”Anti-authoritarians have been great at theorizing ‘dismantling the system’, but there is less emphasis on the importance of building alternative institutions. It is no coincidence that the work of growing alternative relations and networks has largely been invisible in our movements because it is gendered labor. Both the dominant political economy and the microcosm of our movements are subsidized by the labor of those who provide childcare, cook meals, do secretarial work and provide emotional support. Even recognizing these as forms of labor is an uphill battle; we are able to articulate critiques of capital and labor in the wage economy but continue to invisibilize care work in the unwaged economy. A transformative politics requires us to rethink, reimagine and reorient work and its relationship to gender and dis/ability—what is the work that makes all other work possible? How do we foster social relations across generations and communities based on interdependency, resilience, vulnerability, and solidarity? Connection is, after all, the anti-thesis of commodification and at the heart of a truly transformative politics.”
Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics is seeking submissions for the journal’s inaugural issue. Abolitionis a collectively run project supporting radical scholarly and activist research, publishing and disseminating work that encourages us to make the impossible possible, to seek transformation well beyond policy changes and toward revolutionary abolitionism. In that spirit, the journal invites submissions that engage with the meaning, practices, and politics of abolitionism in any historical and geographical context. This means that we are interested in a wide interpretation of abolitionism, including topics such as (but in no way limited to): prison and police abolitionism, decolonization, slavery abolitionism, anti-statism, anti-racism, labor organizing, anti-capitalism, radical feminism, queer and trans* politics, Indigenous people’s politics, migrant activism, social ecology, animal rights and liberation, and radical pedagogy. Recognizing that the best movement-relevant intellectual work is happening both in the movements themselves and in the communities with whom they organize, the journal aims to support activists, artists, and scholars whose work amplifies such grassroots activity. We encourage submissions across a range of formats and approaches – scholarly essays, art, poetry, multi-media, interviews, field notes, documentary, etc. – that are presented in an accessible manner.
Abolition seeks to publish a wide variety of work and this call is open to various forms of writing and creative material. While strict word limits will not be enforced, we suggest the following ranges for submissions:
Short Interventions (1000-2000 words);
Scholarly Papers (5000-10000 words);
Interviews (3000-5000 words);
Creative Works (open).
All submissions will be reviewed in a manner consistent with the journal’s mission. We are building relationships for a new kind of peer review that can serve as an insurgent tool to work across and even subvert the academic-activist divide and reject hierarchical definitions of “peers.” Thus, our Collective and Editorial Review Board are comprised of individuals who approach abolitionism from varied personal, political, and structural positions. Unlike most journals, our review process includes non-academic activists and artists in addition to academics. Editorial decisions will be made according to principles of anti-hierarchical power, democratic consensus, and with a preference for work produced by members of under-represented groups in the academy and publishing. For more information about the journal, please see our website,http://abolitionjournal.org. All of our publications will be accessible, free, and open access, rejecting the paywalls of the publishing industry. We will also produce hard-copy versions for circulation to communities lacking internet access and actively work to make copies available to persons incarcerated and detained by the state.
To be considered for Issue One, please submit completed work (including papers, interviews, works of art, etc.) by January 15, 2016. Submissions and inquiries can be sent to [email protected].
”Anti-authoritarians have been great at theorizing ‘dismantling the system’, but there is less emphasis on the importance of building alternative institutions. It is no coincidence that the work of growing alternative relations and networks has largely been invisible in our movements because it is gendered labor. Both the dominant political economy and the microcosm of our movements are subsidized by the labor of those who provide childcare, cook meals, do secretarial work and provide emotional support. Even recognizing these as forms of labor is an uphill battle; we are able to articulate critiques of capital and labor in the wage economy but continue to invisibilize care work in the unwaged economy. A transformative politics requires us to rethink, reimagine and reorient work and its relationship to gender and dis/ability—what is the work that makes all other work possible? How do we foster social relations across generations and communities based on interdependency, resilience, vulnerability, and solidarity? Connection is, after all, the anti-thesis of commodification and at the heart of a truly transformative politics.”
Abolitionis seeking submissions by artists for our inaugural issue.
Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics is a new radical journal which highlights work that encourages us to make the impossible possible, to push beyond policy changes and toward revolutionary abolitionism. Today we seek to abolish a number of seemingly immortal institutions, drawing inspiration from those who have sought the abolition of all systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression. ‘Abolition’ refers partly to the historical and contemporary movements that have identified themselves as ‘abolitionist,’ but it also refers to all revolutionary movements, insofar as they have abolitionist elements — whether the abolition of patriarchy, capitalism, heteronormativity, ableism, colonialism, the state, or white supremacy. Rather than just seeking to abolish a list of oppressive institutions, we aim to support studies of the entanglement of different systems of oppression and to create space for experimentation with the tensions between different movements. Instead of assuming one homogenous subject as our audience (e.g., “abolitionists of the world unite!”), we publish for multiple, contingent, ambivalent subjectivities — for people coming from different places, living and struggling in different circumstances, and in the process of figuring out who we want to be as we transform the world. With Fanon, we are “endlessly creating” ourselves.
In this struggle, we see the voices of artists, and unique insights possible through the arts, as fundamental in both speaking back to existing systems of oppression and imagining different futures. Against the dominance of ‘academic’ rhetoric, Abolition affirms a multiplicity of ways of knowing the world. We aim to include art in the journal, not as simply illustration or supplement, but as a theory/practice of engaging with the world itself. This is a specific acknowledgement that academia (and also the written word, with whatever cultural understandings the primacy of literacy implies) doesn’t have a monopoly on knowledge or on working towards different futures. Art adds to conversations about abolition in crucial ways. Recognizing that the best movement-relevant work is happening both in the movements themselves and in the communities with whom they organize, the journal aims to support and feature artists whose work amplifies such grassroots activity. We invite submissions by artists working and creating outside the ‘white cube’ circuit whose individual practice, themes or interventions engage with the goals ofAbolitionin a meaningful way. We understand ‘art’ broadly to include many different forms and media: painting, video, drawing, poetry, multi-media, documentary, among others.
Please submit a short (200-300 word) artist statement, visual images in pdf format, online portfolio or website, or other documentation that you feel best represents your work and practice to [email protected] by January 15th, 2016.
Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics is seeking submissions for the journal’s inaugural issue. Abolitionis a collectively run project supporting radical scholarly and activist research, publishing and disseminating work that encourages us to make the impossible possible, to seek transformation well beyond policy changes and toward revolutionary abolitionism. In that spirit, the journal invites submissions that engage with the meaning, practices, and politics of abolitionism in any historical and geographical context. This means that we are interested in a wide interpretation of abolitionism, including topics such as (but in no way limited to): prison and police abolitionism, decolonization, slavery abolitionism, anti-statism, anti-racism, labor organizing, anti-capitalism, radical feminism, queer and trans* politics, Indigenous people’s politics, migrant activism, social ecology, animal rights and liberation, and radical pedagogy. Recognizing that the best movement-relevant intellectual work is happening both in the movements themselves and in the communities with whom they organize, the journal aims to support activists, artists, and scholars whose work amplifies such grassroots activity. We encourage submissions across a range of formats and approaches – scholarly essays, art, poetry, multi-media, interviews, field notes, documentary, etc. – that are presented in an accessible manner.
Abolition seeks to publish a wide variety of work and this call is open to various forms of writing and creative material. While strict word limits will not be enforced, we suggest the following ranges for submissions:
Short Interventions (1000-2000 words);
Scholarly Papers (5000-10000 words);
Interviews (3000-5000 words);
Creative Works (open).
All submissions will be reviewed in a manner consistent with the journal’s mission. We are building relationships for a new kind of peer review that can serve as an insurgent tool to work across and even subvert the academic-activist divide and reject hierarchical definitions of “peers.” Thus, our Collective and Editorial Review Board are comprised of individuals who approach abolitionism from varied personal, political, and structural positions. Unlike most journals, our review process includes non-academic activists and artists in addition to academics. Editorial decisions will be made according to principles of anti-hierarchical power, democratic consensus, and with a preference for work produced by members of under-represented groups in the academy and publishing. For more information about the journal, please see our website,http://abolitionjournal.org. All of our publications will be accessible, free, and open access, rejecting the paywalls of the publishing industry. We will also produce hard-copy versions for circulation to communities lacking internet access and actively work to make copies available to persons incarcerated and detained by the state.
To be considered for Issue One, please submit completed work (including papers, interviews, works of art, etc.) by January 15, 2016. Submissions and inquiries can be sent to [email protected].
Whenever we tried to change anything at my college, they would create a committee to elect a committee that would select the committee to make the change. It would never get done.
Though I’m not able to go hoard books at an actual and physical Manila International Book Fair (MIBF), I’m glad that I get to have the opportunity to know more Filipino writers and books that try to recover and reimagine the Filipino history and culture through webinars like this.
