ANNOUNCEMENT: NEXT EVENT
see sidebar of UPCOMING EVENTS and SEMINARS to get information on the next few events in the series
This is Forever is hosting two conversations next week, on Wednesday and Thursday evening. We hope to see you at both!
Please join us at Bluestockings Bookstore on Wednesday, MARCH 17th at 7PM for a presentation and discussion of migrant struggles in U.S. by Jenna Loyd, a researcher at CUNY, who will share what she learned in the two months traveling this fall in the US South and Southwest. Joining her will be Seth Wessler, a researcher at Applied Research Center, who traveled to Jamaica to look at the often forgotten effects of mass deportation; as well as Manisha Vaze, with Families for Freedom, who brings the focus back home to talk about how people in New York are living with and responding to immigrant policing, detention, and deportation.
Rooted in an inquiry into the past 30 years of criminalizing communities of color and how that has shaped the lives of migrant communities of color in the United States, tonight’s discussion will also attempt to expound the uses of militant research in better understanding and circulating these struggles.
Then, on Thursday, MARCH 18th at 7PM at Bluestockings, please join Team Colors as they reflect on organizing in context of current capitalist and movement crises, and discuss the uses of militant research and inquiry into radical movements in the U.S. They will explore the intention, method and content of their new pamphlet “Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible” and their forthcoming AK Press collection “Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States.”
Team Colors is a national militant research collective. Their approach has developed from involvement in community organizing projects, resistance activities and radical research efforts for more than a decade. Their forthcoming pamphlet “Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible” will be available for sale at the event.
Edu-Factory: “Toward a Global Autonomous University
On Sunday, FEBRUARY 28th at 7PM at Bluestockings Bookstore, This Is Forever will be celebrating the release of “Toward a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge and Exodus from the Education Factory,“ recently compiled by the Edu-Factory Collective and published by Autonomedia. Join contributors and collaborators of the Edu-Factory project for an investigation and discussion of the relationships between the crisis of the university and the emergence of an increasingly international and militant student movement.
As this international student and university movement spreads, points on the map of recent mass demonstrations, occupations, and self-organized university initiatives belie a true sense of how the university world-wide is the site of an increasingly militant struggle. Both the geographic, social and analytic scale of this movement requires careful attention in order to understand the implications, connections, and points of divergence of a struggle that seeks to simultaneously transform the present conditions of labor and creativity that circulate through the university as well as create autonomous universities organized as a commons.
Tonight’s discussion aims to circulate political insights and perspectives on this movement as well as connect to organizing efforts for the March 4th Day of Action to Defend Public Education.
This is Forever is sponsoring the next event in the series on Friday, JANUARY 8th, 2010 at 7PM at Bluestockings. The next events are Monday and Tuesday, JANUARY 11th and 12th, also at Bluestockings at 7PM. Details below. The next few are listed below that:
Climate Justice, Movement(s), and Crisis: A Report back from COP15 and a discussion with Turbulence
On Monday, JANUARY 11th at 7PM, This Is Forever has the pleasure of hosting Tina Gerhardt, activist, academic and free-lance journalist, as she reports to us about the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP15) that took place from December 7th to December 18th, 2009.
Tina arrived in Copenhagen before the summit started and left after it ended. She wrote daily about events inside the Bella Center and demos and actions outside on the streets.
She will bring us her reflections from COP15 as well as the climate justice movement. Tonight’s event will lay out in simple and understandable terms what the Copenhagen Accord includes, what it means, and how it contrasts with the science demands and what other groups of nations, such as the G77, AOSIS and the EU, as well as science calls for. Additionally, we have an opportunity to discuss actions related to the summit, exploring new directions, potentials, limits and the implications of state repression.
On the next evening, Tuesday, JANUARY 12th at 7PM, join Ben Trott, member of the Turbulence Collective, for a presentation and discussion of Issue 5 of their journal, entitled “And Now For Something Completely Different?”
Turbulence: Ideas for Movement is a journal that explores many of the political and strategic directions of the ‘movement of movements’ of the counter-globalization days and into the development of global movements today. The journal is a key space for debate and investigation into core logics, practices, and visions of an international network of movements.
The current issue discusses the condition of anti-capitalist movements in the wake of various crises: of financial capital, of the doctrines of neoliberalism, of our planetary commons and the environment, of social and political forms of equitable life, and of our movements themselves.
Ben will be presenting the arguments of the collective’s article “Life in Limbo?” that introduces the new issue as well as the political project of the journal itself.
Both events will take place at 7PM at Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, NYC 10002. Print copies of the journal will be available to all attendees. You can find more information about Turbulence here as well as download the entire issue here.
Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life
Our first TIF event in the new year and quite a celebration: At Bluestockings on Friday, JANUARY 8th at 7PM there will be a release party and book discussion for Stevphen Shukaitis‘ recently published Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life. Stevphen explores the limits and possibilities of collective imagination in the age of spectacular recuperation. In what ways has ‘the power of imagination’, a radical bulwark for over forty years, been seized and corrupted by the image-commodity? Attending to this problem, Stevphen explores and mutates various autonomist political traditions with subversive avant-garde movements and many instances of self-organization in everyday life. In order to reorganize our radical imaginaries such that they (and we) remain a terrain of conflict and antagonism to capitalist subsumption, Stevphen invites us to think of our collective struggles as machines – ones that perhaps work best when paradoxically breaking down.
As Stevphen writes, “the task is to explore the construction of imaginal machines, comprising the socially and historically embedded manifestations of the radical imagination. Imagination as a composite of our capacities to affect and be affected by the world, to develop movements toward new forms of autonomous sociality and collective self-determination.”
This event also celebrates the recent militant publishing venture of Minor Compositions, a new project dedicated to inquiry into radical and movement histories, autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and revolutions of everyday life, as forms of research militancy useful to present organizing. More info can be found on thier website – http://www.minorcompositions.info/
Towards a Global Labor History with van der Linden
16 Beaver GroupSaturday, October 31st @ 12PM – 2PM
Marcel van der Linden: Working Class History from Below
16 Beaver Street, 4th fl.
New York, NY 10004
Marcel van der Linden will be presenting research from his book, “Workers of the World, Essays Towards a Global labor History,” which builds the foundations of a global history of capitalism from below: a history freed from Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism. Using literature from diverse regions, epochs and disciplines, van der Linden provides arguments and conceptual tools for a different interpretation of history – a labor history which integrates the history of slavery, indentured labor, and subsistence labor; and which pays serious attention to diverging yet interconnected developments in different parts of the world.
“Workers of the World: Essays Toward a Global Labor History” (September 2008) was published in the Netherlands by Brill Publishers.
While the discussion will span themes from the entire book, the book’s Introduction (pp. 1-14 of the book’s pagination) is a useful starting point. So, too, are the sectionsConceptualizations (Chapters Two through Four, pp. 17-78) and Forms of Resistance(Chapters Nine through Twelve, pp. 171-283)
Tea and coffee will be provided; any simple food contributions are appreciated, such as bread, cheese, honey, jam, fruit, etc.
Crude World: The Politics of Oil
SILVIA FEDERICI and GEORGE CAFFENTZIS in Conversation with PETER MAASS
Tuesday November 10th, 2009 6:30 pm
Graduate Center
365 5th Ave btwn 34th and 35th (The Skylight Room, 9100)
The environmental devastation wrought by the world’s reliance on petroleum can no longer be denied, but the insidious cultural effects of oil extraction, production, and exportation still receive scant attention. Join Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis as they discuss big oil’s cultural and political violence with Peter Maass, contributing editor at The New York Times Magazine and the author of the recently published Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. The event is moderated by Ashley Dawson, Associate Professor of English, The Graduate Center, CUNY.
George Caffentzsis and Silvia Federici have collaborated on a number of pieces dealing with the political and class implications of oil.
Most notable is the 2001 publication of Midnight Oil:Work, Energy, War 1973-1992by Midnight Notes.
Organized by The Center for Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY.
Ecological Debt: Embodied Debt
ARIEL SALLEH on a feminist and ecologically integrated politics of the commons; introduced and in dialogue with SILVIA FEDERICI
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 7:00PM
Bluestockings Bokstore
172 Allen Street
New York, New York 10002
In a time of financial meltdown and global warming, alter-globalisation movements look for a shared political analysis – one that is sex-gender literate, culturally inclusive, and grounded materially in nature. Understanding the specific character of peasant, indigenous, and household labor will be critical for an integrated move toward the commons. Such labor models an epistemology that protects ecological integrity and the social metabolism. Ariel Salleh seeks to re-frame political ecology with new concepts like – embodied debt, meta-industrial labour, eco-sufficiency, and metabolic value.
Ariel Salleh will be speaking on themes from her recently edited volume, Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology (Pluto Press, 2009)
Ariel Salleh’s work is widely debated in ecopolitics and her Ecofeminism as Politics (Zed Books, 1997) is a classic in the field. She is published in Environmental Politics, New Left Review, Economic and Political Weekly, Futures, Organization & Environment. A researcher in Political Economy at the University of Sydney, Australia, and a co-editor of Capitalism Nature Socialism, she is a seasoned activist in biodiversity and water politics, and has taught at universities in North America and the Asia-Pacific region.
