Category: political

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Reblog> Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds

This looks interesting, via Nicholas Crane :

Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds

As part of an infrastructure for the construction of what Mark Purcell recently called ‘Joyful Geography,’ the editors of the Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds Book Series (with University of Minnesota Press) are soliciting book proposals. The recent Making Other Worlds Possible (2015) indicates a direction for the series. I cut and paste Kevin St. Martin’s announcement of the series below.

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Diverse Economies and Liveable Worlds Book Series 

University of Minnesota Press

The Diverse Economies and Liveable Worlds Book Series offers a space where the theoretical and political conversations opened up by an anti-capitalocentric vision of economy can take place. The core concerns of this series are diverse economies as both a mode of inquiry and as actually existing, potential, and transformative economies. The series is explicitly focused on undoing our understanding of capitalism as a conceptual container. Thinking outside this container is what allows us to veer from the singularity, inequities, and degradations associated with ‘capitalism’. The Diverse Economies research program initiated by J.K. Gibson-Graham has carved out a new intellectual territory for interrogating and performing ‘more than capitalist’ worlds that is attracting many scholars. At the same time, on the ground, a plethora of movements are forging forms of post-capitalist politics that imagine and enact liveable worlds in which economies are refocused on meeting the needs of people and the planet. The series will attract established and emerging scholars who are pushing at the boundaries of thinking about how we represent and enact ‘the economy’, how we recognize and theorize economic diversity, and what a post-capitalist politics here and now might be.

The editors of this Book Series are J.K. Gibson-Graham k.gibson[at]westernsydney.edu.au, Maliha Safri msafri[at]drew.edu , Kevin St. Martin kstmarti[at]rci.rutgers.edu, and Stephen Healy stephen.healy[at]gmail.com.

We welcome book proposals from a wide range of fields including Architecture and Design, Anthropology, Assemblage and More than Human Studies, Business and Organization Management, Communications and Media, Economics:, Environmental Humanities, Geography, Philosophy, Political Science, Regional Planning, Sociology and Women’s Studies.

For more information please contact the Series Editors.

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“The dictatorship of data” (on BBC R4)

Just caught up with a programme aired on BBC Radio 4 last week called “The Dictatorship of Data“, presented by their Security Correspondent Gordon Corera. The role of the presenter certainly inflects the tone of the programme. It focuses on the growth in the collection of data, as the wholesale capture of data exhausts and meta-data from our devices and public platforms, and thus how that collection and then aggregation both allows and then presents problems for forms of surveillance.

It is an interesting programme insofar as it offers a general introduction to several key issues. The discussion of the geopolitical responses to the uses of social media platforms and how Russia in particular wants to capture some of that capability (particularly in relation to SORM) is good, and it mostly draws on the authors of a book that sounds good: “Red Web“. Likewise, there’s some entertaining and perhaps disquieting discussion of ‘The Hacking Team‘, purveyors of malware to governments. Again, this is understandably figured in geopolitical terms.

However, I’d say it is slightly wide of the mark in terms of the discussion offered of the prospects of social media enabling some kind of authoritarianism. The way it is discussed takes as it’s assumption that people are faithfully reporting their actual opinions, ‘real’ events and so on and that they are individuals (and not bots) – as though social media are some kind of unproblematic ‘social sensing platform’. Now, some will argue that there is a way to somehow ‘solve’ the ‘biasing’ of the sample represented by a given social media platform’s population and I’m no statistician so… meh. I remain skeptical that any kinds of claim about ‘representivity‘ are particularly meaningful.

I think those who want a more nuanced viewpoint on some of these issues probably ought to checkout Louise Amoore‘s The Politics of Possibility and her papers following on from this, likewise it’s worth checking out both David Murakami Wood and Francisco Klauser‘s work on surveillance too (of course, there’s more – but you have access to a search engine 😉 ).

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Does critical geography need a shock to thought? On Purcell’s ‘joyful geography’

Over on his blog Path to the Possible Mark Purcell has written a thoughtful and interesting piece diagnosing a slip into a kind of cynicism, or perhaps a rut in ‘critical’ thinking in geography, that the predominant disposition of criticality in ‘critical geography’ is of being against– :  “against colonialism, against capitalism, against racism, etc.”.

