Time: 5pm-7pm
Venue: Lock Keeper’s Cottage, QMUL, London E14NS - More info
Hosted by Arianna Bove (Business and Management-Queen Mary, University of London)

Editors: Paula Chakravartty (University of Massachusetts – Amherst  &  Denise Ferreira da Silva (Queen Mary, University of London)

The idea for the residential came from participants of the participants in the Black, British,Feminist Workshop, hosted by the Centre for Caribbean Studies (Goldsmiths, University of London), on 22 October 2012.

Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva is a founding member.

Public Lecture with Cedric Robinson

Cedric Robinson is the author of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership and Black Movements in America. He is also the author of numerous articles on US, African and Caribbean political thought; Western social theory, film and the press. His most recent work includesThe Anthropology of Marxism, a monograph study of the historical and discursive antecedents of Marxism, and research into anti-facism in Africa and the African Diaspora in the 1920s and 1930s.

Co-organised and sponsored by: Centre for Ethics and Politics (Queen Mary, University of London) Centre for Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths, University of London

We understand language to be a politically and socially charged instrument of power, which we aim to teach critically and thoughtfully according to the specificity of our classes. Our English classes are organized to create a space where sex work as work can be openly talked about and does not have to be concealed or hidden. Through providing such a space we aim to challenge the stigma and isolation attached to our profession while at the same time we guarantee confidentiality and respect for those involved.

In addition to providing free English classes to migrant sex workers, we support critical interventions around issues of migration, race, gender, sexuality and labour, we participate in feminist and anti-racist campaigns and we are active in the struggle for the rights of sex workers in London, the UK and globally.

www.xtalkproject.net

Over the past forty years the ideas and practices of Guy Debord and the Situationist International have become a constant reference point for those involved in radical politics, the arts, and cultural theory. Despite this ubiquity Debord’s work has been reduced to a palatable cliché rather than being used as a tool for crafting an ongoing practice of critique and engagement. Come on join us to celebrate the release of Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s new book, Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy, as we excavate this potential from the historical wreckage.

Drawing on the work of Guy Debord, Gilman-Opalsky argues that the theory of practice and practice of theory are superseded by upheavals that do the work of philosophy. Spectacular Capitalism makes the case not only for a new philosophy of praxis, but for praxis itself as the delivery mechanism for philosophy – for the field of human action, of contestation and conflict, to raise directly the most irresistible questions about the truth and morality of the existing state of affairs.

Commentary and response from Gavin Grindon.

“Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s Spectacular Capitalism rescues Situationist theory and praxis from merely antiquarian and art-historical commentary and puts it in dialogue with the project of a radical philosophy for leaving the 21st century.” – McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory

Organised by Minor Compositions and the Centre for Ethics and Politics

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Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy

Richard Gilman-Opalsky

To be released June 2011

ISBN 978-1-57027-228-8

Bio: Richard Gilman-Opalsky is Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He is the author of Unbounded Publics: Transgressive Public Spheres, Zapatismo, and Political Theory (Lexington Books, 2008), as well as numerous articles.

Released by Minor Compositions, London / New York / Port Watson

Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.

Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia

www.minorcompositions.info |info@minorcompositions.info

Time: 4:00 – 6:30 pm

Venue: Room 4.04/08, Francis Bancroft Building, Queen Mary University of London

Society is increasing fragmenting, primarily as a result of digitalisation – and with serious consequences, including for the production of public opinion. Today, the challenge for information elites and the holders of power within the public sphere lies in processing vast amounts of information and keeping up with the ever-increasing speed with which it circulates. Meanwhile, there are large sections of society completely excluded from the formation of public opinion. This is a phenomenon that contemporary theories of the public attempt to grasp and articulate. As someone who works in the industry, Imran Ayata will outline these developments and use different case studies to illustrate how, within these complex communication webs, political institutions and corporations use strategic communication and campaigning to further their interests and secure understanding and acceptance. The focus of his talk will be on campaigns in Germany that have used participation and dialogue to address socially and politically contested issues. He asks: is this the depoliticisation of political conflict or the politicisation of marketing? Imran Ayata is a Managing Partner of A&B One, German ‘Agency of the Year’.

This seminar is co-hosted by the School of Business and Management departmental seminar series and the Centre for Ethics and Politics. It is free and open to all.

Contact: e.dowling@qmul.ac.uk

Map and directions: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/about/howtofindus/mileend/

The encounters aim to provide an initial platform to reflect on current practices, establish networks and create shared concept-tools that can be used in different situations. We will begin from our questions, discomforts and curiosities: What dispositives feed the potential of collective practices? What makes self organisation different from self management? How do we inhabit, modulate and speak about groups? How do we share tasks, pass on knowledges, reach out or support each other through this crisis?