Charlie’s book, Children of the Postcolony, is a collection of essays about the Filipino intellectuals “who have contributed to the foundation of the cultural archive of decolonization“ namely Edith L. Tiempo, Fernando Zobel, Bienvenido L. Lumbera, E. San Juan, Jr, and Jose Maria Sison that raise a few concerns about the Filipino decolonization:
How would Filipinos be able to break free from the corruption of the American interference?
How was the interference affected the forgetting of the early history of the postcolony?
How do we go about the process of reconstruction when contamination is inevitable?
Is Filipinization a Filipino idea or an American one- is it a corrupted idea or a revolutionary idea?
Charlie said that the book wasn’t meant to criticize the past, but to provoke the scholars and students to “reconstruct those lost years in Filipino memory.”
Hoping to attend more webinars of this kind. There are two more events for the month of November which you can attend:
If you’re genuinely interested in learning more about settler colonialism and answering questions like “wait what does land back look like?” “What can I do?” and “What are the contexts informing this and why do Indigenous people reject being part of the US/Canada?” there are free syllabi online which can answer these questions (they will not answer it directly, the point is to get you to think for yourself and ask more questions that can lead you to thinking more deeply about this and how you can personally take action towards better practices of solidarity)
These are limited resources that mainly deal with North America and English-speaking countries, because that’s the context I am coming from. If you have resources from other regions and other languages, I welcome them here, or anything from your local context.
“We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the triumph of the revolution. Women hold up the other half of the sky”
—
Thomas Sankara (Marxist revolutionary, Pan-Africanist theorist and President of Burkina Faso from 1983-87)
“We realize that some people who happen to be Jewish and who support Israel will use the Black Panther Party’s position that is against imperialism and against the agents of the imperialist as an attack of anti-Semitism. We think that is a backbiting racist underhanded tactic and we will treat it as such. We have respect for all people, and we have respect for the right of any people to exist. So we want the Palestinian people and the Jewish people to live in harmony together. We support the Palestinian’s just struggle for liberation one hundred percent. We will go on doing this, and we would like for all of the progressive people of the world to join our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live.” (On the Middle East, Huey Newton)
May 1st, 1946: The Pilbara strike, a strike by indigenous Australian pastoral workers for human rights, fair wages, and better working conditions, begins. It involved more than 800 workers walking off from their jobs and lasted for over three years.
Strikers were met with violence and unlawful arrest but ultimately won their demands. The 1946 Pilbara strike is remembered as the first and one of the longest industrial strikes by Aboriginal people since colonization.
FREE high resolution 12” x 18” poster honoring Sharice Davids, Nathan Phillips, and Deb Haaland. RESPECT INDIGENOUS UPRISING ✊ The future called and asked us to commemorate this moment. We have always been here resisting white fuckery in a heteropatriarchal settler colonial nation state that violently forced some of us to convert to western religious mythology. As with all our posters, feel liberated to share, print, repost, disseminate & wheatpaste at will!
Much of my research deals with the ways in which bodies are disciplined and how they go about resisting that discipline. In this piece, adapted from one of the answers to my PhD preliminary exams written and defended two months ago, I “name the disciplinary strategies that are used to control bodies and discuss the ways that bodies resist those strategies.” Additionally, I address how strategies of embodied control and resistance have changed over time, and how identifying and existing as a cyborg and/or an artificial intelligence can be understood as a strategy of control, resistance, or both.
In Jan Golinski’s Making Natural Knowledge, he spends some time discussing the different understandings of the word “discipline” and the role their transformations have played in the definition and transmission of knowledge as both artifacts and culture. In particular, he uses the space in section three of chapter two to discuss the role Foucault has played in historical understandings of knowledge, categorization, and disciplinarity. Using Foucault’s work in Discipline and Punish, we can draw an explicit connection between the various meanings “discipline” and ways that bodies are individually, culturally, and socially conditioned to fit particular modes of behavior, and the specific ways marginalized peoples are disciplined, relating to their various embodiments.
This will demonstrate how modes of observation and surveillance lead to certain types of embodiments being deemed “illegal” or otherwise unacceptable and thus further believed to be in need of methodologies of entrainment, correction, or reform in the form of psychological and physical torture, carceral punishment, and other means of institutionalization.
1) The logic isn’t that race doesn’t matter, the logic is that individuals can be racist, and systems can be racist and all they require are complicit operators.
2) Unfortunately, the entirety of American history is a race issue. The concept of race in its modern form was born here. It began with the extermination and subjugation of the indigenous people (celebrated in Cowboy and Indian movies) and the violence against the African populations stolen in the Atlantic Slave Trade and plantation life.
