Peter Linebaugh is our Commons Seminar guest lecturer talking about his work on the commons in Stop Thief (chapters 3 and 4). He will speak to us on Friday, April 1, 2-4 pm in GC Room 5318.
He is also doing a book launch for his new book on May Day. This event will be Thursday, March 31 at 6:30pm in the GC Anthropology Lounge (room 6402).
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This event is free and open to the public.
Friday Feb 19, 2-4pm
David Harvey
Rebel Cities and Urban Commons
ARC Seminar Room 5318
Wednesday October 7, Vicenc Navarro
All Welcome
Two Events:
Vicenc Navarro is a Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Professor of Public Policy in Barcelona, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pampeu Fabra, Barcelona.
Tuesday, October 20, 6:30pm
Sylvia Federicci and George Caffentzis
Commons Against and Beyond Capitalism
ARC Seminar Room 5318
NOTE: The paper by Federicci and Caffentzis, “Commons Against and Beyond Capitalism,” is available online at http://cdj.oxfordjournals.org/content/49/suppl_1/i92.full.
Silvia Federici is a long time feminist activist, teacher and writer.
She was a co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, the New York Wages For Housework Committee, the Radical Philosophy Association Anti-Death Penalty Project and the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. She has taught at the University of Port Harcourt (Nigeria) and Hofstra University.She has authored many essays on feminist theory and history. Her published books include: “Revolution at Point Zero,” “Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation”; “Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and its Others” (editor); “Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities” (co-editor).
George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective and a coordinator of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa.He has taught in many universities in the US and at the University of Calabar (Nigeria). He has written many essays on social and political themes. His published books include”In Letters of Blood and Fire,” “Clipped Coins, Abused Words and Civil Government: John Locke’s Philosophy of Money, “Exciting the Industry of Mankind: George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Money”; “Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles in the Fourth World War”; “Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities.”
Inequality and the Commons Seminar: African Popular Movements
Students interested in planning for the Anthro course in the Spring: Inequality and the Commons, we have a meeting at 5:30pm in the same room.
The Protester, the Performer and a Common Political Imagination
Ruchi Chaturvedi
Recent popular protests in various parts of Africa, and the acclaimed Nigerian artist Jelili Atiku’s street performance during the 2012 ‘Occupy Nigeria’ movement are the key pivots of this presentation. I regard the protests and Atiku’s performance against the backdrop of writings on the so-called ‘lumpenproletariat,’ politics of the informal in Africa, and critical postcolonial perspectives on republican democracy. Together they enable us to reconstruct and reimagine the figure of the protester, her self, resistance, the place of the everyday and the common therein, and the very nature of the democracy we might aspire to.
Ruchi Chaturvedi is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town. Her work primarily focuses on popular politics, cultures of democracy, and violence in postcolonial contexts. In the past, her research has been set in South India; her current project examines that relationship in more comparative frames—between parts of Africa and South Asia while taking greater cognizance of the recent economic transformations in these regions.
Ruchi received her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. From 2008-2012 she was an Assistant Professor at Hunter College, CUNY, and has been a visiting fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Makerere Institute of Social Research, University of Makerere, Kampala; and the Center for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town.
‘Becoming Post-apartheid: Citizenship and the Legacies of Indirect Rule’
‘This presentation outlines a research project that investigates the question of whether we can claim, after the Marikana massacre, to be postapartheid without contending with the legacy of the fusion of ethnicity, citizenship and territorial power in South Africa.”
Suren Pillay is Associate Professor at the Center for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. He has published on issues of violence, citizenship and justice claims. With Chandra Sriram he is co-editor of the book, Truth vs Justice? The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice in Africa (London: James Currey, 2011) He has an Mphil, and a Phd in Anthropology from Columbia University. Suren is currently completing two book manuscripts- a study of state violence in the period of late apartheid; and a study of citizenship, violence and the politics of difference in post apartheid South Africa. His current research also focuses on experiments in cultural sovereignty in postcolonial Africa in the sphere of knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences. Suren has been a visiting fellow at Jawarhalal Nehru University, India, the Makerere Institute for Social Research, Uganda, the Center for African Studies, Univ. of Cape Town, and the Center for Social Difference, Columbia University. He is a previous editor of the journal Social Dynamics, blogs for Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), and has published widely in the press.
Room 5318
ABSTRACT:
The May 15 Indignados movement begun with the spontaneous occupation of the main Madrid public space and quickly established a huge laboratory of commons where a web of assembles and task-groups produced new protocols for collective, horizontal and inclusive, decision making and action. Its extension to the neighbors and to several “mareas” (waves) in defense of specific welfare services won a broad support in all sectors of society, but only few partial successes, and none substantial policy change. In spite of that, the 15M opened a new political cycle not only because it showed the power (and limitations) of mass mobilization but also because its contribution to people’s self-confidence and to certify the inability of the old political actors. The assessment of this situation as an opportunity to challenge the political arrangements set up after Franco Regime led to diverse municipalist initiatives and, finally, to Podemos party. We will discuss the new opportunities, the challenges and also the risks that the rising of Podemos poses to political and social change in Spain under the light of the achievements at European, regional and local elections.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Hector Grad is Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the Department of Social Anthropology of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He received PhD in Social Psychology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (1999), after BA and MA studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He is engaged in interdisciplinary national and international research studying how the coloniality and the “civic” and “ethnic” constructions of nationalism affect the relation between the national and other geopolitical (regional, supranational) identities and inter-ethnic relations in metropolitan societies.
He is also involved in the study of resistances to gentrification, and in participatory urban design – where anthropological, and action-research field methods bring community voices and empowerment into the architectural, creative-technical, process of urban planning and design.
Hector has participated in Madrid 15M-Occupy and in the defense of public universities against neo-liberal policies. He is currently involved in the building of Podemos party, the main political development of these movements, in the areas of Higher Education and of International policy.