The guests we have invited will offer some points of departure for us to take elsewhere. The purpose is to increase our awareness of the modalities
through which we become, act, and affect one another in common. As an experimental beginning, we wanted to focus each of the first set of
encounters around four broad themes. We hope that this project may continue and transform itself based on the inputs and desires of all those involved.

As part of the project, recordings, materials and other resources will be made available online here: http://self-org.blogspot.com/
For enquiries and suggestions, send an email to: selforganising@gmail.com
All sessions are free and open to the public to participate.

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Programme

/Friday March 4th
Self-organization and group dynamics
Internal ecologies, openness and closure, affects and ghosts, habits and artifices, scale and scope.

David Vercauteren (Micropolitiques.net, Brussels)
http://micropolitiques.collectifs.net/
Valeria Graziano (QMUL, London)
Venue: Lock Keepers Cottage, QMUL, London E14NS no. 17 on the map
Time: 5pm-7pm

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/Friday April 1st
Self-organization and the economy
From cooperatives to social enterprises, between state funding, self funding, alternative economies and charity dependence. Authorship,
redistribution of resource, production of value and co-production.

Sion Wellens (Calverts Coop, London)
http://www.calverts.coop/
Toni Prug (QMUL, London)
Marcel Mars (Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht)
http://kiberkomunist.posterous.com/41479850
Matt Zimmerman (Ubuntu, London)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Zimmerman_%28technologist%29
Venue: Lock Keepers Cottage, QMUL, London E14NS no. 17 on the map
Time: 5pm-7pm

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/Friday May 6th
Self-organization and community
External dynamics, political discourse and outreach. The role of the organizer when working with constituencies. Issues of politicization,
outreach, involvment, negotiation.

Doina Petrescu (Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée, Paris)
http://www.urbantactics.org/
Jane Wills (QMUL, London)
http://www.citizensuk.org/campaigns/living-wage-campaign/
Venue: Lock Keepers Cottage, QMUL, London E14NS no. 17 on the map
Time: 5pm-7pm

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/ Friday May 27th
Self-organization, pedagogy and reproduction

Janna Graham (Ultrared, London)
http://www.ultrared.org/directory.html
Vedrana Bibic (The Occupation Cookbook, Plenum delegate; Faculty of
Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb)
http://slobodnifilozofski.org/?p=1901
Arianna Bove (QMUL, London)
Venue: Lock Keepers Cottage, QMUL, London E14NS no. 17 on the map
Time: 5pm-7pm

Many thanks to Ade Alele for his logistical support

Call for Papers:
How do we approach the emergence of various media forms? From radio to the mobile phone, from tamashas to Bollywood, different affects and novel perceptions resonate with new media ecologies. These media processes are covered over by a form of criticism that takes the actual media form for history itself. We are interested in returning criticism to the nonlinear field of potentiality from which these actual media forms emerge. The dominance of Hindi-Urdu cinema in South Asian media studies has shaped popular cultural criticism, to the point of often occluding this history.

Thus, Hindi-Urdu cinema has been discussed for the most part in three ways:
1) as national cinema
2) as a global phenomenon
3) as the “purple pleasures of the moment”

Yet scant attention has been paid to the intensive processes of emergent filmic forms that take the critical gaze beyond cinema: from Hindi-Urdu cinema’s “going global” to its intermedial forms of habituations, South Asian film in its various moments of media assemblage gives birth to new processes, new meanings, new perceptions, new interfaces. These processes of intermedial formations and their nonlinear history is the focus of this special issue of South Asian Popular culture.

Our sense is that the transformation of media (for example: the Bombay film apparatus becoming integrated with global Hollywood) doesn’t follow a straightforward trajectory–some unbroken line from colonial to national to global. Rather, rigorous attention to the intensive processes of intermedia helps us in diagramming the phase spaces and transitions of new media forms throughout history (its field of potentiality and its actual forms). This is an intervention in the monumentalizing of linear media history in South Asia. Foregrounding media’s nonlinear history shows that there were complex and unresolved negotiations between the national, the global, and the local. Historicizing these heterogeneous articulations helps in de-sedimenting this narrative, and also in pragmatically situating our present moment of transnational intermedia.

Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:
· Subaltern cinemas and their legacies
· Regional language cinemas displacing the dominance of Bollywood
· Interdisciplinary approaches to media history
· Non-linear dynamics and media emergence
· Fandom and the active audience
· Old and new circuits of film music
· New linguistic codes in media delivery
· Potentializing gender in media forms
· Affective dispositions in media aesthetics
· Capital, gradient flows, and media history
· Sexuality and sensation in mutating bodies and morphing media

Please send abstracts to Dr. Priya Jha at priya_jha@redlands.edu and Dr. Amit S. Rai at a.rai@qmul.ac.uk .

Link to journal: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rsap