It’s hard to grasp the scope of the coronavirus outbreak and our many responses to it, as the disease’s impact cuts across professional worlds, political projects and personal lives all at the same time.
Here are three mapping projects working to track different organizing efforts in response to COVID-19 in the U.S. context. We hope you can use these as a jumping-off point for projects to follow and support!
Continue reading “Mapping COVID-19 repsonses”On December 8th, graduate student workers at UC Santa Cruz launched a wildcat strike, aiming to win a Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) to their wages and protect themselves from the state’s housing crisis, which pushes many student workers to the brink of homelessness.
The UCSC struggle is ongoing, with strikers threatened with firings and solidarity strikes spreading to other University of California campuses. Faculty on other campuses can sign the support petition in this google doc.
Everyone can donate to the UCSC strike fund here:
Meanwhile in the United Kingdom, tens of thousands of lecturers, librarians and other academic and support staff are striking across the country. The series of staggered strikes, planned into March, focus on issues of pay, pensions and working conditions.
You can support the UK strikers by donating to the University and College Union strike fund here:
As you may know, ISARN has been exploring the ways we can think through solidarity pedagogically. It’s for that reason that we’ve decided upon the collaborative production of a virtual syllabi.
While we’re still working through the aesthetics of it, a virtual syllabi would be a way of providing an interactive engagement and knowledge of solidarity movements around the world. This includes thinking through the ways these movements speak to each other and the significance of undervalued and unappreciated participants in movement making.
However, in thinking through solidarity and pedagogy questions of representation become even more important. For that reason, we’re asking all of you for help. Willingness to share past syllabi, any pedagogical resources, lists of texts/films/journals/other resources would be appreciated. Feel free to email your materials to isarn.info [at] gmail.com.
All the information that is shared will be password protected with access only by ISARN members. Further, any suggestions to the development of the virtual syllabi would be happily welcome!
Best wishes,
ISARN team
Deadline: 15 de marzo de 2020
Coordinadores:
Eudald Cortina Orero (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) eudald.cortina[at]usc.es
Fernando Camacho Padilla (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) fernando.camacho[at]uam.es
La movilización revolucionaria en América Latina durante la segunda mitad del s. XX estuvo definida por su carácter transnacional. Los procesos de cambio social y, en contraposición, la emergencia de gobiernos autoritarios y la instauración de dictaduras militares en este periodo estuvieron atravesados por el contexto internacional de Guerra Fría. La consolidación de propuestas alternativas impulsadas a partir de las conferencias de Bandung (1955), Cairo (1957-8), Belgrado (1961), y La Habana (1966), quebró el eje Este-Oeste, redefiniendo identidades, redes políticas y prácticas solidarias.
Continue reading “Solidaridades y militancias transnacionales en América Latina: de la confrontación Este-Oeste a la construcción del Sur global”Deadline: February 1, 2020
Editors: Genevieve Ritchie, Sara Carpenter, and Shahrzad Mojab
Contact Information: marxism.and.migration [at] gmail.com
The present conditions of transnational migration are nothing short of alarming. Best described as a kind of social expulsion, these conditions range from migrant caravans and detained unaccompanied children in the United States to the thousands of migrant deaths at sea to the razing of self-organized refugee camps in Greece and to the massive internal and inter-regional dispersal of populations. At the very same time, technology firms are using refugee camps as testing grounds and migrants are targeted by the financial industry as an ideal investment and workforce. The chaos of migration stretches globally yet differentially impacts countless communities. Migrants are simultaneously described as a dangerous threat, victims of state violence, culturally backward, and resilient workers, while activists talk of undoing border imperialism, decolonizing settler societies, or opening borders. We, therefore, find reason to pose the following questions: What are the historical continuities linking colonial dispossession to the displacements and dispossessions internal to the imperialist stage of capitalism? To what extent do the conditions propelling migration cohere with, and even support, the state practices of managing class interests through the threat of crisis? Lastly, to what extent has the ostensible crisis of migration assisted with the criminalization of activists resisting state violence? Marxism and Migration seeks to theorize these chaotic and uneven conditions by centering the global relations of class struggle.
Continue reading “Call for Papers for Edited Volume: Marxism and Migration”Activists and academics are signing on to a call to boycott academic and cultural institutions sponsored by the Turkish government in the wake if the latter’s Syrian incursion:
We call on academics, artists and intellectuals around the world to oppose the Turkish invasion of northeastern Syria by boycotting Turkish government sponsored academic, artistic and musical events taking place inside and outside of Turkey.
Read more on the campaign website.
Deadline: September 23rd, 2019
Organizer: Anthony Alessandrini
Co-Organizer: Julie-Françoise Tolliver
In “Five Theses on the Common,” Gigi Roggero writes that “the common is always organized in translation.” This seminar begins from a related suggestion: that it might be possible to say that solidarity is always organized in translation.
This could mean a number of things. Most simply, forms of international/translocal solidarity almost inevitably involve the use of literal translations. At a different level, we might ask whether “translation” can be useful for thinking about the role played by literary and cultural production in political struggle—for example, asking how writers and artists translate political struggles into the body of their cultural work, and in turn how political actors translate the forms of political imaginaries found in literary and artistic works into their praxis. At the furthest end of the spectrum, given the global rise of right-wing populism and the resurgence of fascistic nationalist movements (including white supremacist movements), we might propose that today, all attempts to translate across borders and boundaries might be reimagined as forms of solidarity.
Continue reading “Call for papers: Solidarity in Translation”
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