Purcell argues that a negative consensus of what constitutes ‘criticality’ has developed that has created an orthodoxy of negation:

“I worry that we have become inordinately attached to singing in this key, that we have become unable to do anything other than cancel what we oppose.”

Indeed, this echoes a criticism of the over-coding of the various readings of what one might mean by ‘neo-liberalism’ by James Ferguson in Antipode that, as Clive Barnett summarises: “identifies a standard style of critique as denunciation of exploitation, inequality and oppression” but that can also be rather limited.

In this way we might understand such an orthodoxy of a perpetuation of an adaption to the contemporary milieu, in the form of a negation of its conditions (such as, for example, labelling everything ‘neoliberalism’) rather than an adoption and then rethinking the practices/processes of the conditions that produce it [I’m riffing on Stiegler’s distinction between adaption (as a tendency towards dis-individuation) and adoption (as a tendency towards co-individuation)]. This ‘orthodoxy of negation’ (as I have chosen to call it) can be characterised as a kind of entropy, a slip from proactive thought into what might be a kind of un-thinking or ‘unreason’  and ‘stupidity’ (as Stiegler has it in States of Shock). Stupidity is a necessary tendency for all of us insofar as it is the precondition for knowledge, but we need a shock to thought in order to reinvigorate our capacities for knowledge. Of course, we are overburdened by shocks (as Naomi Klein outlines in The Shock Doctrine) that appear to arrive with increasing frequency. Rather than submit to simply adapting to the onslaught of ever-more-frequent shocks, following Stiegler’s analysis, we need to engender a therapeutic form of ‘shock’ to our thinking that doesn’t simply confirm a status quo of the orthodoxy of negation.

Reading this together with the argument presented by James Ferguson, who argues:

“what if politics is really not about expressing indignation or denouncing the powerful? What if it is, instead, about getting what you want? … Denunciatory analyses often treat government as the simple expression of power or domination–the implication apparently being that it is politically objectionable that people should be governed at all. But any realistic sort of progressive politics that would seek a serious answer to the question “what do we want?” will have to involve an exploration of the contemporary possibilities for developing genuinely progressive arts of government.”

Thus the habitual ruts of critique that Ferguson calls the “antis” (anti-globalisation, anti-neo-liberalism, anti-privatisation, etc.) in which any exercise of power is considered in some way dubious are, perhaps analogous to the forms of ‘stupidity’ (of entropy) that Stiegler argues against. I am not offering a simple and pejorative sweeping dismissal of any of those so-called “anti–” positions, neither am I making a glib appeal to Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that a more affirmative attitude might be necessary and that we all need to be aware of our own ‘stupidity’ (otherwise there’s simply no hope for individuation!).

I welcome a call for ‘joyfulness’ in research and in ‘critique’, a more affirmative attitude towards the exercise of power in the face of the orthodoxy of negation and all of this reminded me of Clive’s excellent reading of James Ferguson’s paper, upon which some of this post has been based. So, for me (and for what its worth) I guess I would advocate a kind of practical joyfulness – one that aspires to the same precepts of communing, of mutual aid, of solidarity that Purcell discusses in his blogpost and begins from the everydayness of doing geography (as an academic, as a teacher, as an activist and so on).

I’ve hardly slept due to a poorly child but I do think it’s worth reading all of these things I’ve linked here together to formulate a way of moving forward… just my grain de sel”Ž 🙂

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Event> The Politics and Economics of Attention (14/12)

Both Clive Barnett and I will be speaking at the sixth seminar in the Behaviour Change & Psychological Governance series (funded by the ESRC) which is being held at the University of Bristol on the 14th of December.

I’ll be revisiting some of the things Patrick Crogan and I wrote about back in 2012 in the themed issue of Culture Machine we co-edited following an ESF-funded conference on attention in 2010. My move forward is probably being a little more critical in my thinking about what constitutes the process of valuing attention (critically reflecting on why a Labour Theory of Value might not quite fit) and thinking (with the work of Bernard Stiegler) about how the socio-technical systems that attempt to economise (something that gets called) attention are a kind of pharmakon (an indeterminacy, originating from the idea of a drug as both poison and cure). By looking at some examples I hope to offer some suggestions about how we might understand what’s going on (in networked technology systems in particular) when an attempt is made to place a financial value on ‘attention’.

