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Greetings,<br>
<br>
Here’s information about some new books and events: <br>
<br>
1. New books: Squatting in Europe; The Undercommons<br>
2. Event: The Shape of the Contemporary Workplace – May 27@ 2pm<br>
3. Upcoming tabling: London Radical Bookfair & Balkans Anarchist
Bookfair<br>
<br>
<b>1. New books:</b><br>
<br>
<b>Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles</b><br>
Edited by the Squatting Europe Kollective<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=504">http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=504</a><br>
<br>
Squatting in Europe aims to move beyond the conventional
understandings of squatting, investigating its history in Europe
over the past four decades. Historical comparisons and analysis
blend together in these inquiries into squatting in the Netherlands,
Italy, Spain, France, Germany and England. In it members of SqEK
(Squatting Europe Kollective) explore the diverse, radical, and
often controversial nature of squatting as a form of militant
research and self-managed knowledge production.<br>
<br>
Essays by Miguel Martínez, Gianni Piazza, Hans Pruijt, Pierpaolo
Mudu, Claudio Cattaneo, Andre Holm, Armin Kuhn, Linus Owens,
Florence Bouillon, Thomas Aguilera, and ETC Dee.<br>
<br>
“Amidst the proliferation of post-political banter, it is refreshing
to see the time-tested politics of pre-figurative direct action
being taking so seriously. This is a must-read for anybody who
wants to better understand how the politics of squatting offer a set
of transformative strategies for a creating a more egalitarian
world. Furthermore, this collection illustrates how such
transformative politics so often start in the world’s cities through
deliberate organizing and thoughtful reflection by committed groups
of activists, scholars and everyday citizens.” – Nik Heynen,
University of Georgia<br>
<br>
--<br>
<br>
<b>The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study</b><br>
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=516">http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=516</a><br>
<br>
In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the
theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports,
inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and
aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds
itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the
proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the
management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of
life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an
array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped.
On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the
essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the
self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day
and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.<br>
<br>
“This is a powerful book, made of words and sounds, crisscrossed by
subversion and love, written and studied ‘with and for,’ as Stefano
Harney and Fred Moten put it. The roar of the battle is never
distant while reading The Undercommons. The London riots and occupy,
practices of refusal, marronage and flight, slave revolts and
anti-colonial uprisings frame a challenging rethinking of concepts
such as policy and planning, debt and credit, governance and
logistics. The Undercommons is a homage to the black radical
tradition, to its generative and constituent power before the task
of imagining ‘dispossessed feelings in common’ as the basis of a
renewed communism.” – Sandro Mezzadra<br>
<br>
<b>2. The Shape of the Contemporary Workplace – May 27@ 2pm</b><br>
Auto Italia South East<br>
Unit 2, 3 York Way, King’s Cross, N1C 4AE<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://autoitaliasoutheast.org/projects/immaterial-labour-isnt-working/">http://autoitaliasoutheast.org/projects/immaterial-labour-isnt-working/</a><br>
<br>
How is a contemporary workplace organised? In Fordist workplaces,
time and motion studies monitored workers’ activity in order to make
the industrial process more efficient and productive. In response,
workers and intellectuals in post-war Italy began mapping their own
workplaces in order to better plot resistance and sabotage. How can
we, as workers within the ‘new economy’ begin to understand our own
working conditions? Joanna Figiel and Stevphen Shukaitis
(Metropolitan Factory: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://metropolitanfactory.wordpress.com/">http://metropolitanfactory.wordpress.com/</a>)
will look at contemporary working conditions for precarious workers
within the arts, culture and education and how we understand our own
working lives.<br>
<br>
Joanna Figiel is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Culture
Policy Management, City University London. Her research focuses on
labour issues, precarity and policy within the creative and cultural
sectors. She completed her MA at the Centre for Cultural Studies,
Goldsmiths. She is a member of the editorial collective of ephemera.<br>
<br>
Stevphen Shukaitis is an editor at Autonomedia and lecturer at the
University of Essex. He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy
& Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (2009,
Autonomedia) and editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of
Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective
Theorization (AK Press, 2007). Previously he has worked for as
producer for Ever Reviled Records and WBAI (both in the New York
City metropolitan region), and is all too familiar with the
contradictions of trying to survive as a creative worker today. <br>
<br>
<b>3. Upcoming tabling:</b><br>
London Radical Bookfair May 11:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://londonradicalbookfair.wordpress.com/">http://londonradicalbookfair.wordpress.com/</a><br>
Balkan Anarchist Bookfair May 24-26th, Ljubljana:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.a-federacija.org/2013/01/26/balkan-anarchist-bookfair-2013/">http://www.a-federacija.org/2013/01/26/balkan-anarchist-bookfair-2013/</a><br>
<br>
--<br>
<br>
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations
drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the
revolutions of everyday life.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.minorcompositions.info">http://www.minorcompositions.info</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.facebook.com/groups/255105881183214/">http://www.facebook.com/groups/255105881183214/</a><br>
<br>
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