ISSUE 1: SPRING 2012
Mashup by Erin R. Anderson
Theory and Method
Introduction: Theory and Method
Patricia Ticineto Clough (Thread Editor)
The Humanities and the University in Ruin
John Mowitt
Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts
Jared Sexton
Response
Christina Sharpe
Mobilisations, Interventions, and Cultural Policy
Introduction: Mobilisations, Interventions, and Cultural Policy
Emma Dowling (Thread Editor)
Urban Interventions / Intervenziones Urbane
Alexander Dellantonio
Postcool: the question of collective organization in postcolonial capitalism as challenged by a small militant group in the Raval, Barcelona
Francesco Salvini
Response - Sandro Mezzadra
nanopolitics: a first outline of our experiments in movement
the nanopolitics group
Universities in Question
Countermapping the University
Countermapping Queen Mary Collective
Manuela Zechner, Tim Stallmann, Maria Catalina Bejarano Soto, Liz Mason-Deese, Rakhee Kewada, Bue Rübner, Mara Ferreri, and Camille Barbagallo
Introduction
Bruce Burgett and Randy Martin (Thread Editors)
The Map | The Game
Countermapping Queen Mary Collective
Interview
Countermapping Queen Mary Collective
Interaction design by Erin R. Anderson
Lateral Moves – Across Disciplines
Miriam Bartha, Bruce Burgett, Randy Martin, Diane Douglas, and Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren
Culture Industries
Culture Industries: Critical Interventions
Toby Miller, Jaafar Aksikas (Thread Editor), and Stefano Harney
Towards a Cultural Study of the Culture Industries:
A Research Resources Guide / Chart
"Nothing gold can stay:"
Labor, Political Economy, and the Birmingham Legacy of the Culture Industries Debate
Sean Andrews
Distributed Centralization: Web 2.0 as a Portal into Users' Lives
Robert W. Gehl
Contributor Biographies
THREAD EDITORS
JAAFAR AKSIKAS (Culture Industries) is Associate Professor and Director of the Cultural Studies Program at Columbia College Chicago. His publications include Practicing Cultural Studies (co-authored with Sean Andrews, forthcoming) and Arab Modernities: Islamism, Nationalism, and Liberalism in the Post-Colonial Arab World (2009).
BRUCE BURGETT (Universities in Question) is Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell and graduate faculty in the Department of English at the University of Washington Seattle. He is the founding director of the UW graduate Certificate in Public Scholarship and a core faculty member in the community-based Master of Arts in Cultural Studies at UW Bothell. He is the author of Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic, and co-editor of Keywords for American Cultural Studies (with Glenn Hendler). He is currently working on a co-edited collection, New Formations of Cultural Studies: Collaboration, Practice, Research, and completing a book project entitled Sex, Panic, Nation. He has taught, researched, and published widely in the fields of American studies, cultural studies, and queer studies. He serves on the editorial and advisory boards of American Quarterly and American Literary History, and the press committee of the University of Washington Press. He is vice president of the executive board of the U.S. Cultural Studies Association and chair of the national advisory board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Humanities Washington.
PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH (Theory and Methods) is professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York. She is author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000); Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse (1994) and The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, (2007) and with Craig Willse, editor of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (2011). She is currently working on Ecstatic Corona: Philosophy and Family Violence, an ethnographic historically researched experimental writing project about where she grew up in Queens New York.
EMMA DOWLING (Mobilisations, Interventions and Cultural Policy) is Lecturer in Ethics, Governance and Accountability at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of 'Producing the Dining Experience -- Measure, Subjectivity and the Affective Worker' (2007) in the issue 7.1 of the journal Ephemera, a special issue about immaterial and affective labour that she co-edited with Ben Trott and Rodrigo Nunes and 'The Waitress -- On Affect, Method and (Re) presentation', in Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies (forthcoming, 2012). She recently contributed to the collection Occupy Everything. Reflections on Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere, edited by A. Lunghi and S. Wheeler (2012, Minor Compositions) and is a contributor to a forthcoming special issue of the journal Social Justice on 'Conflicts within the Crisis.'