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Reblog> A time for grieving, a time for analysis

Really excellent piece by Adrian Ivakhiv:

A time for grieving, a time for analysis

Sometimes discussions in social media feel like the internal conversations of a person with severe multiple-personality disorder trying hard to give equal voice, or at least free rein, to their many voices. And I find I can agree with all or most of those voices; and at the same time disagree.

In a facebook debate over whether or not it’s okay to grieve more for Paris than for the victims of similar events in Beirut or elsewhere, someone wrote, “How much better off could the world be if we were not wired to respond more viscerally to that which is close and familiar to us, or could reprogram ourselves to feel equally for strangers, and places we’ve never been?”

I agree that it would be better if we could feel – deeply feel – for the stories and experiences of utter strangers, people from cities we’ve learned to think of as the places where “those things happen”: the Beiruts and Baghdads and Kabuls and Jerusalems. And I agree that there’s a valid political point to be made – about colonialism, Eurocentrism, and the like – in the fact that many of us don’t.

But I also disagree, because I can’t imagine a world in which we would be wired not to respond more viscerally to that which is close and familiar to us. That’s what makes us human, and it’s what gives us the capacity to empathize; everything else is abstract. I’ll take real (instinctual) empathy over abstract compassion any day. Even if I will advocate the latter as a half-way step toward developing and expanding the former.

Writing in Vox.com, journalist Max Fisher provides a thoughtful reflection on the Paris-Beirut comparison meme. While he is quite right that the media covered the Beirut bombings, the amount of coverage they received is significantly less. I counted 17 New York Times paragraphs starting on page A6 for the Beirut bombings (the article he cites reflecting on whether they were undercovered or not appeared three days later) – and over 6 full pages, including the entirety of page A1, of the Sunday edition devoted to the Paris attacks.

But the point is that the media tried to cover them, and that media, in a competitive media environment, play up what they believe their readers want to hear. So Fisher’s arguments largely stand, with the caveat that the causality has become somewhat circular: the chicken of “what will people read?” drives the egg of “what should we give them?”, and vice versa.

Something else in his piece strikes me as extremely revealing:

“France has received 6,700 Syrian asylum claims”¦ In response, European and other Western leaders have convened repeated international summits”¦ Lebanon currently hosts 1.1 million Syrian refugees“¦ In response, the world has given some aid but has fallen far short of the United Nations’ annual funding requests.” 

That western readers – those with the money that could make a difference – are tone-deaf to the non-white world is not news. That there are ways we could make much better decisions about these things should also not be news. 

That’s what makes the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities – including studies of how people make sense of global issues and how new media affect those sense-making processes – so important today. We process things the ways our nervous systems like to process things, amplifying certain kinds of threats (such as those posed by people who look different from us, who might be doing deviant things or wanting to move into our communities) and ignoring others (those that seem distant in time and in space). And those with a stake in our processing help that out in ways that benefits their interests.

What can help?  Education, for starters. That’s why our educational institutions, instead of being subjected to neoliberal cost-cutting and money-making pressures (as they are, increasingly), ought to be transformed into the active and engaged learning communities that would transform society from the ground up. 

As someone who teaches at a public research university that prices many students out of its offerings, or at least keeps them in debt for years afterward, I know how that can seem only a dream. But it’s a dream worth working towards. 

In the end, I have felt like citing Ecclesisastes on there being a season for everything. If we grieve for Paris, let us do that with the attention and emotional acuity it deserves. That doesn’t mean we should not have grieved for Beirut, or any other place. But grieving, when it starts, needs its space.

But as soon as we grieve, we render ourselves vulnerable to one pressure or another. So analysis ought to follow soon after.

