Sunday 25 November 2012
Self care and community care in social movements
Just came across this fascinating conversation on the US Organizing Upgrade site, apparently coming out of debates around the US Social Forum and debating the politics of self-care (on which see also Joshua Stephens' forthcoming workshop). Too complex to summarise but well worth a read!
Friday 23 November 2012
Interface 4/2. For the global emancipation of labour
Just out...
Interface: a journal for and about social movements http://interfacejournal.net
Volume four, issue two (November 2012)
For the global
emancipation of labour: new movements and struggles around work,
workers and precarity
Issue editors: Peter Waterman, Alice Mattoni, Elizabeth Humphrys, Laurence Cox, Ana Margarida Esteves
http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/
Volume four, issue two of Interface, a peer-reviewed e-journal produced and refereed by social movement practitioners and engaged movement researchers, is now out, on the special theme "For the global emancipation of labour: new movements and struggles around work, workers and precarity”
Interface is open-access (free), global and
multilingual. Our overall aim is to "learn from each other's
struggles": to develop a dialogue between practitioners and
researchers,
but also between different social movements, intellectual traditions
and
national or regional contexts. Like all issues of Interface,
this
issue
is free and open-access.
This issue of Interface includes 529 pages and 28 pieces in English and Spanish, by authors writing from / about Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Ecuador, Egypt, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Tunisia, the UK and the US among other countries.
This issue of Interface includes 529 pages and 28 pieces in English and Spanish, by authors writing from / about Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Ecuador, Egypt, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Tunisia, the UK and the US among other countries.
Articles
in
this
issue include:
- Peter
Waterman, Alice Mattoni, Elizabeth Humphrys, Laurence Cox, Ana
Margarida Esteves,
For the global emancipation of labour: new movements and struggles around work, workers and precarity
For the
global emancipation of labour
- Wolfgang
Schaumberg,
Development in China and Germany: another world is possible? (action note) - Dae-Oup Chang,
The neoliberal rise of East Asia and social movements of labour: four moments and a challenge - Joe Sutcliffe,
Labour movements in the global South: a prominent role in struggles against neo-liberal globalisation? (action note) - Stefania Barca,
On working-class environmentalism: a historical and transnational overview - Nora Räthzel and
Peter Uzzell,
Mending the breach between labour and nature: environmental engagements of trade unions and the North-South divide
- Melanie Kryst,
Coalitions of labor unions and NGOs: the room for maneuver of the German Clean Clothes Campaign
- Jean Faniel,
Trade unions and the unemployed: towards a dialectical approach
- Martine D’Amours,
Guy Bellemare and Louise Briand,
Grasping new forms of unionism: the case of childcare services in Quebec - Annalisa Murgia
and Giulia Selmi,
“Inspire and conspire”: Italian precarious workers between self-organization and self-advocacy
- Alberto Arribas
Lozano,
Sobre la precariedad y sus fugas. La experiencia de las Oficinas de Derechos Sociales
- Franco Barchiesi,
Liberation of, through, or from work? Postcolonial Africa and the problem with “job creation” in the global crisis
- Elise Thorburn,
A common assembly: multitude, assemblies, and a new politics of the common
- Godfrey Moase,
A new species of shark: towards direct unionism (action note) - Nicolás Somma,
The Chilean student movement of 2011 – 2012: challenging the marketization of education (event analysis) - Tristan
Partridge,
Organizing process, organizing life: collective responses to precarity in Ecuador (action note) - Peter
Waterman,
An emancipatory global labour studies is necessary! On rethinking the global labour movement in the hour of furnaces
General
articles:
- Jackie Smith,
Connecting social movements and political moments: bringing movement building tools from global justice to Occupy Wall Street activism - Kenneth Good,
Democratisation from Poland to Portugal, 1970s - 1990s and in Tunisia and Egypt since 2010 - Mayssoun
Sukarieh,
From terrorists to revolutionaries: the emergence of “youth” in the Arab world and the discourse of globalization - Corey Wrenn,
The abolitionist approach: critical comparisons and challenges within the animal rights movement - Ángel Calle
Collado,
Marta Soler Montiel, Isabel Vara Sánchez, David Gallar Hernández,
La desafección al sistema agroalimentario: ciudadanía y redes sociales - Tomás Mac Sheoin,
Power imbalances and claiming credit in coalition campaigns: Greenpeace and Bhopal
This
issue’s reviews include
the following titles:
- Ben Selwyn, Workers, state and development in Brazil: powers of labour, chains of value. Reviewed by Ana Margarida Esteves.
