montenegro Airways

Edited by Ana María León
Publisher SA+P Press / MIT Department of Architecture, Cambridge, MA, Spring 2013
Open Access
ISSN 1091-711X
ISBN 9780983508267
212 pages

Journal website

PDF (13 MB)