Author Archives: countercartographies

3Cs goes to the beach

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3Cs recently returned from a week long retreat at North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Besides enjoying the beach and the (slightly cold) water and eating delicious food, we started work on our new project – a sequel to the disOrientation Guide looking at the university and the cris(is/es). Themes we plan to focus on when looking at the university include: immigration, housing, labor, organizational transformations, and struggles for autonomy. Leave comments if you have thoughts on our new projects or if you’re interested in working with us (or email: countercartographies(at)gmail.com).

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Audio from Situaciones Workshop

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The complete audio from the Apr 27-28 Workshop with Colectivo Situaciones is now up!

Conocimiento en Movimiento: Challenges and Practices of Activist Research in Times/Spaces of Crisis

Colectivo Situaciones defines itself as a militant research collective. The group emerged from Argentina’s radical student milieu in the mid 1990s and, since then, have developed a long track record of intervention in Argentine social movements. Their books are dialogues with the unemployed workers movement, explorations of the question of power and tactics of struggle, and conversations about how to think about revolution today.

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The two-day workshop was divided into 3 parts:

Part I: The Geneologies and Experiences of Colectivo Situaciones

Part II: Activist Research at a Crossroads
with 3cs, El Kilombo, and Edu-Factory

Part III: New Forms of Politics: Beyond the Left-Right Spectrum
with Michael Hardt and Walter Mignolo

Anomalous Wave against the G8 University Summit

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news from our friends in Italy:

The Anomalous Wave has invaded the streets, and blocked the cities again, and again has conflicted on the link education-work, starting from the protests against the unsustainable and illegitimate G8 University Summit. In Turin, ten thousands students, moving from the Block G8 Building,decided to march across the centre, sanctioning banks and temporary employment agency, crying again that “We won’t pay for your crisis”. The whole Wave decided to break into the red zone, not to accept prohibitions to the freedom of movement, and to try to reach the venue of the illegitimate summit of the chancellors’ baronial lobby: we protected the demonstration from the charges and we denounce the massive and excessive use of tear gas thrown at eye level against students. Yet another Wave that subverts the G8 University Summit, once again we demonstrate our dissent, day after day in every faculty we build up the autonomous university by the “self reform”, we build up the reappropriation of income and the autonomous production of knowledge!
Continue reading →

audio from edu-factory panel!

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On February 24, 3Cs hosted a panel discussion at UNC on the theme of “We Won’t Pay for Your Crisis!”

We’ve finally got the audio from that event edited and posted. Click through each speaker’s name to download an mp3 of their talk, or click here for the group Q&A session. Apologies for the poor audio quality…

Speakers, and their talks, were:

  • Anna Curcio: postdoctoral associate, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, founder member of the edu-factory collective and co-editor of Global University. Hierarchies and Self-education in the Knowledge Market (Autonomedia forthcoming).
  • Brett Neilson: associate professor in social and cultural analysis, University of Western Sydney, founder member of the edu-factory collective and co-editor of Global University. Hierarchies and Self-education in the Knowledge Market (Autonomedia forthcoming)
  • Michael Palm: assistant professor of communications, UNC-CH, co-editor of The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace, and organizer of the 2005 NYU graduate employees strike.

Here’s how the original flier described the event:

Is the current financial crisis affecting the university? University of Arizona is apparently over the brink, Princeton is bankrupt, and university job offers are being erased in the NY area. Is the crisis accentuating a threatening tendency in higher education towards a university model as “post-fordist knowledge factory + corporate research laboratory”, as some are claiming? At the same time, is there a better place to be than a university in times of crisis? how can we defend that space? what opportunities might this crisis open?


Join us to hear how others have been organizing in and around the university. How people have blasted open the narrow vision of the university as an ivory tower to demand rights to a just livelihood and access to education. Speakers from New York, Sydney-Australia and Rome-Italy will join us to discuss new ways that students, faculty and employees are taking the university to task for what it is- a tower of power not ivory.

April 27-28: Workshop with Colectivo Situaciones

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Conocimiento en Movimiento: Challenges and Practices of Activist Research in Times/Spaces of Crisis
A Workshop in Three Parts with Colectivo Situaciones from Buenos Aires
Monday, April 27, 3:00- 6:30 pm and Tuesday, April 28, 3:00-7:00
Global Education Center, Fourth Floor, UNC-CH

Part I: Monday, Apr. 27 3:00-4:30 pm
Genealogies of activist research: The experience of Colectivo Situaciones

Part II: Monday, Apr. 27 4:45-6:30 pm
Activist Research at a Crossroads
Colectivo Situaciones with El Kilombo, Edu-Factory/Uninomade, Counter Cartographies Collective, Notes from Nowhere, and others

Part III: Tuesday, Apr. 28 3:00-7:00pm
The forms of politics: Beyond the Right-Left spectrum
Colectivo Situaciones with Michael Hardt, Walter Mignolo, Eunice Sahle, Graeme Chesters, Yamila Gutiérrez Callisaya, and others

For more information and to RSVP please contact:
socialmovements@gmail.com

Click here for readings

Colectivo Situaciones (www.situaciones.org) defines itself as a militant research collective. The group emerged from Argentina’s radical student milieu in the mid 1990s and, since then, have developed a long track record of intervention in Argentine social movements. Their books are dialogues with the unemployed workers movement, explorations of the question of power and tactics of struggle, and conversations about how to think about revolution today.
Their radical views pertain to practice as much as theory. They are genuinely a collective and all of their projects are collectively produced.

In a note printed on the back of many of their books, they describe their work as follows:

[We] intend to offer an internal reading of struggles, a phenomenology (a genealogy), not an “objective” description. It is only in this way that thought assumes a creative, affirmative function, and stops being a mere reproduction of the present. And only in this fidelity with the immanence of thought is it a real, dynamic contribution, which is totally contrary to a project or scheme that pigeonholes and overwhelms practice.

 

SDS, Tancredo, Free Speech and Police Violence

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The protests at Tom Tancredo’s speech earlier this week have been getting quit a bit of attention. The “objective” media (including our wonderful DTH) has conveniently forgotten to talk to anyone besides the police and UNC administration.

Read the statement from SDS here
Sign a petition to support the students from SDS here

The use of violence by the police force, including the use of pepper spray and tasers (potentially deadly weapons), should be a cause of concern for everyone on this campus. There needs to be an immediate investigation into the police’s actions and steps taken to ensure students’ safety.

The violent disruption of this protest and the targeting of SDS by the administration and the press is yet another step to delegitimize protest and political action on this campus. Too often, the only speech protected on campus is that of political conservatives (and usually white males) (i.e. people who get heard all the time anyway), while already marginalized voices are not only not listened to, but are violently repressed. Despite his friendly demeanor, Chancellor Thorp seems to be going even further than his predecessor to silence dissent on campus (on top of his response to these events look at his other responses to protests and the decision to press charges against those arrested in the DSP sit-in last spring). We must take steps to maintain students’ rights on this campus – rights to organize, to assemble, and to free speech (for everyone in the campus community – including SDS).

-lmd