Constituent Imagination

by Shukaitis, Stevphen

• ISBN13: 9781904859352
• ISBN10: 1904859356
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-03-07
• Publisher: A K Pr Distribution

Summary

What is the relationship of radical theory to movements for social change? In a world where more and more global struggles are refusing vanguard parties and authoritarian practices, does the idea of the detached intellectual, observing events from on high, make sense anymore? In this powerful and unabashedly militant collection, over two dozen academic authors and engaged intellectuals-including Antonio Negri and Colectivo Situaciones-provide some challenging answers. In the process, they redefine the nature of intellectual practice itself. The book opens with the editors' provocative history of the academy's inherent limitations and possibilities. The essays that follow cover a broad range: embedded intellectuals in increasingly corporatized universities, research projects in which factory workers and academics work side by side, revolutionary ethnographies of the global justice movement, and meditations on technology from the branches of a tree-sit in Scotland. What links them all is a collective and expansive re--imagining of engaged intellectual work in the service of social change. In a cultural climate where right-wing watchdog groups seem to have radical academics on the run, this unapolo-getic anthology is a breath of fresh air.

Table of Contents

Continental drift : activist research, from geopolitics to geopoetics	p. 39
Do it yourself and the movement beyond capitalism	p. 44
Logic and theory of inquiry : militant praxis as subject and episteme	p. 62
Something more on research militancy : footnotes on procedures and (in)decisions	p. 73
The breath of the possible	p. 94
Drifting through the knowledge machine	p. 112
Autonomy, recognition, movement	p. 127
Fragments on machinic intellectuals	p. 137
Reinventing technology : artificial intelligence from the top of a sycamore tree	p. 155
Practicing militant ethnography with the movement for global resistance in Barcelona	p. 164
Eating in public	p. 180
Bridging the praxis divide : from direct action to direct services and back again	p. 189
The revolution will wear a sweater : knitting and global justice activism	p. 209
Hard livin' : bare life, autoethnography, and the homeless body	p. 223
Forging spaces of justice	p. 242
Global uprisings : towards a politics of the artisan	p. 253
Black sails in the corridor : treasonous minds and the desire for mutiny	p. 263
Practicing anarchist theory : towards a participatory political philosophy	p. 276
Toward an anti-authoritarian anti-racist pedagogy	p. 288
No gods, no masters degrees	p. 301
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