- Jai Sen (ed.), Interrogating empires and Imagining alternatives. Reviewed by Guy Lancaster.
- Janet Conway, Edges of global justice: the World Social Forum and its “others”. Reviewed by Mandisi Majavu.
- Alan Bourke, Tia Dafnos and Kip Markus (eds.), Lumpencity: discourses of marginality / marginalizing discourses. Reviewed by Chris Richardson.
- Craig Calhoun, The roots of radicalism: tradition, the public sphere and early nineteenth century social movements. Reviewed by Mandisi Majavu.
A call
for
papers for volume 5
issue 2 of Interface is now open, for pieces on any aspect of
social movement research and practice that fit within our mission
statement
(http://www.interfacejournal.net/who-we-are/mission-statement/).
We
can
review and publish articles in
Afrikaans,
Arabic, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German,
Hungarian,
Italian, Maltese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian,
Spanish,
Swedish, Turkish and Zulu. The website has the full CFP and details on
how to
submit articles for this issue at
http://www.interfacejournal.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Interface-4-2-CFP-vol-5-no-2.pdf
The next issue of Interface (May 2013) will be under the title “Struggles, strategies and analysis of anticolonial and postcolonial social movements”.
The next issue of Interface (May 2013) will be under the title “Struggles, strategies and analysis of anticolonial and postcolonial social movements”.
Tuesday 20 November 2012
"Rethinking self-care: collective liberation and the long haul" workshop
A workshop with Joshua Stephens on the idea of self-care,
sustainability and effecting change on social, political and personal
levels.
Monday 3 December, 6 - 9 pm
NUI Maynooth Dept. of Sociology / research cluster "Critical Political Thought, Activism and Alternative Future''.
Monday 3 December, 6 - 9 pm
Hall AX1, Auxilia building, North Campus, NUI Maynooth
Admission free - all welcome
NEW: Poster for this event now available from Indymedia
Joshua Stephens is a board member with the Institute for Anarchist Studies and has been active in anti-authoritarian movements for the last two decades, drawing from mentors as diverse and dispersed as the Ruckus Society and Murray Bookchin's Institute for Social Ecology in the US, to Zapatistas in southern Mexico and the Popular Resistance Committees in Palestine. His work has spanned coordinating and training participants for direct action struggles around issues both local and international, co-teaching a course on classical and contemporary anarchist traditions at Georgetown University, and co-founding three workers' cooperatives. He lives in Brooklyn, NY where he's active with the Occupy movement, and has recently been traveling and interviewing anarchists in the eastern Mediterranean.
Some of his work in this area can be found (as podcast talk and a transcribed interview) at http://indyreader.org/content/self-and-determination-inward-look-collective-liberation-conversation-joshua-stephens. His posts to the Buddhist Peace Fellowship from Occupy Wall Street can be read here.
Admission free - all welcome
NEW: Poster for this event now available from Indymedia
Joshua Stephens is a board member with the Institute for Anarchist Studies and has been active in anti-authoritarian movements for the last two decades, drawing from mentors as diverse and dispersed as the Ruckus Society and Murray Bookchin's Institute for Social Ecology in the US, to Zapatistas in southern Mexico and the Popular Resistance Committees in Palestine. His work has spanned coordinating and training participants for direct action struggles around issues both local and international, co-teaching a course on classical and contemporary anarchist traditions at Georgetown University, and co-founding three workers' cooperatives. He lives in Brooklyn, NY where he's active with the Occupy movement, and has recently been traveling and interviewing anarchists in the eastern Mediterranean.