And if we feel closer to one place than another, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on why that’s the case. I know why I feel for Paris: I’ve been there, have friends there, know and love its history – its revolutions, its artistic and philosophical culture. I would want every city to be a bit like Paris. And I know where my idea of Beirut comes from: when I was growing up, it was synonymous with “divided city,” with bombings, with seemingly senseless loss of life, so it’s not only on my inherited list of cities where “things like that” happen – it defines that list.

But a capacious response to such events calls for extending our analysis to the broader contours and contexts that frame them. In the case of both sets of bombings, that means recognizing that there are ideologies that cannot be accommodated within a pluralistic social body, because they are intended to destroy that pluralism and the respect for difference that must be its foundation. Those ideologies must be met, challenged, defused and neutered. (And before that happens, they must be adequately understood.)

But it also means recognizing that at least some of the grievances that fuel them come not from outside, but from within that same social body. That is why connecting Paris to Beirut is useful and sensible, once the grieving has been given its space. They are connected as points on global vectors, some of which can only be understood through a long and probing historical lens (one that requires conceptual tools of analysis like militarism, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the like).

No one ever said that the prospect of building a peaceable global civilization will be an easy one. Back in the late Cold War era, there were times when it seemed we couldn’t possibly make it to the year 2000. We (or most of us) did. As we have shifted into an ever more unified world of multiple power centers and egregious resource and wealth imbalances, things have gotten wilder and less predictable.

There’s no going back, because there’s no “there” to go back to. There’s only the way forward – a way that will have to address those imbalances, the desires and struggles they represent, and the ever more precarious ecological frame that encloses them – all at once.

Good luck to that. If there’s an alien civilization that can give us any pointers, we could use them now. Failing with that, the only thing that will carry us through is the belief that it’s possible.

That gives me hope. And it makes me feel even more for the people of Paris, and of Beirut, and of all the other places where it hurts today.

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The problematic imaginative geographies of collective ‘grieving’ on social media

This provocative article “Got a French flag on your Facebook profile picture? Congratulations on your corporate white supremacy” on The Independent‘s website makes for a compelling read.

I think is worth reading alongside the excellent letter from Paris by Judith Butler posted to the Verso blog “Mourning becomes the law” – also a must-read, really:

Mourning seems fully restricted within the national frame. The nearly 50 dead in Beirut from the day before are barely mentioned, and neither are the 111 in Palestine killed in the last weeks alone, or the scores in Ankara. Most people I know describe themseves as “at an impasse”, not able to think the situation through. One way to think about it may be to come up with a concept of transversal grief, to consider how the metrics of grievability work, why the cafe as target pulls at my heart in ways that other targets cannot. It seems that fear and rage may well turn into a fierce embrace of a police state. I suppose this is why I prefer those who find themselves at an impasse. That means that this will take some time to think through.  It is difficult to think when one is appalled. It requires time, and those who are willing to take it with you

A few snippets from The Independent article:

So you want to show solidarity with France – specifically, with those killed in Paris this weekend. If you’re a British person who wants to do that because you feel sympathy and sadness for people who are brutally massacred, regardless of their nationality, then fine. I just hope that you also change your profile picture to a different country’s flag every time people are wrongly killed as the result of international conflicts – for example, during the attack on Beirut in Lebanon just the day before.

…

Flags are politically and historically charged symbols (just look at the infamous and aptly self-styled Isis flag itself), symbolising states and representing influence, power, segregation, borders, nationalism and identity – some of the most commonly held reasons for armed conflict. It’s important, before overlaying a flag on your smiling face, to think about this.

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I’m guessing you didn’t feel moved to drape yourself in the Tricolore [sic] until Facebook pushed that option out to you, possibly even until you saw how many people had already snapped it up. But paint-by-numbers solidarity when it’s foisted on you by one of the most powerful companies in the world is simply not the way to help a traumatised nation in shock after murder.

I’d just add that apparently the tricolor overlay implemented by Facebook has a setting that allows the user to automatically switch it off after a given length of time… how convenient.

There has, of course, been some interesting academic and journalistic discussion of what has been referred to as ‘recreational grieving’ and ‘mourning sickness‘ that is cognate to this argument, but the article above puts in sharper relief complex issues concerning the kinds of imaginative geographies that are being (re)produced and performed in response to the incredibly sad and horrific events that took place in Paris last weekend and their aftermath… something Derek Gregory has also written about on his blog.

