The social movement since September 2011 has been a tremendous force for personal change. I'm different. I'm also in a place where I'm starting to acknowledge my own difference. The movement needs to be different. The time is full of violence, of hostility and fear. There has been so much talk of love. But love is hard in a warming climate, in permanent recession, in debt.>>
Blog
I just untied my copy of Critical Making, a collection of texts and images on DIY culture edited by Garnet Hertz. When I pulled it from the hand addressed brown paper envelope I was startled by its handmade, twine-wrapped beauty....>>
How can the power of storytelling build public awareness of the struggles of immigrant and low-wage workers? In recent years, storytelling has proven a strong tool for achieving social change, and this practice has been particularly prevalent among immigrants and low wage workers.>>
The Skim
Care for that sandwich with a side of "enforced rapture"?
What exactly is happening to also those videotapes of lectures ... and Derrida answering the phone.
The breathtaking, unrepentant arrogance of the 1% is on full display in Jessica Pressler's profile of AIG CEO Bob Benmosche.
Barred by law from the internet, an Anonymous hacker relishes "the feeling of being able to close my eyes without being bombarded with flashing shapes or constant buzzing sounds."
Collective member Jasbir Puar with Maya Mikdashi on pinkwashing and pinkwatching.
Sex is changing.
"What is needed is not an extension or reformulation of Subaltern Studies; what is needed are new projects."
"Nothing highlights Spanish financial problems like an abandoned airport."
Events
Graduate Center, CUNY -- Center for Humanities
Nov 26, 2012, 6:30pm | The Skylight Room (9100)
Ashley Dawson, Matthew K. Gold, Michael Mandiberg, Tavia Nyong'o
What are the radical possibilities of open access publishing? This panel will bring together a number of scholars who have published online to consider how university presses are either facilitating or impeding efforts by academics to explore new forms of cultural production and media activism unleashed by movements such as Occupy Wall Street. Join us to explore these questions and to develop new strategies and models for contemporary academic publication.
Reviews
Bishnupriya Ghosh's new book Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular is a thorough but at times confounding account of the Icon in our media-saturated global age. In her book, Ghosh treats dominant and popular representations of three women -- Mother Teresa, Arhundhati Roy, and Phoolan Devi -- to see what kind of politics they might provoke once they've become iconic objects of devotion. She argues convincingly that these figures register at the levels of the global, where they are sensationalized by mass media, and the local, where they are constantly taken up and repurposed, imbued with new, insurrectionary meanings. Icons such as Teresa, Roy, and Devi are immediately affective even if they reside in collective imaginaries, and just as they may act as smokescreens for abominable politics, they may catalyze radical and surprising social practices. It's the "magical" interplay, Ghosh contends, between devotees and more dominant powers that enables icons to... >>
Periscope
critical intelligence on current events
Work and Idleness in the Age of the Great Recession
This special issue of Periscope on “Work and Idleness in the Age of the Great Recession,” reconsiders our sense of what qualifies as work or idleness when there is little or no work to be had. The role idleness might play in our lives, and in our collective imaginaries, may strike some as unthinkable or even irresponsible when so much suffering and uncertainty has been triggered by high unemployment rates. Yet perhaps now more than ever we have arrived at a moment that necessitates a critical rethinking of the normative institutions of work—in the form of employment or occupation, amongst others—under capitalism, especially during this time when “Right to Work” legislation, notions of a “jobless recovery,” and austerity measures have been proposed and implemented as the means of resolving various crises, both social and economic, in the U.S. and other parts of the globe. >>
