Sometime in early October I showed up to an OWS organizer's meeting at 16 Beaver Street. 16 Beaver, like 56 Walker or Charlotte's Place, is one of these magically anachronistic spaces in lower Manhattan that feel like something out of Patti Smith's Just Kids -- free space for art, activism, and organizing, embedded in some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Of course, to label these spaces "anachronistic" is to cede to capital its totalizing power. >>
In Topics
Technically, I never worked on Wall Street. But, for a difficult year in my early twenties, I did don a suit at the crack of dawn and schlep down to one bank or another in the financial district or, occasionally, to one of its outposts in Long Island City, Queens, or Stamford, CT. Citibank, Chase Manhattan, American Express, Swiss Bank. I was a perma-temp in a series of glorified secretarial pools, the highest paid work my liberal arts degree could secure me, even in the middle of the Nineties dot com boom. >>
An Interview with Matthew Frye Jacobson.
Michael Mandiberg: So tell us about the Historian's Eye project...
Matthew Frye Jacobson: This started for me back in about 2007-2008. I was trying to think about different ways of getting intellectual work out in the world, continuous with all the writing I've done but in a different register. Read more >>
What is the point of the bombing campaign against Libya? To answer this question, it would be nice if we could reach some certainty about what is going on in Libya itself. But this is not going to be easy, in the absence of specialist knowledge about the parties and players involved in the internal conflict. Certainly, Qaddafi, a world figure of some notoriety, seeks to maintain his power in the face of internal opposition. But who is this opposition? >>
ST Editorial Collective member Michael Ralph shares photos from the 2011 World Social Forum (Dakar, Senegal, February 6th-11th), including a protest outside the Egyptian Embassy just hours before Mubarak's resignation was announced. Patrick Bond and Immanuel Wallerstein share their reflections on WSF 2011.... >>
Periscope
Bird on Fire
Bird on Fire offers many crucial lessons for environmental and climate justice activists. To draw out some of those lessons, Social Text has assembled a group of prominent activist intellectuals to comment on Ross’s important book, as well as an excerpt from the book and a video of a talk that Ross gave at the CUNY Graduate Center. Sandy Bahr is the director of the Sierra Club's Grand Canyon Chapter in Arizona; Kristin Koptiuch is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University; Laura Pulido is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California; and Julie Sze is Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Davis. >>