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CFP> “Spatializing Sovereignty”

Another interesting event, from the Society for Radical Geography, Spatial Theory, and Everyday Life, short deadline now though: 20th Nov. –– I saw this via Mark Purcell.

2016 Symposium CFP: “Spatializing Sovereignty”

Featuring keynote addresses by:
Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Professor of American Indian Studies and Gender Studies, UCLA
and Gelare Khoshgozaran, Writer and Multi-disciplinary Artist

UC Berkeley
March 4, 2016

While sovereignty is often defined in terms of the bounded nation-state, this symposium convenes to examine competing, overlapping, and “nested sovereignties” (Simpson 2014). How is the spatiality of sovereignty felt, practiced, embodied, inhabited, or imposed at various scales? We might consider how the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada and the U.S. lay bare logics of patriarchal white settler sovereignty, while ongoing state-sanctioned violence reveals that anti-Blackness is also constitutive of and central to securing the nation state. What might the controlling and blocking of Syrian refugee movement say about state sovereignty in this moment? Furthermore, transnational feminist scholars have continuously interrogated the relationship between regimes of debt and modes of sovereignty in the Global South. Movements resisting these forms of violence in turn show how the gendered and racialized body becomes a site at which sovereignty can be (re)articulated.

This symposium seeks explorations of how sovereignty is spatialized at all levels, from the power of mapping, to the affects and “erotics of sovereignty” (Rifkin 2012), to the praxis of sovereign polities. How do variously defined geographies determine the limitations and possibilities of sovereignty as concept, as process, and as discursive and political strategy?

Possible topics can include but are not limited to:

  •        Indigenous sovereignty and spatial justice
  •        Geographies of race and racialization
  •        Spatialization of affect and affective sovereignty
  •        Corporeal sovereignty and biopolitics
  •        Sovereignty, space, and disability
  •        Sovereignty in and through artistic, literary, and expressive cultures
  •        Transnational feminist theory and the sovereign
  •        Critical feminist, queer, and trans readings of sovereignty
  •        Bordering and colonialisms
  •        Neoliberal governance and state sovereignty
  •        Sovereignty and carceral power
  •        Sovereignty and sexuality, desire, and the erotic
  •        Climate justice, ecologies of space, and the anthropocene
  •        Urban regimes and the right to the city

Though we welcome submissions that deal generally with spatial theory, special consideration will be given to abstracts that engage this year’s theme. We encourage abstracts from activists, artists, and academics at all stages of research, and will consider proposals of any format for 20-minute presentations (including conference papers, artist talks, art interventions, short film screenings, and activist report-backs). This symposium is committed to producing sustained conversations and a collaborative environment for scholars, artists, and activists whose work engages our society’s interests in radical geography, spatial theory, and everyday life. Those interested may submit proposals of no more than 500 words to radicalspaces@gmail.com by November 20, 2015. Presenters will be notified of their acceptance by December 15, 2015.

This year’s symposium will be held at UC Berkeley on March 4, 2016 featuring two keynote addresses: Dr. Mishuana Goeman, associate professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies at UCLA, and Gelare Khoshgozaran, writer and multi-disciplinary artist.

References

Rifkin, Mark. (2012). The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Simpson, Audra. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Power, powerlessness, entropy and dissent. A manifesto by de Lagasnerie and Louis & response by Stiegler

Over on the LA Review of Books site there is a really interesting sort of ‘call and response‘ debate, in which Geoffrey de Lagasanerie (Prof. of Philosophy at ÉNS) and Edouard Louis (author) offer a manifesto for counter-acting a perceived capturing of politics by a kind of right-wing intellectualism (this was originally published in Le Monde, and translated for LARB), to which Bernard Stiegler (philosopher & activist) offers a forthright response (translated for LARB).

de Lagasanerie and Louis observe:

Against this massive political-intellectual dynamic [populism, Islamophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, antisemitism], a general mood is established. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there are many today who make their living off of this disarray and sadness. To experience politics, for most of us now, is to experience powerlessness.

