A User’s Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, art, education, protest, social movements, united kingdom
This guide is not a road map or instruction manual. It’s a match struck in the dark, a homemade multi-tool to help you carve out your own path through the ruins of the present, warmed by the stories and strategies of those who took Bertolt Brecht’s words to heart: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
It was written in a whirlwind of three days in December 2010, between the first and second days of action by UK students against the government cuts, and intended to reflect on the possibility of new creative forms of action in the current movements.
Produced by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, London, December 2010
This version coordinated by Minor Compositions, May 2011
ISBN 978-1-57027-218-9
62 pages
Anti-copyright, share and disseminate freely.
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Critical Studies in Peer Production, Nr. 1: Mass Peer Activism (2011)
Filed under journal | Tags: · activism, actor-network theory, commons, filesharing, internet, mass collaboration, networks, p2p, peer production, wikipedia
Critical Studies in Peer Production (CSPP) is a new open access, online journal. Through the analysis of the forms, operations, and contradictions of peer producing communities in contemporary capitalist society, the journal aims to open up new perspectives on the implications of peer production for social change.
Issue 1 is divided in three sections:
– Research papers by Andersson and O’Neil
– Debate papers by Söderberg, Tkacz and O’Neil
– Reports by Niesyto & Tkacz and Dobusch & Thorne
Editor: Mathieu O’Neil
Published by Oekonux, June 2011
Sections:
View online: Research: Mass peer activism (HTML articles)
View online: Debate: ANT and power (HTML articles)
View online: Reports (HTML articles)
Begüm Özden Firat, Aylin Kuryel (eds.): Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, and Possibilities (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, art, culture jamming, media activism, politics, situationists, social movements, surv, tactical media
This volume addresses contemporary activist practices that aim to interrupt and reorient politics as well as culture. The specific tactics analyzed here are diverse, ranging from culture jamming, sousveillance, media hoaxing, adbusting, subvertising, street art, to hacktivism, billboard liberation, and urban guerilla, to name but a few. Though indebted to the artistic and political movements of the past, this form of activism brings a novel dimension to public protest with its insistence on humor, playfulness, and confusion. This book attempts to grasp both the old and new aspects of contemporary activist practices, as well as their common characteristics and internal varieties. It attempts to open up space for the acknowledgement of the ways in which contemporary capitalism affects all our lives, and for the reflection on possible modes of struggling with it. It focuses on the possibilities that different activist tactics enable, the ways in which those may be innovative or destructive, as well as on their complications and dilemmas.
The encounter between the insights of political, social and critical theory on the one hand and activist visions and struggles on the other is urgent and appealing. The essays collected here all explore such a confrontational collaboration, testing its limits and productiveness, in theory as well as in practice. In a mutually beneficial relationship, theoretical concepts are rethought through activist practices, while those activist practices are developed with the help of the insights of critical theory. This volume brings scholars and activists together in the hope of establishing a productive dialogue between the theorizations of the intricacies of our times and the subversive practices that deal with them.
Publisher Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2011
Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race series, No 21
ISBN 9042029811, 9789042029811
261 pages
publisher (incl. contents)
google books
PDF (pages 1-8 missing)
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