Bristol Radical History Group
This Is Forever is excited to announce three New York City events with the Bristol Radical HIstory Group, on Thursday NOVEMBER 12th, Friday NOVEMBER 13th and Sunday NOVEMBER 15th.
Since 2006 Bristol Radical History Group (BRHG) have organised nearly 100 history events; staging walks, talks, gigs, reconstructions, films, exhibitions, trips through the archives and fireside story telling. We also publish a range of pamphlets and host a comprehensive website (http://www.brh.org.uk).
Brecht Forum
Thursday, November 12th @ 7:30PM
Bristol Radical History Group: Radical History ‘From Below’
451 West Street (between Bank & Bethune Streets
New York, NY 10014
The ‘History Workshop’ movement was founded in 1966 in Ruskin College, Oxford, U.K. by the Marxist academic Raphael Samuel, a champion of ‘history from below.’ He famously defined this movement as being “the belief that history is or ought to be a collaborative enterprise, one in which the researcher, the archivist, the curator and the teacher, the ‘do-it-yourself’ enthusiast and the local historian, the family history societies and the individual archaeologist, should all be regarded as
equally engaged.”
In 2006 in the U.K., Bristol Radical History Group was formed with a view opening up some of the hidden history of their home city to public scrutiny, to challenge some commonly held ideas about historical events and approach this history from ‘below’. Unlike Samuel’s ‘History Workshop,’ the group actually came ‘from below’ its genesis being in an expanded sports club rather than in the academy. As a result it has been able to successfully integrate both the formal lecture with street performance, the organic intellectual with the academic and engage the public in the excitement of radical history by the use of different media.
Members of Bristol Radical History Group will be outlining the influences that inspired their project from E.P.Thompson to punk rock, describing their forays into the battles over the historical representations of their city from slavery to labour history and looking to the future of radical history from ‘below’. So if you want to find out what unites a 17th Century blasphemous preacher and some drunken Can-Can dancers this is the event for you.
16 Beaver Group
Friday, November 13th @ 4PM – 9PM
Bristol Radical History Group: Why History Matters and Why Radical History Matters More
16 Beaver Street, 4th fl.
New York, NY 10004
An afternoon/evening of lectures, presentations and discussion presented by Bristol Radical History Group (BRHG) emphasising the importance and relevance of radical history. Using a diverse series of historical case studies the speakers will demonstrate the various interventions BRHG have made into their local and national histories including: uncovering hidden histories / challenging established narratives / questioning previous generations of ‘radical history’ / linking new narratives and critiques with current struggles.
Case studies include:
‘A Barbarous and Ungovernable People’: The Miners of Kingswood Forest: Steve Mills explains the nature of the commons and the content of ‘commoning’ by studying the English forest and its rebellious inhabitants. Focusing on Kingswood (east of Bristol) between the 17th and 19th centuries he examines the moral economy of the native colliers, their struggles against enclosure and the attempts by the authorities to pacify the area.
‘From Peterloo to Captain Swing’: Victims or Insurgents?: Roger Wilson critiques received ‘radical’ narratives of enfranchisement and the formation of Trade Unions in Britain by focusing on the hidden history of uprising and insurrection in the early 19th Century. Why have some events been ignored or denigrated and others been championed by the left and the labour movement?
‘Votes for Ladies’: The Suffragette Movement 1903-1914: An examination of the established narrative of the struggle for the enfranchisement of women. Anny Cullum critiques the composition and outlook of this iconic movement from a class perspective.
‘My Holiday Snaps’: The Indian Enclosures: Richard Grove presents an illustrated talk charting the Adivasi’s and Dalits’ struggle to protect their land from the encroachments sponsored by industry and the World Bank in a contemporary world-wide wave of enclosures.
Bluestockings Bookstore
Sunday, November 15th @ 7PM
Bristol Radical History Group: History as Inquiry and Militant Research
172 Allen Street
New York, NY 10002
Since 2006 Bristol Radical History Group (BRHG) have organised a bewildering range of history events; staging walks, talks, gigs, reconstructions, films, exhibitions, trips through the archives and fireside story telling. Tonight, the Bristol Radical History Group (BRHG) will give an account of its own formation as a group, the arc of their activities in Bristol and beyond, as well as how the methods and techniques employed in their history from below relates to practices of militant research.
Bristol Radical History Group member Dan Bennett will also present “A History of Commercial Corporations”, in which he exposes the hidden and chequered history of the Corporation explaining in the process what corporations are, where they come from and how they derive their power.
Events sponsored by ‘This is Forever’: From Inquiry to Refusal’, an event and discussion series dedicated to understanding the current composition of political movements and struggles using the lens of autonomist thought. For more information, please seewww.thisisforever.org