Some of his work in this area can be found (as podcast talk and a transcribed interview) at http://indyreader.org/content/self-and-determination-inward-look-collective-liberation-conversation-joshua-stephens. His posts to the Buddhist Peace Fellowship from Occupy Wall Street can be read here.
The Auxilia Building is #47 on this map:
http://www.nuim.ie/location/maps/NUIM-Map-booklet-v3.pdf
An initiative of the MA in Community Education, Equality and Social Activism.NUI Maynooth Dept. of Sociology / research cluster "Critical Political Thought, Activism and Alternative Future''.
Monday 19 November 2012
And now for something entirely different...
The hunt for Dhammaloka:
on the trail of early Irish-Buddhist links
on the trail of early Irish-Buddhist links
28 years unaccounted for...
Use of multiple aliases...
Use of multiple aliases...
Sedition conviction in Burma...
Police surveillance in Ceylon...
Fake death in Australia...
Final whereabouts unknown...
Public seminar with Laurence Cox, Mihirini Sirisena, Rachelann Pisani
In 1900, in a Burma
which had only been conquered by the British Empire 15 years before, an Irish
ex-sailor and ex-hobo was ordained as a Burmese Buddhist monk. Crossing the
boundaries of race and religion, he now became not only a barefoot beggar but a
leading critic of Christian missionaries who used the latest freethinking
(atheist) arguments to make his case that Asians should resist "the Bible,
the Gatling gun and the whisky bottle" brought by colonialism. Over the
next 12 - 14 years he travelled from Japan to Ceylon and from Nepal to
Singapore, confronting the colonial police, facing charges of sedition,
preaching to huge crowds, setting up Buddhist schools, challenging injustice
and corresponding with fellow-atheists and Buddhists around the world.
Dhammaloka's life was an uncomfortable challenge both to colonial assumptions of white and Christian superiority but also to later Asian nationalist accounts of purely national independence struggles. As a result, much of what we know about him comes from his opponents. But he was also keen to obscure his tracks, using many different aliases and on one occasion faking his own death. We cannot be certain as to his date of birth or early life, and the decades before he appears in Burma in his 40s are shrouded in mystery. Was he perhaps a political or trade union radical in the US, and did he have a past to hide from? Or was he a "beachcomber" in India or Ceylon, flying below the colonial radar? When did he die, and why is there no memory of the death of this intensely public figure?
The "Early western Buddhists in Asia" project involves archival research in Ireland, Britain, the USA, India and Sri Lanka in an attempt to track down some of the missing pieces of Dhammaloka's life. It also uses this research to explore further the experience of "poor whites" in colonial Asia, in particular those who "went native", subverting the strict racial hierarchies and their implications for class and gender - as well as the official histories of western Buddhism which privilege "gentleman scholars" rather than these early plebeian "beachcomber Buddhists". It also challenges Irish accounts which present the discovery of Asian Buddhism as a recent phenomenon linked to the 1960s or recent immigration, rather than a centuries-old engagement born out of shared colonial and imperial histories and which already led, in the later 19th century, to a number of Irish conversions to Buddhism - including a mysterious colleague of Dhammaloka's who officiated at the mass conversion of several thousand "untouchable" mine workers to Buddhism in an attempt to break out of Hindu caste structures in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Dhammaloka's life was an uncomfortable challenge both to colonial assumptions of white and Christian superiority but also to later Asian nationalist accounts of purely national independence struggles. As a result, much of what we know about him comes from his opponents. But he was also keen to obscure his tracks, using many different aliases and on one occasion faking his own death. We cannot be certain as to his date of birth or early life, and the decades before he appears in Burma in his 40s are shrouded in mystery. Was he perhaps a political or trade union radical in the US, and did he have a past to hide from? Or was he a "beachcomber" in India or Ceylon, flying below the colonial radar? When did he die, and why is there no memory of the death of this intensely public figure?
