Rachel Liebert, Puleng Segalo, Wen Liu, Hillary Caldwell, Jen Gieseking, and Einat Manoff will present on their recent visit to Israel-Palestine and share reflections on scholar-activist encounters around resistance and participation.
Nate Eisenstadt is a longstanding participant/ethnographic researcher within a number of squatted and autonomous/anarchist spaces in Bristol UK. His work centers around the tension between liberation and new modes of self-governance in these spaces as participants attempt to shift from spectacular and temporary forms of protest to lasting and everyday forms of politics. In this talk he explores this paradox at the level of self in the ways that emancipated subject formation can, without care, easily reproduce the modes of domination it rises against. He looks to emergent anti-oppression praxes for a route through/around some of these problematic tensions.
Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester in its School of Environment and Development. Swyngedouw is committed to political economic analysis of contemporary capitalism, producing several major works on economic globalisation, regional development, finance, and urbanisation. Latterly his interests have turned to political-ecological themes and the transformation of nature, notably water issues, in Ecuador, Spain, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe.
In this landmark book, Hamid Dabashi argues that the revolutionary uprisings that have engulfed multiple countries and political climes from Morocco to Iran and from Syria to Yemen, were driven by a ‘Delayed Defiance’ – a point of rebellion against domestic tyranny and globalized disempowerment alike that signifies no less than the end of Postcolonialism. Sketching a new geography of liberation, Dabashi shows how the Arab Spring has altered the geopolitics of the region so radically that we must begin re-imagining the moral map of ‘the Middle East’ afresh.
The Arab upheaval ignited in Tunisia in December 2010 is now well into its second year. It has overthrown three Arab rulers, in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and forced another to hand over power in Yemen. However, uprisings in Bahrain and Syria have been violently repressed, the latter at the cost of ten thousand lives already. This is while the future of the revolutionary process is uncertain in the four countries where initial victories have been achieved, with electoral processes proving unable to quench the upheaval’s fundamentally social dynamics.
Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Yale University Press, 2011) is an account of industrialized killing from a participant’s point of view. Political scientist Timothy Pachirat, was employed undercover for five months in a Great Plains slaughterhouse where 2,500 cattle were killed per day—one every twelve seconds. Working in the cooler as a liver hanger, in the chutes as a cattle driver, and on the kill floor as a food-safety quality-control worker, Pachirat experienced firsthand the realities of the work of killing in modern society. He uses those experiences to explore not only the slaughter industry but also how, as a society, we facilitate violent labor and hide away that which is too repugnant to contemplate.
Omoyele Sowore is the founder and publisher of the Sahara Reporters, which covers news in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa from a progressive perspective. He started Sahara Reporters as a groundbreaking online forum whose mission is to seek transparency, accountability and democratic character in Africa’s government and private spheres. The forum’s principal goal is to empower all citizens of various African nations to actively demand and defend their democratic rights. Launched in 2006, SaharaReporters receives 8 million pageviews per month. Apart from serving as an indispensable watchdog for African governments, the website also watches the mainstream media […]
A year after the fall of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s government in Tunisia that sparked uprisings all over the Middle East, what is the status of democratic outcomes of the Tunisian revolution? As journalists still fight for freedom of the media and racketeering has erupted in the job market, join Taoufik Ben-Amor (Arabic Studies, Columbia) as he speaks with Peter Hitchcock (Center for Place, Culture and Politics) about the cultural as well as political impact of this historic shift. This conversation finds its home in Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency’s Common Assembly which opens a forum in the James Gallery for discussions of rejuvenation of contested sites […]
