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Postcard from Berlin

125 years after the Berlin Conference inaugurated the Scramble for Africa, Black Berliners and their allies marched through the streets of the Kreuzberg neighborhood. >>

Logos of our Lives

Two of the more influential books that have taken swipe at our contemporary intellectual property landscape concerned themselves with trademark, logos, and capitalism. Here I am thinking of Rosemary Coombe's seminal The Cultural Life of Intellectual Property and Naomi Klein's more activist take on the subject, No Logo. What would happen if you condensed the arguments in these two books into a 15 minute video? >>
From the community

Survival

Ever since the effective collapse of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, I've been thinking about how we represent survival and futurity in a conjuncture in which hegemonic ideology is so clearly bankrupt and the ruling classes in the world's most powerful nations are so transparently unwilling to take the steps necessary to save civilization. >>

New Social Text Book on Alter-Globalization

Protest and Organization in the Alternative Globalization Era, by Heather Gautney, details the history of the alter-globalization protests over the last decade and the attempts by various groups on the global left to build alternatives to neoliberal development through the mechanism of the World Social Forum. >>

Hacker and Troller as Trickster

If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:   Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.  These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his... >>
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