Scholar of Sufism and Western Hermeticism and (under the pseudonym Hakim
Bey) a well-known radical-anarchist social thinker. His books include
Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (City Lights, 1993) and
Escape from the Nineteenth Century and Other Essays (Autonomedia, 1998).
Linda Herrera (PhD Columbia University, MA, American University in Cairo, BA UC Berkeley) joined the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as Associate Professor and core staff in the Global Studies in Education MA program in January 2011. Prior to that she was a Senior Lecturer in International Development Studies (2005-2010) at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam where she was Convenor of the Children and Youth Studies MA specialization. Her major research interests and writing are around issues of Youth and citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA); critical ethnography of schooling; youth, employment and international development policy; democracy and education; and, more recently, youth, new media and Arab Revolution.
ReadEssay written in August 2002 for the New York University Tactical Media Lab, organised by the NYU Center for Media, Culture and History.
Tactical Media emerged when the modest goals of media artists and media activists were transformed into a movement that challenged everyone to produce their own media in support of their own political struggles. This "new media" activism was based on the insight that the long-held distinction between the 'street' (reality) and the 'media' (representation) could no longer be upheld. On the contrary, the media had come to infuse all of society... Read More
"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is
an idea [?] and ideas are bulletproof."
- From the film V for Vendetta
Abstract of the lecture by Peter Lamborn Wilson
For the 'Next Five Minutes" Conference, Amsterdam, january 1996
A bailout of the people by the people
Rolling Jubilee is a Strike Debt project that buys debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, abolishes it. Together we can liberate debtors at random through a campaign of mutual support, good will, and collective refusal. Our latest project The Debt Collective aims to build collective power to challenge the way we finance and access basic necessities such as housing, medical care and education. Join us as we imagine and create a new world based on the common good, not Wall Street profits.
ReadGlobal Uprisings is an independent news site and video series dedicated to showing responses to the economic crisis and authoritarianism. Since 2011, Brandon Jourdan and Marianne Maeckelbergh have been travelling, researching, and making documentary films.
Their short films detail social movements in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the UK, and the US. Their films cover strikes and demonstrations in the UK, the large-scale housing occupations and street mobilizations in Spain, the various general strikes, protests, and factory occupations in Greece, the revolution in Egypt, the Gezi Park uprising in Turkey, the 2014 social explosion in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the revolt against austerity in Portugal, and the occupy movement in the United States.
"If you've been following events in Syria, you'd know that the
English-language press is mostly deeply critical of the Assad regime
(while the Arabic press displays a slightly wider range of views). I
thought it would be worth trying to present a minority report on the
situation from a Syrian friend of mine, although, as you will see, he
argues precisely that his position is actually held by a very
significant majority (albeit a rather quiet and frustrated majority) of
Syrians.
Camille Otrakji is a Syrian political blogger based in
Montreal. Although he tends to keep a low profile, Otrakji has been, for
the past several years, at the forefront of many of the most
interesting and influential online initiatives relating to Syrian
politics. He is one of the authors and moderators at Joshua Landis's
Syria Comment, and the founder of Creative Syria, a constellation of
websites including Mideast Image (a vast collection of original old
photographs of Middle Eastern subjects) and Syrian Think Tank (an online
debate site hosting many of Syria's top analysts). Last year, Otrakji
courted controversy with a new initiative devoted to the subject of
Syrian-Israeli peace, entitled OneMideast.org. He agreed to speak with
me about the latest events in Syria, and I'm sure that his views will
generate plenty of discussion."
While the uprising in Egypt caught most observers of the Middle East
off guard, it did not come out of the blue. The seeds of this
spectacular mobilization had been sown as far back as the early 2000s
and had been carefully cultivated by activists from across the
political spectrum, many of these working online via Facebook, twitter,
and within the Egyptian blogosphere. Working within these media,
activists began to forge a new political language, one that cut across
the institutional barriers that had until then polarized Egypt's
political terrain, between more Islamicly-oriented currents (most
prominent among them, the Muslim Brotherhood) and secular-liberal ones.
This debate in the frame of the International Film Festival Rotterdam's
Power Cut Middle East programme, takes a look at the images, both moving
and still, that have come from the Middle East like a huge wave in the
past few months. Due to the increase of mobile phone films and photos,
we have a great deal of material whose origin is uncertain. It seems
authentic, but who is coming to blows with whom? And who has made the
films and taken the photos? Regimes are also aware of this, and use it
to their advantage. Are we seeing actors, paid demonstrators, real
people? How do we read and interpret these images?
Activist Media Tomorrow*
* BH: When I wrote this text five years ago, it really was not clear whether
the swarming tactics of the counter-globalization movement would get a
"second chance." But they have, and now the subtitle could be "activist
media today."
What happened at the turn of the millennium, when a myriad of recording
devices were hooked up to the Internet and the World Wide Web became an
electronic prism refracting all the colors of a single anti-capitalist
struggle? What kind of movement takes to the barricades with samba bands
and videocams, tracing an embodied map through a maze of virtual
hyperlinks and actual city streets? The organizational aesthetics of the
networked movements was called "tactical media," a concept that mixed
the quick-and-dirty appropriation of consumer electronics with the
subtle counter-cultural anthropology of Michel de Certeau. The idea was
to evoke a new kind of popular subjectivity, constitutionally "under the
radar," impossible to identify, constantly shifting with the inventions
of digital storytelling and the ruses of open-source practice. Too bad
so much of this subversive process was frozen into a single seductive
phrase.
Republished with permission from metamute / Mute Magazine in London:
Moving beyond the conceptual polarisation of tight-knit vanguardist
parties and loose-tie virtual networks, Rodrigo Nunes sifts the residue
of last year's wave of revolts to produce a more nuanced picture of
organisational dynamics in the age of Web 2.0