3) Policing did not begin with Civil Rights, slavery existed in the North, and racial discrimination was the law of much our country until 1964-65 when it was forcibly removed by the Federal Government. For example:
And so policing (especially on the local level) existed to maintain the status quo, that status quo was slavery, later that status quo became Jim Crow, and today that status quo is racist and class-based oppression.
In the contemporary American context, police officers can be of many ethnic or cultural backgrounds. The POC police officer need not be racist for their actions and the system to be racist, they need only be complicit with racist orders– and by being complicit they become part of the racist structure.
american leftists seem extremely focused on anti imperialism (good) but rarely- if at all- discuss decolonization in their own fucking country, despite acknowledging that it is a settler colonial state.
im serious about this though. as an urban indian, i definitely cant speak on this as much as a rez indian could. but i know from talking to rez friends i have and from what the american indian movement has screamed for over the years that we need land we can grow on, we need clean water, we need to allow the wildlife that once lived in this land to live here again (meaning you need to listen to us before building those high speed rails you all get so hard over).
you cant drool over the zapatistas while ignoring people in your own country who have a similar goal
silly me I never provided things to read on the topic of decolonization! I’d personally suggest the following as “beginner level” essential reading to understand decolonization:
Discourse on Colonialism (Aimé Césaire) - this is more a focus on colonization, but I feel it’s a necessary read in my opinion as in order to understand decolonization I believe it’s important to first understand colonization.
Wretched of the Earth (Franz Fanon)
Decolonization is Not a Metaphor (Tuck, Yang)
also an “easy to process” read, to understand landback specifically here in Turtle Island, I’d suggest reading The Red Deal (there is a pdf, I don’t mean the article with the same title)
Such an important topic and their food is delish! I’ve been blessed to eat with them a couple times and am anxiously awaiting the new restaurant that is coming.
Really? I want to try it so bad too!
ok but they mentioned colorado does that mean I can travel in my car to a place where someone cooks indigenous food because i am so down
Okay this is cool and cause Sam Neill is a kiwi and I was just thinking about what a new NZ flag could look like, heres the nz flag with the Maori flag instead of the union jack:
The maori flag looks so cool what the heck
I’ve seen this post a few times but now someone’s brought in the NZ flag I think there’s a clear opportunity for a teaching moment - when we had a flag referendum a few years ago, the kaitiaki of the tino rangatiratanga flag (the one shown here as the ‘Māori flag’) did not want it to be one of the options because they did not want it appropriated by the Crown. The tino rangatiratanga flag symbolises Māori sovereignty, and taking it and plunking it on the NZ flag is…exactly the sort of surface-level appropriation of Māori culture that the tino rangatiratanga movement is emphatically against. I’m not trying to argue that every Māori person would oppose this, but I know many, many people would; and I am confident that the people who have the right to decide what is done with this flag would. This kind of change could only ever be something offered as a gift, not taken.
I’ve always looked at the first part of this post and wondered: did Sam Neill (who is Pākehā) consult any Aboriginal people before he decided to make this costuming choice? I understand what he was trying to do, and it was clearly well-intentioned. But white Europeans have been in this part of the world for three hundred years now taking stuff because they think it’s cool. We have to be extra assiduous to not let ‘decolonial’ actions turn into stealing stuff with a different hat.
Much of my research deals with the ways in which bodies are disciplined and how they go about resisting that discipline. In this piece, adapted from one of the answers to my PhD preliminary exams written and defended two months ago, I “name the disciplinary strategies that are used to control bodies and discuss the ways that bodies resist those strategies.” Additionally, I address how strategies of embodied control and resistance have changed over time, and how identifying and existing as a cyborg and/or an artificial intelligence can be understood as a strategy of control, resistance, or both.
In Jan Golinski’s Making Natural Knowledge, he spends some time discussing the different understandings of the word “discipline” and the role their transformations have played in the definition and transmission of knowledge as both artifacts and culture. In particular, he uses the space in section three of chapter two to discuss the role Foucault has played in historical understandings of knowledge, categorization, and disciplinarity. Using Foucault’s work in Discipline and Punish, we can draw an explicit connection between the various meanings “discipline” and ways that bodies are individually, culturally, and socially conditioned to fit particular modes of behavior, and the specific ways marginalized peoples are disciplined, relating to their various embodiments.
This will demonstrate how modes of observation and surveillance lead to certain types of embodiments being deemed “illegal” or otherwise unacceptable and thus further believed to be in need of methodologies of entrainment, correction, or reform in the form of psychological and physical torture, carceral punishment, and other means of institutionalization.
