Category: Communiqués

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Communiqués

Creative Militancy, Militant Creativity and the New British Student Movement

By Sarah Amsler, Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University (Birmingham, UK), Posted: December 10, 2010 10:55 AM

Under what might now need to be termed comparatively normal circumstances, I have often agonised over helping my students understand the practical significance of critical theory. They ask, but what can one actually do with Herbert Marcuse today? In a scheduled class, it all feels so remote.

Now I can say, look: his work is a defense against injustice. Or in the more eloquent words of the London Book Bloc, inspired by its Italian counterpart, “books are our tools — we teach with them, we learn with them, we play with them, we create with them, we make love with them and, sometimes, we must fight with them.” In today’s fourth, most passionate and most ungoverned national demonstration against the British government’s wholesale privatization of higher education, books-as-shields replaced pens-as-swords. Creative militancy meets militant creativity, and this may be one of the most defining characteristics of the emerging student movement.

Read the rest at Huffington Post

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Communiqués

It Gets Worse…

By Jack Halberstam on November 20, 2010

At bullybloggers, the blogging site that Lisa Duggan, Jose Munoz and Tavia Nyong’o and I sometimes call our internet home, we believe in bullies. No, not those kinds of bullies, not Tennessee Williams’ no-necked monsters, the brutish boys who make it their business to keep everyone else in line. We believe in a queer breed of bullies, bullies who bash back.  In actual fact, lots of queer girls (and I speak from experience) do begin their lives as bullying types as they fight their way out of the restrictions of femininity. Some find queerness to be a refuge from the ravages of teenage heterosexuality. And their queerness, especially if it comes with certain forms of social rejection from boys, while sometimes putting them in the way of violence, also shelters them from many of the treacherous dangers of teenage girlhood – teen pregnancy, recruitment to the role of feminine dependent, plummeting sense of self-worth, eating disorders and so on. While being a lesbian is no silver bullet, and while lots of lesbians also have body image issues and suffer through the indignity of being seen as essentially unattractive, there are advantages and liabilities to checking out of toxic heterosexual sociality….

Read the rest at Social Text / Periscope

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Communiqués

Puerto Rico: Tense Prelude to the Student Strike

From GlobalVoicesOnline.org:

A 48-hour blockade organized by students from the state-run University of Puerto Rico in protest against a proposed $800 annual fee got off to a tense and violent start early Tuesday morning, as students raising barricades around the Río Piedras campus clashed with private security guards hired by the administration.

The day began as students, many of them masked in order to protect their identities, were photographed by the local press [es] as they built and patrolled their barricades in defiance of the administration’s efforts to undermine the protests. Such administrative measures included taking down several University gates [es] around the main campus in Río Piedras early Monday morning, allegedly as a way of guaranteeing entrance to those students, teachers, and employees who showed up for classes and work; and hiring the private security firm Capitol Security, whose guards have proven to be inexperienced and volatile [es] during the first 24 hour cycle of events.

Violent acts were reported and decried by both students and Capitol Security, with one university student allegedly having been beaten by a team of twelve security guards, and several guards allegedly suffering injuries in skirmishes with students. Students and security guards have since declared a truce, according to news reports [es]. Vandalism to school property has also been reported.  Radio Huelga, a ‘pirate’ radio station and website set up by university students during the two-month long strike last semester was able to capture video of the student beating as it took place.

Read more at GlobalVoicesOnline.org


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Communiqués

Occupying Editor 03: Micha Cardenas

Micha Cárdenas is an artist/theorist whose transreal work mixes physical and networked spaces in order to explore emerging forms of queer relationality, biopolitics and DIY horizontal knowledge production. She is a lecturer in the Visual Arts department and Critical Gender Studies program at UCSD. She is an artist/researcher with UCSD Medical Education and the b.a.n.g. lab at Calit2. Her recent publications include “I am Transreal”, in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation from Seal Press, Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, with Barbara Fornssler, from Atropos Press and “Becoming Dragon: A Transversal Technology Study” in Code Drift from CTheory. Her collaboration with Elle Mehrmand, “Mixed Relations,” was the recipient of the UCIRA Emerging Fields Award for 2009. She has exhibited and performed in biennials, museums and galleries in cities around the world including Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, New York, San Francisco, Montreal, Egypt, Ecuador, Spain, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Dublin, Ireland and many other places. Her work has been written about in publications including Art21, the Associated Press, the LA Times, CNN, BBC World, Wired and Rolling Stone Italy.

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Communiqués

OCCUPY EVERYTHING (NOW)

We’ve built, seemingly by vulgar and beautiful chance, a party. The occupation. The mob. A mobile force. A machine. This is to say many of us are you, and likely many of you are us. We are all bound together merely by inhabiting the same arena. But we are also adventurists. – Anticapital Projects

Useful dreams are only dreamt in struggle.- Anonymous


OCCUPY EVERYTHING calls on all cultural workers, artists, filmmakers, film schools, media labs, art schools and universities–private and public–to join the struggle for access to higher education and the humanities NOW.

NOW is the time to claim/reclaim our commons and demonstrate solidarity with  occupations in Southern California and internationally such as those at Goldmiths and Slade. In Southern California, this call extends to those at CalArts, OTIS, USC, Art Center, Art Institutes, and those in art, film and media departments across the  California (UC/CSU/Community Colleges) higher education system.

As cultural workers located both inside and outside universities we identify direct action and occupations as acts of creation and protest. We feel the daily occupation of our spaces by the forces of capital and capitalist logic. To our peers, students, friends: administration offices and buildings belong to you; these are your studios – this is your work. Remaking your department, art school, film school and the world starts NOW.

From University buildings to train stations to banks to political party headquarters, a new territory is being mapped out at the very moment it is being created.

OCCUPY EVERYTHING.


Useful dreams are only dreamt in struggle.