Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Acheh: The Social Form of ‘Natural’ Disaster–Pete

Acheh: The Social Form of `Natural’ Disasterby Peter HudisThat which reason consider evil, is not evil in respect to the order and laws of nature as a whole, but only in respect to the laws of our own reason.-Spinoza    The tsunami that impacted over a dozen nations in the Indian Ocean region at the end [...]
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Imre Szeman, / The Politics of Documentary Today: A Roundtable (Part 1)

Imre Szeman Open Society Archives / Budapest, Hungary / November 9, 2007 Participants: Leo De Boer (Netherlands), Dr. Christian Christensen (Sweden), Diana Groó (Hungary), Christian Frei (Switzerland), Anna Ginestí Rosell (Germany) The following discussion on “The Politics of Documentary Today” took place at the end of the two-day workshop Alternative Images: Documentary as Counter-Culture, held in Budapest, Hungary [...]
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International Unity for Iraqi Youth

International Unity for Iraqi Youth Since the conflict in Iraq began, the international community has focused on the millions of displaced Iraqis living inside Iraq. However, the world has forgotten the Iraqis who fled their country on foot and found safety in bordering countries. No one suffers more than the Iraqi children, who number in the hundreds of thousands [...]
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Sean Saraka, George Hartleys The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime

The privileged relationship between Marxian theory and the real is first suggested by Marx himself in early texts such as the 1844  Manuscripts and the Theses on Feuerbach,  and is carried over into the methodological reflections of the 1857 Introduction and the first volume of  Capital.   It not only informs claims regarding the methodological distinctiveness [...]
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Wanda Vrasti, The Politics, Economics and Ethics of Independent Travel: Rewriting the Ethnography of the Travel Trope

For a number of years, the theorization of travel and tourism was left up to the fields of sociology, cultural anthropology and literary/cultural studies. In these contexts, the study of travel and tourism digressed in three distinct directions, with sociology reading these preoccupations structurally in light of the existential dilemmas of their practitioners (e.g. loss [...]
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Y-Dang Troeung, Disciplinary Power, Transnational Labour, and the Politics of Representation in Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt

Stephanie Black’s important documentary Life and Debt contains a segment that focuses on a free trade zone established in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1980s. Black provides a compelling visual and narrative account of the processes of globalization leading up to the creation of this free zone and of the exploitive working conditions endured by [...]
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Alex Means, Toxic Sovereignty: Biopolitics and Cote dIvoire

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.-Michel Foucault Death has been sown in a voluntary or involuntary manner – justice will decide.-President Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast    [...]
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Kiel Hume, Four Micro-Interventions into Neoliberal Globalization

I. Spectacle and Theory’s Images In 1936 Walter Benjamin published his widely read essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. In it he ponders the new kinds of images available to the world, taking a curiously optimistic stance on the issue of film. He sees the world and politics becoming [...]
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Ola Jonsson, A Review of Banskys Wall and Peace

The Politics of Anonymity and SurveillanceWall and Piece, by BanksyLondon: Random House, 2005 ‘I like to think that I have the guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things no-one else believes in – like peace and justice and freedom’– Banksy, Wall and Piece In an interview in Guardian [...]
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Derek Merrill, A Review of Negris Books for Burning

Negri in Buenos   Aires: A review of Book for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy[1]  Hatred of work and hatred of exploitation are the productive content of invention-power, which is the prolongation of the refusal of work. –Antonio Negri, Books for Burning  In November of 2003, Antonio Negri delivered a series of lectures around [...]
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