(Cite as: Williams, Damien P. “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture,” talk given at the 2019 Conference for the Society for the Social Studies of Science, September 2019)
Thank you, everybody, for being here. I’m going to stand a bit far back from this mic and project, I’m also probably going to pace a little bit. So if you can’t hear me, just let me know. This mic has ridiculouslygood pickup, so I don’t think that’ll be a problem.
So the conversation that we’re going to be having today is titled as “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture.”
I’m using the term “SFF” to stand for “science fiction and fantasy,” but we’re going to be looking at pop culture more broadly, because ultimately, though science fiction and fantasy have some of the most obvious entrees into discussions of STS and how making doing culture, society can influence technology and the history of fictional worlds can help students understand the worlds that they’re currently living in, pop Culture more generally, is going to tie into the things that students are going to care about in a way that I think is going to be kind of pertinent to what we’re going to be talking about today.
So why we are doing this: Why are we teaching it with science fiction and fantasy? Why does this matter? I’ve been teaching off and on for 13 years, I’ve been teaching philosophy, I’ve been teaching religious studies, I’ve been teaching Science, Technology and Society. And I’ve been coming to understand as I’ve gone through my teaching process that not only do I like pop culture, my students do? Because they’re people and they’re embedded in culture. So that’s kind of shocking, I guess.
But what I’ve found is that one of the things that makes students care the absolute most about the things that you’re teaching them, especially when something can be as dry as logic, or can be as perhaps nebulous or unclear at first, I say engineering cultures, is that if you give them something to latch on to something that they are already from with, they will be more interested in it. If you can show to them at the outset, “hey, you’ve already been doing this, you’ve already been thinking about this, you’ve already encountered this, they will feel less reticent to engage with it.”
The history of biotechnological intervention on the human body has always been tied to conceptual frameworks of disability and mental health, but certain biases and assumptions have forcibly altered and erased the public awareness of that understanding. As humans move into a future of climate catastrophe, space travel, and constantly shifting understanding s of our place in the world, we will be increasingly confronted with concerns over who will be used as research subjects, concerns over whose stakeholder positions will be acknowledged and preferenced, and concerns over the kinds of changes that human bodies will necessarily undergo as they adapt to their changing environments, be they terrestrial or interstellar. Who will be tested, and how, so that we can better understand what kinds of bodyminds will be “suitable” for our future modes of existence?[1] How will we test the effects of conditions like pregnancy and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in space, and what will happen to our bodies and minds after extended exposure to low light, zero gravity, high-radiation environments, or the increasing warmth and wetness of our home planet?
During the June 2018 “Decolonizing Mars” event at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, several attendees discussed the fact that the bodyminds of disabled folx might be better suited to space life, already being oriented to pushing off of surfaces and orienting themselves to the world in different ways, and that the integration of body and technology wouldn’t be anything new for many people with disabilities. In that context, I submit that cyborgs and space travel are, always have been, and will continue to be about disability and marginalization, but that Western society’s relationship to disabled people has created a situation in which many people do everything they can to conceal that fact from the popular historical narratives about what it means for humans to live and explore. In order to survive and thrive, into the future, humanity will have to carefully and intentionally take this history up, again, and consider the present-day lived experience of those beings—human and otherwise—whose lives are and have been most impacted by the socioethical contexts in which we talk about technology and space.
This paper explores some history and theories about cyborgs—humans with biotechnological interventions which allow them to regulate their own internal bodily process—and how those compare to the realities of how we treat and consider currently-living people who are physically enmeshed with technology. I’ll explore several ways in which the above-listed considerations have been alternately overlooked and taken up by various theorists, and some of the many different strategies and formulations for integrating these theories into what will likely become everyday concerns in the future. In fact, by exploring responses from disabilities studies scholars and artists who have interrogated and problematized the popular vision of cyborgs, the future, and life in space, I will demonstrate that our clearest path toward the future of living with biotechnologies is a reengagement with the everyday lives of disabled and other marginalized persons, today.
SoThe U.S. Transhumanist Party recently released some demographic info on their first 1,000 members, and while they seem to be missing some some rather crucial demographic markers, here, such as age and ethnicity, the gender breakdown is about what you’d expect.
I mention this because back at the end of June I attended the Decolonizing Mars Unconference, at the Library of Congress in D.C. It was the first time I had been in those buildings since I was a small child, and it was for such an amazing reason.
We discussed many topics, all in the interest of considering what it would really mean to travel through space to another planet, and to put humans and human interests there, longterm. Fundamentally, our concern was, is it even possible to do all of this without reproducing the worst elements of the colonialist projects we’ve seen on Earth, thus far, and if so, how do we do that?
