It’s 3Cs (unofficial) 4 year anniversary!

4 years ago, we conducted a ‘stationary drift‘ investigating labor on our university campus. that Labor Day, students & faculty worked as normal, while the ‘real workers’ had the day off.

our drifts led us to explore the other sites of knowledge work in the ‘Triangle‘ and back to UNC.

4 years later, putting the finishing touches on a new disorientation guide, many of the same questions are still relevant. Who works on campus? Where? Why are some forms of labor acknowledged while others are not? Where do we find precarious labor on campus?

Today, the precarity of our own situations is ever more apparent, as graduate students, teaching assistants, freelance cartographers, parents, immigrants… In a state where workers are denied the right to collectively bargain, precarity hits twice as hard.

While it may seem like not that much has changed in 4 years, we are excited by a new wave of university struggles, deepened critical thought on the nature of the university, and a growing number of examples of students taking the university into their own hands. And we continue to be inspired by a history of struggle on our own campus.

so happy labor day to all and thanks to all and please keep waiting patiently for the next disorientation guide!

Pizza parties are a key part of building any radical collective. From Colectivo Situaciones, to the Non-Stop Liberal Arts Institute, to the Community Economies Collective.

Pizza parties are about more than just having fun together and recognizing that we think/work better when we are well-fed. They are a conscious attempt to establish an ethics of care – to support and care for one another and to create alternatives through our own practices.

3Cs is busy working on new projects this summer.
We’re traveling between Chapel Hill, NY, the West Coast and Buenos Aires.
Check out our blog to see what we’re up to and to get in touch!

3Cs is presenting at the Reworking the University Conference
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Friday, Apr. 24, 1:15-2:30pm
http://www.reworkingtheu.org/

Whose University is this?
A Teach-In on the Budget Cuts
Wednesday, April 15 at 7pm
UNC Student Union Room 3413

Continue reading →

The Common and the Forms of the Commune – Alternative Social Imaginaries Symposium
At Duke University, Durham, NC

Continue reading →

Craig and Liz’s first AAG presentation was part of a series of sessions on “Anarchism, Autonomia, and the Spatiality of Revolutionary Politics and Theory”.

Our paper focused on mapping as militant investigation. Here’s our abstract:

Since its founding in 2004, the Counter Cartographies Collective at UNC-Chapel Hill has used different forms of mapping to plot, understand, and prompt alternative ways of seeing and producing spaces and knowledges in the NC Research Triangle Area. This paper lays out the theoretical foundations of the collective and highlights a series of cases that were instructive to the direction of the group. The cartographic intervention we propose constructs mappings in ways that render, through sight, action and communication, a multiplicity of alternative worlds. These ideas stem from the ‘new cartography’ of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, as well as recent cases of activist-mapping in Europe and the United States. Among others, we draw on the work of Precarias a la Deriva in Spain, Bureau d’Etudes in France, Colectivo Situaciones in Argentina – all groups consciously challenging the boundaries between academic research and political action, through their research methods and the products they produce. In our work, we aim to employ miltiant research methodologies that have ranged from a version of the derive to direct action or interventions. In the past four years, the collective worked on a number of different mapping projects, including the “disOrientations” map/guide to UNC-Chapel Hill and investigations of the spaces and organization of knowledge production at Research Triangle Park and UNC-Chapel Hill.

Other presentators discussed their research on anarchist movements/groups, autonomous experiences within/around the university (like the New School occupation!), and anarchist/autonomist theory in general and how it might be applied to geography.

It is exciting to see geographers engaging these concepts and we hope this can become part of a larger conversation about autonomy in the university.

Demanding transparency and community accountability, members of 3Cs joined 40-50 other students, faculty and staff of UNC as we marched on the Board of Trustees meeting Thursday morning, March 26. A truly transnational rally — drawing chants and slogans from both Thatcherite era struggles (“They say cut back, we say fight back!”), and the current anomalous wave movement (“We won’t pay for your crisis” was the lead banner). Photos below:

Marc Bousquet was recently in town to give the keynote address at the NC AAUP conference. 3Cs had the chane to chance to chat with Marc a bit before his talk. Unfortunately we don’t have audio of the conversation but here are some of the key themes of the conversation:

• How to research the university – there’s no clear answer except for hard work, patience and some creative thinking (and remember – somethings people give you information if you just ask politely!)
• The university is leading the way for the development of new corporate organization and management methods (meaning the university is not just following the corporate model but creating it!)
• Exciting organizing going on around the country by grad students and contingent faculty, through unions and organizations that act like unions, to demand recognition of their status of workers and for increased rights and benefits as workers (hopefully this will be the topic of a longer post at some point)
• Undergrads are workers too – Marc tends to focus on work-study programs which are not as big at UNC as some other schools, but we can think of many ways that undergrads are workers. The point is: undergrads are not only training to become workers but are already workers and that the part-time, flexible (precarious) labor of undergrads (I think this can be expanded across the university community) is a central part of the economy and highly exploited by capital.
• Students produce value for the university even in their free time, especially through the branding of the university, – whenever we wear university apparel, hold events for charity, win sports events, or even protest, anything to increase the university’s publicity and popularity.

The good news of all this is that students have enormous amount of power, especially if we recognize our positions as workers. In his address to the AAUP, Marc discussed student labor more, along with the trend toward an ever more contingent teaching staff. You can read more of Marc’s work on his blog