The Occupy Movement has revived May Day. For far too many years, this holiday, which was of course also a solidarity-building occasion, has been ignored by the US labor movement. Ironic, given the fact that May Day actually began in the US.>>
The Skim
Where to send people when they ask what alternatives to Kony 2012 there are.
Al Jazeera English has a 25 minute documentary on the rise of #OWS.
100 years of Trayvon Martin.
Scholars and writers urge reform of anti-dissent law in Thailand.
"Law for the People" vs. Monarchic "Land of Smiles."
Occupy the Academy panel at Columbia to consider politics of open access, February 28th, noon.
The other side of freedom
Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal invests $300 million in Twitter, though at the time of this announcement "it wasn't clear how much of Twitter the prince will control."
"There is no reason to believe that these abrogations of popular
sovereignty cannot be sustained for a very long time with the tactical
application of force." Africa? Latin America? No, Western Europe and the U.S..
There is nothing wrong with higher education in Greece that a little less democracy couldn't solve, according to an international committee that included the chancellors of University of California-Davis and New York University.
When did "health and safety" become a euphemism for "shock and awe"?
Great aerial footage of #OWS action in solidarity with #OccupyOakland
What Days of Rage looked like around the world.
Events
May 4, 2012, 5:00pm | The James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center
Under the auspices of neoliberalism, technical systems of compliance and efficiency have come to underwrite a biopolitics of war, terror, and surveillance. On the occasion of the publication of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death, join an international panel of distinguished critical theorists, first convened at the Graduate Center in 2006, to discuss the value of the concept of biopolitics in addressing issues of governance and economy from the latter decades of the twentieth century to current geopolitical conditions of life and death.
Reviews
Thought follows action. A new precarious generation of cognitive workers knows this all too well, for their struggles trace the crumbling edifice of both the university and the global economy that increasingly depends on knowledge, affects, and information for its operations. If we begin with these struggles, we can dare to know much more about how our present circumstances are shaped by the knowledge economy.
This is the provocative thesis of Gigi Roggero's The Production of Living Knowledge, part treatise on the changing role of the university in contemporary capitalism, and part manifesto for a movement to expropriate the expropriators of the present economy, to build up autonomous institutions that organize our commonwealth, and to set sail toward a new society. >>
Periscope
critical intelligence on current events
Neuroculture
The articles here by Kim Cunningham, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Jesse Prinz, Deboleena Roy, and Alyson Spurgas are the outcome of a year-long critical interdisciplinary engagement with neuroscience. The articles include technophiles and neuroskeptics, empiricists and social constructionists, those who believe that science can be made better and those who reject its basic assumptions about objectivity and the material world in the first place. Their aim is not consensus, but to proliferate thought in multiple directions. >>