RANDY MARTIN (Universities in Question) is professor and chair of art and public policy and director of the graduate program in arts politics. He is the author of Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self; Socialist Ensembles: Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua; Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics; On Your Marx: Relinking Socialism and the Left; Financialization of Daily Life; Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management, and Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor and the Professional Turn. He has edited collections on U.S. Communism, sport and academic labor and, most recently, Artistic Citizenship: A Public Voice for the Arts (with Mary Schmidt Campbell) and The Returns of Alwin Nikolais: Bodies, Boundaries, and the Dance Canon (with Claudia Gitelman). He is past president of the Cultural Studies Association, serves on the board of Imagining America, and was an editor of the journal Social Text.
DESIGN / PRODUCTION
In collaboration with DM@P (Digital Media At Pitt), University of Pittsburgh
JAMIE "SKYE" BIANCO (Design Editor) is the Director of DM@P (Digital Media At Pitt) and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She works in digital media theory and composition and in the critical digital humanities. Recent work includes: "This Digital Humanities Which Is Not One," in the recent Minnesota Press collection, The Debates in Digital Humanities (ed. Matthew Gold), and the creative critical multimedia composition, #inhabitation, published in the inaugural issue of College Composition and Communication Online. Her work has also appeared in several journals, including FibreCulture, Women's Studies Quarterly, and in the collection, The Affective Turn (ed. Patricia Clough). She is the Director of Communications for the Cultural Studies Association
ERIN R. ANDERSON (Web and Multimedia Design) is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh where she teaches, studies, and practices digital media production and multimodal composition. She is the author/designer of "The Olive Project: An Oral History in Multiple Modes," in the Spring 2011 issue of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, and has also published work in Gender, Place, and Culture and Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy. She is currently developing a dissertation project exploring the possibilities for a compositional/material ethics of digital vocality.
FELIPE CASTELBLANCO (Design Assistant) is an MFA student in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University where he works in the areas of media arts and contextual practice. He also has experience developing design projects for non-profit organizations and art festivals in South America and Europe.
CONTRIBUTORS
MORGAN ADAMSON is a lecturer in the department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Her research is focused on visual culture and critical financial studies. She has also been active in writing and organizing around issues of university labor, and co-organized a series of conferences at the University of Minnesota on the crisis of higher education.
SEAN ANDREWS is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Columbia College Chicago. He is co-author (with Jaafar Aksikas) of Practicing Cultural Studies (forthcoming).
CAMILLE BARBAGALLO spent years fighting against the mandatory detention of refugees in Australia before migrating to London. She is currently researching neo-liberal restructuring of the home, gender and reproductive labour.
MIRIAM BARTHA is Associate Director of the University of Washington Simpson Center for the Humanities, co-director of the University of Washington Certificate in Public Scholarship, and affiliate faculty in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington, Bothell.
MARIA CATALINA BEJARANO SOTO, a Colombian who migrated to London interested in learning more about geographies of migration, is now back in Colombia working in the public sector trying to make a difference in the implementation of public policy in rural areas.
ALEXANDER DELLANTONIO studied at the Academy of Art and Design in Bolzano, as well as at the Academy of Fine Art in Florence, Italy. His art practice draws on 1920 avant-garde constructivism, the techniques of collage and décollage, and the reuse of used materials. He takes his inspiration from street life and views his artistic and political activity as intimately interwoven. Over the last two years, he has been very interested in so-called street art, which is one of the guiding threads in his work on tattered manifestos.
DIANE DOUGLAS is the Executive Director of Seattle CityClub, a former Director of the Bellevue Art Museum and co-editor of Choosing Craft, a social and cultural history of the American craft movement. At the time of the "Lateral Moves" interview, she was the Executive Director of Bellevue Community College's Center for Liberal Arts.
MARA FERRERI has worked and studied between visual arts and urban geography, and is currently concerned with anti-gentrification struggles, urban transience, and work and life precarity.
BEGÜM ÖZDEN FIRAT is a political activist and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul. Her field of research includes politics of visual culture, radical arts, and cultures of social movements. She has co-edited Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Rodopi, 2011) and Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory & Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
ROBERT W. GEHL is Assistant Professor of New Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. He is currently at work on a book on the architecture and political economy of social media.
