Debby | 16 Dec 2015

Notes on the the Activist, the Academic, and Digital Media

Dark Side Anthropology: The art of financial culture hacking

  • @suitpossum - Brett Scott
  • Social science of finance
    • ‘Objective’ social science, leaving political affiliations aside
    • Implicitly endorses finances
  • Activists launch campaigns, but they don’t know the financial system
    • Misleading ideas that actually help the financial system
  • Got a job in brokerage
  • Breaking the boundaries between:
    • Undercover
    • Mainstream person
    • Reformed person
  • Activists vs. financial professionals

Subdisciplines and Constraints

  • Immersive Anthropology
    • Controversial: pushing to the pure participation side
  • Activist Anthropology
    • Leading Leftist, e.g. David Graeber
    • Anarchist strand
  • Upward Anthropology
  • The problem is that it’s still anthropology
    • Ethical criteria

Ambiguity

  • Investgonzo journalism
  • Nellie Bly

Being with Activist Groups

  • Knowledge
  • Human dynamics & empathy
  • Embracing uncertainty: the systems don’t have strict ways of working
  • Dark side hybridization: spontaneous abhorrence -> should be overcome, being in and out of these systems out of moral horror (e.g. Blade)

Anarchy in the Academy

  • Sandra Jeppesen
  • The Presumed Gap
    • activist non-researchers or non-activist researchers
    • activists: practices
    • academia: theories
  • Assumptions and Transgressions
    • All research is subjective and ideological
    • University hierarchy can invisibly marginalize anarchist researchers
    • Embodied experience of researcher-activist (of oppression, of activism) produces legitimate expertise as knowledge

How do we generate (more) anarchy in the academia?

  • Media Action Research Group (MARG) Methodology
  • PPFPAR
    • Prefigurative Antiauthoritarian Feminist Participatory Action Research
    • Radical media mixer with 90 participants
    • Co-research projects with media activist partners
      • The Media Co-op
      • Mi’kmaq podcast

Methodology

  1. anachy | prefiguration
    • Portwood-Stacer
      • antiauthoritarian practices countering structures and institutions of domination
      • communicative logic of prefigurative politics in everyday life
  2. anachy | power-sharing
    • Ferrell
      • freeing research from the suffocating authority of dominant method
      • horizontal leadership
      • transgressive methods
    • Juris
      • embodied experience
  3. anachy | mutual-aid
    • Gordon
    • Kruzynski
  4. anachy | intersectionality
    • Volcano & Rogue
      • -

Challenges & Contraditions

  • RA
  • Conferences
    • Who
    • What
  • Decision-making power
  • Management

Characteristics of Direct Research | 3 Public Spheres

  • Research engage in direct action social movements
  • Radical media mixers generate direct impact for/with media activists
  • PAFFAR direct creation of horizontal research structures in university

Critical Reflections on doing Militant Research with Occupy London

  • Sam Halvorsen

Militant Research

  • No inevitable disconnect between theory and practice
  • All political struggle necessarily involves theory
  • Dilemmas over researcher and activist ‘hats’ may be overblown
  • More helpful to explore the ways in which militant research is incorporated
    intensification and deepening of the political (Shukaitis and Graeber, 2007, p. 9)

History

  • History of “workers inquiry” — Marx 1880 (La Revue Socialiste)
  • Co-research: 1960s Autonomistas, Situationists
  • Post 1970s: Class composition, Precarity
  • Recently: Militant ethnographies; Argentina, Spain

Militant Research and the University

  • Neoliberalism

Within the University

  • ESRC Funding
  • Resources
  • Space
  • Problem with the Ethics Committee at UCL

Beyond the University

  • Occupy Research Collective (ORC)
    • Jargon free reflections
    • Resources: familiar story of burn-out
    • Increase administrative tasks to maintain the institutional form
    • Increasing specialization and lack of participation from wider movement
    • Fear of providing critique to Occupy, but most important the narrow vision taken by militant researchers: not only failure to think beyond Occupy but to think beyond particular repertoires of Activism

Militant Research against-and-beyond itself

  • No pure or autonomous sites for doing militant research
  • University remains a main site, but it’s important to keep working as collectives
  • The limits to militancy
    • short-sightedness? Who is to say how the world should be changed?
    • Does the university, then, provide a useful ‘thirdspace’ (Routledge, 1996) from which to have one step in one step own militant situations? Or is it too constrained?
  • The need for theory
    • e.g. precarious workers, immaterial labor

Capitalism, Technology, and Contemporary Social Movements: A Methodology of Research and Change

  • Todd Wolfson
  • Urban ethnography
    • a independent media in Philadelphia
  • Enamored with the strategies
    • Use of media to bind sites
    • Decentralized structure
    • Deeply embedded in social movements
  • Weaknesses
  • New Project: in the spirit of Poor People’s Organizing: Groundwork
    • Started from Martin Luther King
  • Research became the function of the movements
  • Digital Rebellion
  • radical politics
  • rise of communication technology
  • history of the left movement
  • epoch
    • “cyber left”
  • Link of the Global Justice Movement with contemporary movements
    • fight hierarchy, non-centralized
    • how to change the world without taking power
  • Why Indie Media Died
  • Lack of full analysis of Capitalism, Patriarchy, Class. Power goes to people with the most culture capital.
  • Techno-utopian
  • Suspicion of organization building (lack of long-term plans).
  • Build readership outside of the class.
  • Use media to build across communities
  • Build an organization (dialectic)
  • Ground the movement locally
    • problem: parochial
  • Leadership development
  • Use technology appropriately
    • e.g. cab drivers

Conclusion

  • Push back the norms of academy
  • Push back the proprietary nature of knowledge
  • You have to be in the community
    • ethnography, embodiment
  • Ethnography is a good tool because it forces you to build relationships
  • The common academic position is to be objective, but you do better research with deep involvement
  • As faculty, build processes to push a better way forward

Discussions

  • Binaries?
    • Virtualism?
    • Hacker culture
      • exploration and messing with systems
      • deconstructing stuff
      • blends together rebellion and creativity
      • queer theory, decentralizing things
      • individualistic -> traditional social movements
  • Public Intellectuals
    • How can we build ourselves as intellectuals? Not focusing on people with the most culture capital
    • How we can all level up to build projects for the betterment of the humanity
    • Recognize how hierarchies are constructed
  • Ethics
    • Feminists: ethics protocol
    • Challenge from Big Data
  • Research Grants
    • Within the institutions, there are allies
    • Relect on the changes of the political economy
  • Theory & Practice
    • Theory comes from the language activists use - ontology?
    • Discourse disseminated in the activist groups
  • Power