Click through to view the actual interactive timeline…
Who owns Franklin St?
Tim has a map in this week’s Indy. The map shows who owns the properties on Franklin Street. Many of the properties are owned by out of town landowners, while the University continues buying up more land across Chapel Hill. Despite the University efforts to buy up everything, there are still quite a few vacant lots. Is another Franklin Street possible?
read the whole story here
happy labor day
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!
the wave cannot be arrested
The Anomalous Wave cannot be arrested! Let’s support the students against the repression of the italian governement!
Please sign and circulate the call in solidarity with the students arrested (add also your affiliation): http://www.PetitionOnline.com/wave/petition.html
At dawn this morning, in the framework of an investigation ordered by Torino’s Public Prosecutor office, Italian police made dozens of unwarranted house searches against students and activists. 21 of them are under arrest: 15 in prison, 6 under house-arrest.
At dawn this morning, in the framework of an investigation ordered by Torino’s Public Prosecutor office, Italian police made dozens of unwarranted house searches against students and activists. 21 of them are under arrest: 15 in prison, 6 under house-arrest.
This is the unjust response of the government and the Public Prosecutor Giancarlo Caselli to the mass demonstrations in Torino on 18-19 May against the G8. This is a clear suspension of any form of democratic right: the charges don’t justify remands after two months. Therefore, we are facing a direct attempt of intimidation against the Wave just a few days before the G8 in L’Aquila, a forum which clearly no longer has any democratic legitimacy now.
The answer of the Wave is instant. Immediately, students from all Italian cities have organized demonstrations, occupations, city blockades and meetings against the police’s heavy-handed operation. The slogan is one: freedom for all now! In the Wave there are no good or bad students: it’s one huge movement that expresses the main form of social opposition in this country in the last months.
We demand an immediate, clear and unequivocal statement by the university institutions against these arrests. Otherwise, deans and their offices will be under remand by the Wave. For this reason we have begun to occupy the dean’s offices of our universities and we’ll not stop until the last student is released.
Let’s generalize the Wave, generalize freedom! Freedom for all now!
Anomalous Wave
3Cs pizza party
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.
a letter in the N&O on the university in crisis
A 3Cs member has a letter to the editor in today’s News & Observer on the crisis in the university:
The controversy surrounding Mary Easley’s appointment is indicative of a much deeper problem in higher education today. Universities are spending increasingly more funds on administrative and managerial costs, while proportionally much less money is spent on teaching and learning, the supposed objectives of higher education.
At UNC-CH, for example, lecturers, often responsible for three courses a semester, receive less than $40,000 a year with little job security and few benefits, and graduate students, responsible for much of the teaching and direct interaction with undergraduates, receive less than $20,000. Class sizes are rising, students’ tuition is increasing and adjunct faculty are often forced to teach at multiple schools to make ends meet. Yet our universities continue to pay administrators hundreds of thousands of dollars despite the budget crisis.
This is not a problem that can be rectified by a handful of resignations, but rather a problem that requires systematic change in the way our universities operate. Universities must be run transparently and democratically by those who make them up: the students and faculty. As long as universities are run as businesses, controlled by politicians and the corporate elite to generate profit and prestige, we will continue to see these conflicts on our campuses.
See it in the N&O here
3Cs summer plans
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 goes to the beach
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).
Audio from Situaciones Workshop
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.
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
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!
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