and offer a kind of manifesto, or set of principles, in response: to refuse to recognise particular ideologues; to recognise refugees and racists alike as what they are rather than bow to a perceived deception; to ‘redistribute shame’ by making those on the far-right understand that their remarks are worthy of nothing but contempt; and finally: to intervene, wherever possible. They argue that:

…we cannot just lament the situation without questioning the means of creating new structures. In fact, all hope is not lost: the Zemmours and Houellebecqs are bent on denying what they really are, and lying. The left continues to dominate symbolically. In France, “intellectual right” remains an oxymoron, better still: an impossibility. We must at least rejoice in that.

In response, Bernard Stiegler opposes the sweeping generalisation of the identification of any kind of ‘intellectual’ which for him validates a kind of proleterianisation (after Marx) that is (in fact) a loss of knowledge (regardless of class position):

In the first place, for any thinking that claims to think powerlessness (and “to say things other than what is already agreed”), the common noun “intellectual” (“an intellectual,” “intellectuals”) must not only be the subject of critique, but should be scrupulously avoided. […] The figure of “the intellectual” is an unfortunate invention that unquestioningly internalizes the opposition between “manual workers” and “intellectuals,” […] Behind all this lies proletarianization, which today affects all forms of knowledge, and firstly as a destruction of knowledge – of how to live, do, and conceptualize.

Stiegler moves on to discuss how the issue of powerlessness not only stems from the issues that de Lagasnerie & Louis diagnose but are, further, entrenched and tied up with these forms of proletarianisation (losses of knowledge), in which even those apparently radical thinkers on the left are somewhat complicit (with a particular withering for Badiou). It is worth quoting at length here:

Geoffroy de Lagasnerie and Edouard Louis deplore the absence of intellectual debate. For my part I deplore that, like Manuel Valls, they have apparently never heard either of Pharmacologie du Front National or of States of Shock – in which I argue that so-called “post-structuralism” has significantly contributed, in France and elsewhere, to the legitimation first of neoliberal discourse and then libertarian discourse, the libertarians being those who are the practitioners of disruption.

This is occurring not only because “intellectuals” yield to the drive-based ideology of the extreme right as it continues to gain ground. It is because there is no thought of the present age worthy of the name – and here, where I am resolutely “on the left,” I would never say that such a thought “worthy of the name” would necessarily be on the left.

The “intellectuals,” whether of the “left” or the “right,” are stuck in an antiquated opposition between “intellectual” and “manual” that refers in a more profound way to the opposition between logos and tekhne against which Marx fought, and which he posited as the basis of the ideology that was then called “bourgeois.” This has largely been forgotten, in particular by the heirs of Althusser and firstly by Alain Badiou. For the consequence lies in the fact that, contrary to what Badiou’s hero, Plato, wants to prove, knowledge is always constituted by technics, which in so doing always constitutes a social relation.

In this forgetting of the technological composition (in all of the meanings of that word) of society and humanity we fail to recognise the context of what is variously (by politicians and technologists alike) referred to as ‘disruption’. Stiegler argues (somewhat) in passing here, and in greater detail elsewhere, that this is precisely what is stake in coming to know/understand the ‘anthropocene’. He discusses how this relates to contemporary feelings of powerlessness through the trope of entropy/negentropy – which he has been working with across various books (some of which have recently been translated and some which are still to be translated):

Entropy is becoming, devenir. Negentropy is what inscribes within it a future, avenir. Becoming and future have until today been confused. It is this confusion that makes us powerless, and it is what the impasse of the Anthropocene reveals. Such a perspective is also an immense building site for intellectual construction – open to all those who still have the ability to think for themselves, rather than vainly repeat received ideas.

These two articles are well worth a read, they offer an interesting counter-poise to anglophone debates about the multiple ‘crises’ in Europe (of refugees, of the rise of the far-right, of the capitulation of democracy to technocracy etc. etc.). Plus they’re good fun to read 🙂

Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive by Geoffroy de Lagasnerie & Edouard Louis, translated by Adam Briscoe.