The "Early western Buddhists in Asia" project involves archival research in Ireland, Britain, the USA, India and Sri Lanka in an attempt to track down some of the missing pieces of Dhammaloka's life. It also uses this research to explore further the experience of "poor whites" in colonial Asia, in particular those who "went native", subverting the strict racial hierarchies and their implications for class and gender - as well as the official histories of western Buddhism which privilege "gentleman scholars" rather than these early plebeian "beachcomber Buddhists". It also challenges Irish accounts which present the discovery of Asian Buddhism as a recent phenomenon linked to the 1960s or recent immigration, rather than a centuries-old engagement born out of shared colonial and imperial histories and which already led, in the later 19th century, to a number of Irish conversions to Buddhism - including a mysterious colleague of Dhammaloka's who officiated at the mass conversion of several thousand "untouchable" mine workers to Buddhism in an attempt to break out of Hindu caste structures in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Wednesday December 5th,
2.30 – 5 pm
Seminar Room, Sociology Dept., Auxilia, North Campus, NUI Maynooth
Seminar Room, Sociology Dept., Auxilia, North Campus, NUI Maynooth
Admission free but
space is limited –
please email rachelannpisani@gmail.com to book a place
Supported by the Irish Research Council
please email rachelannpisani@gmail.com to book a place
Supported by the Irish Research Council
Sunday 18 November 2012
Overview of 14 November anti-austerity protests
Good report and videos here from the Nov 14th European day of action against austerity. 80% of the workforce on strike in Spain, actions in 30 cities in Portugal, 100 in France, 300,000 on the streets in Italy. Unions coordinated strikes and protests in 23 EU states. The largest European strike ever, as the report claims?
Friday 16 November 2012
The fear of protesting
An excellent article by Emer O'Toole in the Guardian about the Savita case finishes with this:
To her family, I want to say: I am ashamed, I am culpable, and I am sorry. For every letter to my local politician I didn't write, for every protest I didn't join, for keeping quiet about abortion rights in the company of conservative relations and friends, for becoming complacent, for thinking that Ireland was changing, for not working hard enough to secure that change, for failing to create a society in which your wife, your daughter, your sister was able to access the care that she needed: I am sorry. You must think that we are barbarians.
Anyone who is serious about social change in Ireland has met with the reverse of this honesty again and again: the implication that there is something wrong with "protest", "going on the streets", "rent-a-mob", "loud voices", "unrest" and so on. What these kinds of criticisms suggest is that publicly making your views known, challenging injustice, attempting to take action, actively participating in democracy are bad things. It is often not very clear what is felt to be good.
Some people, no doubt, would prefer all power to rest with the government except at election time, so that we can exercise a very general choice (usually between near-identical alternatives) once every few years. Others, it seems, are happy with a world of "opinion" on chat-shows, opinion columns and boards so long as everyone remains quietly in their houses. Others again feel that people like them can exercise all the influence they need, in a telling phrase, "from inside the tent pissing out" (on the rest of us, presumably).
But what we have seen on this issue is how little any of this works in practice. The public argument over abortion was won twenty years ago, when the normal operation of the institutions placed a vulnerable young woman in an impossible situation (she, thankfully, survived the experience). The spontaneous popular response, then as now, was to go on the streets; and that public outrage turned into the 1992 referenda.
Having exercised our popular vote, successive governments have refused to act on that decision for the past twenty years (even while insisting, for example, that it was urgent to legislate against blasphemy a couple of years back for constitutional reasons). As this press release highlights, the mainstream political parties blocked an independent bill on the subject earlier this year. Meanwhile, policy has continued to be made in practice by the Irish Medical Organisation and the religiously-defined ethics boards of Irish hospitals (despite this disingenuous article). This is, as one of the people who condemned Savita to death reportedly said, "a Catholic country".
