"Theories are made only to die in the war of time": Guy Debord & the Situationist International as Strategic Thinkers

The Situationist International has been one of the main reference points during the past forty more years within social movement organizing, cultural studies, social theory, and philosophy concerned with the development of the city. While the SI have been understood in many ways, as inheritors as elaborators of a unorthodox Marxist politics drawing heavily from the history of the avant-garde, relatively little attention has been paid to the specifically strategic dimension of their thought and practice. This is surprising, particular in Debord?s case, given how much his work also draws from the history of military strategy. This paper particular will examine the strategic aspects of Debord and the SI?s thought and politics and how they rethinking the nature of strategy through collective forms of aesthetic-political practice

Sisyphus & the Labor of Imagination: Autonomy, Cultural Production and the Antinomies of Worker Self-Management

Is there any radical potential left in the notion and practices of worker self-management? What I want do in this essay is to try and see if it is possible to distill something of a radical kernel from the many difficulties and complications that confront it, particularly within fields of cultural production. How can self-management contribute to what Jacques Ranciere describes as a movement not of slaves filled with ressentiment, but of people living and embodying a new time of sociability and cooperation, creating resources and skills that can spread out from this, rather than being caught and contained by the conditions of is own creation? Drawing from my own experiences working in Ever Reviled Records, a worker owned and run record label, I want to ferret out--conducting something akin to an organizational autoethnography--hints as to whether or not self-management could be useful for radical social struggles today

Revisiting Jon McKenzie?s Perform or else: Performance, labour and pedagogy

Tim Edkins and Stevphen Shukaitis interviewed Jon McKenzie on 24 March 2013 about his book Perform or else: From discipline to performance (2001a), its current resonance and his recent research. We begin by asking about Perform or else?s playful tone and composition. Then we ask about contemporary labour struggles, including in the state of Wisconsin where he is based as a Professor of English and Director of DesignLab at University of Wisconsin. We end by discussing how he sees the current role of the university. We focus on how DesignLab forms part of his applied research program, based on the multifaceted conception of performance theorised in Perform or else and instantiated in higher education

Ontological transparency, (in)visibility, and hidden curricula:Critical pedagogy and contentious edtech

AbstractThe steady migration of higher education online has accelerated in the wake of Covid-19. The implications of this migration on critical praxis—the theory-in-practice of pedagogy—deserve further scrutiny. This paper explores how teacher and student-led educational technology research and development can help rethink online critical praxis. The paper is based on a recent research project at the University of Edinburgh that speculatively explored the potential for automation in teaching, which generated insights into current and future pedagogical practice among both teachers and students. From this project emerged a series of pedagogical positions that were centred around visions of the future of teaching in response to automation: the pedagogical potential of visibility and invisibility online, transparency, and interrogating the hidden curricula of both higher education and educational technology itself. Through the surfacing of these pedagogical positions, this paper explores how critical pedagogy can be built into the broader teacher function and begins to identify the institutional structures that could potentially impede or accelerate that process.</jats:p

In, Against and Beyond Precarity: Work in Insecure Times

In this Foreword to the special issue ‘In, Against and Beyond Precarity’ the guest editors take stock of the existing literature on precarity, highlighting the strengths and limitations of using this concept as an analytical tool for examining the world of work. Concluding that the overstretched nature of concept has diluted its political effectiveness, the editors suggest instead a focus on precarization as a process, drawing from perspectives that focus on the objective conditions, as well as subjective and heterogeneous experiences and perceptions of insecure employment. Framed in this way, they present a summary of the contributions to the special issue spanning a range of countries and organizational contexts, identifying key drivers, patterns and forms of precarization. These are conceptualized as implicit, explicit, productive and citizenship precarization. These forms and patterns indicate the need to address precariousness in the realm of social reproduction and post-wage politics, while holding these in tension with conflicts at the point of production. Finally, the guest editors argue for a dramatic re-think of current forms of state and non-state social protections as responses to the precarization of work and employment across countries in both the Global ‘North’ and ‘South’