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<p><b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1885">Minor
Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 5 Defund Culture by Any
Means Necessary</a></b><br>
<i>Now available on all the usual podcast platforms.</i></p>
<p><img moz-do-not-send="false"
src="cid:part1.dXuevCBW.hsIVO4uR@gmail.com" alt="" width="800"
height="450"><br>
<br>
<br>
In this episode owe are joined by Gary Hall and Seth Wheeler for a
wide-ranging conversation on cultural funding, radical publishing,
and the changing conditions of collective knowledge production.The
discussion begins with Gary Hall’s recent book <a
href="https://www.mediastudies.press/pub/nb-hall-defund/release/4"><i
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.mediastudies.press/pub/nb-hall-defund/release/4">Defund
Culture</i></a>, which challenges conventional calls to
increase arts funding by asking a more fundamental question: what
– and who – is cultural funding actually for? Rather than
defending existing institutions, Hall proposes that the current
crisis in arts funding might be an opportunity to rethink the
entire landscape, redistributing resources away from entrenched,
upper-middle-class infrastructures toward more collective, plural,
and relational forms of cultural production. <br>
<br>
From there, the conversation moves into the practical and
political challenges of radical publishing today. Reflecting on
projects such as <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://openhumanitiespress.org">Open Humanities Press</a>
and <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://www.agitpress.net">Agit
Press</a>, Hall and Wheeler discuss the tensions between
openness and enclosure in contemporary publishing, the uneven
realities of open access, and the difficulty of sustaining
collective, non-commercial forms of intellectual work. Wheeler
draws on experiences from worker movements to highlight the
historical role of print media – newsletters, pamphlets, and
leaflets – as machines to produce consciousness, capable of
expanding political dialogue beyond academic and activist
enclaves.How do these earlier forms resonate with, and diverge
from, today’s digital platforms? What happens when knowledge
production becomes entangled with the logics of content creation,
personal branding, and algorithmic visibility? The conversation
explores how financial precarity and platform economies shape what
can be said, by whom, and under what conditions: raising questions
about whether genuinely collective and autonomous forms of media
can exist within, or beyond, these systems.<br>
<br>
Ultimately this is a question of infrastructure: how to build
alternative networks for producing and distributing knowledge that
do not simply replicate existing hierarchies. From decentralized
publishing models and cooperative platforms to the enduring
importance of print as a social and organizational process, the
episode maps out both the challenges and the possibilities of
creating new cultural forms grounded in collaboration,
redistribution, and shared intellectual life. Rather than offering
definitive solutions, this conversation opens up a space for
thinking through what it might mean to defend/defund culture by
transforming it – experimenting with new modes of publishing, new
institutional arrangements, and new ways of working together.</p>
<p>-- <br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.minorcompositions.info">https://www.minorcompositions.info</a>
Linktree of all our stuff: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions">https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions</a></pre>
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