Power, Powerlessness, Thinking, and Future by Bernard Stiegler, translated by Daniel Ross.

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Reblog> Does Academia.edu Mean Open Access Is Becoming Irrelevant?

A really interesting post by Gary Hall on his blog around what ‘open access’ means and how we negotiate what might be understood as the ‘attention economy’ of academia in relation to the ways in which sites like academia.edu and research gate leverage the ‘respectability’ of our work and our collective need to find audiences in order to generate valuable metadata. As Hall argues:

 In this world who gate-keeps access to (and so can extract maximum value from) content is less important, because that access is already free, than who gate-keeps(and so can extract maximum value from) the data generated around the use of that content, which is used more because access to it is free.

I heartily recommend reading the whole piece…

Does Academia.edu Mean Open Access Is Becoming Irrelevant?

brief discussion took place this month on the Association of Internet Researchers air-l listserve concerning a new book from the publishers Edward Elgar: Handbook of Digital Politics. Edited by Stephen Coleman and Deen Freelon, this 512 page volume features contributions from Peter Dahlgren, Nick Couldry, Christian Fuchs, Fadi Hirzalla and Liesbet van Zoonen, among numerous others. The discussion was provoked, however, not by something one of its many contributors had written about digital politics, but by the book’s cost: $240 on Amazon in the US. (In the UK the hardback is £150.00 on Amazon. Handbook of Digital Politics is also available online direct from the publishers for £135.00, with the ebook available for £40.) As one of those on the list commented, ‘I’d love to buy it, but not at that price’ – to which another participant in the discussion responded: ‘I encourage everyone to use the preprint option to post their piece on ssrn.com and academia.edu, perhaps others have other open access suggestions (e.g. Institutional Repositories of individual universities)’. Now, to be fair, the idea that is implied by this suggestion – that the Academia.edu platform for sharing research represents just another form of open access – is a common one. Yet posting on Academia.edu is far from being ethically and politically equivalent to using an institutional open access repository.

Read the whole post here.

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Reblog> Submit your papers! Philosophy and the future

This looks really good!

Submit your papers! Philosophy and the future

Chiasma, an open-access philosophy journal, is now accepting submissions for their third issues. The deadline is December 15, 2015.

Read the full CFP below.

Chiasma Issue 3: Philosophy and The Future

Philosophy, being untimely, is inexorably embedded in time, dedicated to the future. For Chiasma‘s third issue, we will look for essays engaging with the future – as an object for philosophy, as a hermeneutic of philosophy, and also in terms of the future of philosophy – from an interdisciplinary background.

As Nietzsche writes in Untimely Meditations, philosophy is always “acting counter to our time, and thereby acting on our time, and, let us hope, to the benefit of a time to come.” Essays should focus on, first and foremost, the “time to come,” but also the various ways in which this “to come” affects the now. The future is not merely an ever-receding horizon, but also an immanent object of thought that is itself conditioned by past and present. We invite submissions that explore these and other modes of thinking the future.

Some possible topics include:

  • Philosophies of becoming and event: Badiou, Deleuze, Malabou, Nietzsche, Whitehead
  • Futures of the human: transhumanism, posthumanism, hyperobjects, extinction
  • Ecology and eco-criticism
  • Rhetorics of the future: futurity in capitalist rhetoric, critique of the future as figure, the cultural role of futurity (Marx, Edelman, Zizek)
  • Messianism and non-messianism: Benjamin, Butler, Derrida, Laruelle
  • Utopianism and utopian studies
  • Speculative fiction, science fiction, Meillassoux’s extro-science fiction, future histories
  • Missed futures and lost causes
  • Contemporary divergent futures: intersectionality in critical theory, ontological difference in ethnography and ethnology
  • Revolution and new forms of social action: Occupy, Zapatista, etc.
  • Future of the university: corporatization of the university, crisis of the humanities (Eileen Joy, Henry A. Giroux), alternative academic programs and modes (European Graduate School, New School, Global Centre)

 

Essays should be 5,000-7,000 words long and formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style. Please send papers with abstracts of no more than 150 words tochiasma.asiteforthought@gmail.com by December 15.