GAVIN GRINDON is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Visual and Material Culture at Kingston University, and has taught previously at Goldsmiths, Birkbeck and Manchester Universities. His research on art and activism has been published in the Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, Art Monthly and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and he has been involved in a number of art-activist collectives.
STEFANO HARNEY, Chair in Strategy, Culture and Society, is the Director of Global Learning for the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Business World (forthcoming) and State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (2002).
RAKHEE KEWADA from Zimbabwe currently lives in London and studies issues of migration. She is soon hoping to pursue PhD research on immigration detention practices and the criminalisation of migrants.
KANTA KOCHHAR-LINDGREN directs Folded Paper Dance and is an Associate Professor in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. A former editor for Theatre Topics (2009-2011), her most recent book is a co-edited volume of essays, The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism's Parlor Game.
LIZ MASON-DEESE is a member of the Counter Cartographies Collective and Edu-Factory Collective and is interested in contemporary forms of labor and the politics of knowledge production. She currently resides in Buenos Aires where she is researching the struggles of the precarious and unemployed to create new ways of living in common.
SANDRO MEZZADRA teaches political theory at the Universty of Bologna. He has been involved in social movements for many years. He has taught and worked in such diverse locations as Buenos Aires and Durham, Berlin and Kolkata, Sydney and Ljubljana. He writes on Autonomist Marxism, borders, migration and postcolonialism.
TOBY MILLER is Distinguished Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author and editor of over 30 volumes, and has published essays in well over 100 journals and books. His most recent publications include Television Studies: The Basics (2010), The Contemporary Hollywood Reader (2009), and Makeover Nation: The United States of Reinvention (2008).
JOHN MOWITT is Professor in the department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota where he has worked since 1985. He currently holds the Imagine Fund Chair in Arts and Humanities and is the author of numerous texts on the topics of culture, theory and politics. His books include: Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Duke UP, 1992); Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking (Duke UP, 2002); Re-Takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages and the co-edited volume, The Dreams of Interpretation: a Century Down the Royal Road, both from the University of Minnesota Press (2005 and 2007 respectively). In 2008 he collaborated with the composer Jarrod Fowler to transmute his book, Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking, from a printed to a sonic text/performance. See/hear "Percussion" as Percussion (Patrick Lovelace Editions). His most recent book, Radio: Essays in Bad Reception, appeared from the University of California Press in December of 2011. He is also a senior co-editor of the journal, Cultural Critique a leading Anglophone academic publication in the field of cultural studies and critical theory.
THE NANOPOLITICS GROUP formed in London, UK, in January 2010, around a desire to think politics with and through experience and the body. As a group we have organized movement, theatre- and somatic based workshops and discussions, and function as a support network across militant experiences, particularly in the UK movements against austerity that have emerged in the wake of the financial and social crisis. At the core, the nanopolitics group is a collective of some eight members who carry the organizational and research process of the group; in its wider circles and networks, there are some thirty people who attend sessions regularly.
BUE RÜBNER HANSEN is establishing himself in the pitfalls between philosophy, political economy and plumbing after years of idle study and bursts of activity within the faltering student movements in UK and Denmark.
FRANCESCO SALVINI is an activist and researcher. He participates in Universidad Nomada and in different autonomous spaces in Barcelona and London. He also works as a translator and is a PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University of London.
JARED SEXTON is Associate Professor and Director of the Program in African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and a co-editor of Critical Sociology 36:1 (2010), a special issue on "Race and the Variations of Discipline."
CHRISTINA SHARPE is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Tufts University where she also directs the Program in American Studies. Her first book is Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects was published by Duke University Press in 2010. She is currently working on her second book project called Memory for Forgetting: Blackness, Whiteness, and Cultures of Surprise.
ADAM SITZE teaches in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College.
TIM STALLMANN is a member of the Counter-Cartographies Collective, where he first learned to make maps, and has also expanded into private practice as a cartographic consultant. In addition to counter-mapping, he kneads dough at an anti-capitalist community bakery and is inching towards a Master's degree in Geography.
MANUELA ZECHNER does post-creative research and struggle in and beyond London, currently focusing on how militant practices take care into account. Her long term engagements include the future archive, a PhD, and several collectives.