Emer O'Toole's article asks an important question: given the importance of "ethics" and "morality", what precisely are the ethics of failing to act in response to injustice, of defending the status quo no matter what the cost for vulnerable human beings, of being too afraid that your family or neighbours might notice you having a real principle or taking action to stand up for other human beings in need?
What is the right word for talking about how concerned you are about something while not only failing to take action but letting institutional loyalties dictate what you actually do on the job - as a doctor "just applying rules", a TD "following the party whip", a guard "enforcing the law", or a bureaucrat "assessing your case"? And precisely what gives people whose lives are marked by moral cowardice and hypocrisy the right to judge those who actually attempt to make a difference?
Change for the better in this country has not come from keeping your head down, making the right noises, and following the rules. It has come from active democracy - people going on the streets, disrupting injustice, challenging and breaking unjust laws, supporting the vulnerable, speaking out, organising, publishing outside the mainstream, mobilising, dissenting, developing radical education projects, and developing mass popular action for real equality and a more decent, humane, adult society.
To her family, I want to say: I am ashamed, I am culpable, and I am sorry. For every letter to my local politician I didn't write, for every protest I didn't join, for keeping quiet about abortion rights in the company of conservative relations and friends, for becoming complacent, for thinking that Ireland was changing, for not working hard enough to secure that change, for failing to create a society in which your wife, your daughter, your sister was able to access the care that she needed: I am sorry. You must think that we are barbarians.
Anyone who is serious about social change in Ireland has met with the reverse of this honesty again and again: the implication that there is something wrong with "protest", "going on the streets", "rent-a-mob", "loud voices", "unrest" and so on. What these kinds of criticisms suggest is that publicly making your views known, challenging injustice, attempting to take action, actively participating in democracy are bad things. It is often not very clear what is felt to be good.
Some people, no doubt, would prefer all power to rest with the government except at election time, so that we can exercise a very general choice (usually between near-identical alternatives) once every few years. Others, it seems, are happy with a world of "opinion" on chat-shows, opinion columns and boards so long as everyone remains quietly in their houses. Others again feel that people like them can exercise all the influence they need, in a telling phrase, "from inside the tent pissing out" (on the rest of us, presumably).
But what we have seen on this issue is how little any of this works in practice. The public argument over abortion was won twenty years ago, when the normal operation of the institutions placed a vulnerable young woman in an impossible situation (she, thankfully, survived the experience). The spontaneous popular response, then as now, was to go on the streets; and that public outrage turned into the 1992 referenda.
Having exercised our popular vote, successive governments have refused to act on that decision for the past twenty years (even while insisting, for example, that it was urgent to legislate against blasphemy a couple of years back for constitutional reasons). As this press release highlights, the mainstream political parties blocked an independent bill on the subject earlier this year. Meanwhile, policy has continued to be made in practice by the Irish Medical Organisation and the religiously-defined ethics boards of Irish hospitals (despite this disingenuous article). This is, as one of the people who condemned Savita to death reportedly said, "a Catholic country".
Emer O'Toole's article asks an important question: given the importance of "ethics" and "morality", what precisely are the ethics of failing to act in response to injustice, of defending the status quo no matter what the cost for vulnerable human beings, of being too afraid that your family or neighbours might notice you having a real principle or taking action to stand up for other human beings in need?
What is the right word for talking about how concerned you are about something while not only failing to take action but letting institutional loyalties dictate what you actually do on the job - as a doctor "just applying rules", a TD "following the party whip", a guard "enforcing the law", or a bureaucrat "assessing your case"? And precisely what gives people whose lives are marked by moral cowardice and hypocrisy the right to judge those who actually attempt to make a difference?
Change for the better in this country has not come from keeping your head down, making the right noises, and following the rules. It has come from active democracy - people going on the streets, disrupting injustice, challenging and breaking unjust laws, supporting the vulnerable, speaking out, organising, publishing outside the mainstream, mobilising, dissenting, developing radical education projects, and developing mass popular action for real equality and a more decent, humane, adult society.
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