Piracy In Theory and Practice

PIRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Coventry University, UK, 9 - 10 April 2015

http://besidesthescreen.com/?p=366

We are looking for ongoing research projects to participate in a workshop associated with the AHRC funded Besides the Screen symposium PIRACY IN THEORY & PRACTICE, to be held at Coventry University, UK. The workshop will be on Thursday 9th April, during the first day of the main event. Departing from the relation of movie piracy with the economy and politics of content distribution, the symposium means to discuss the dynamics of authority embedded in contemporary systems of communication and explore how informal media practices might intervene with the development of new technologies, frame film curating, foster or inhibit particular scholarships, and even raise questions about the ontology of the moving image.

Confirmed speakers at the symposium include Adnan Hadzi (Coventry/UK), Gary Hall (Coventry/UK), Ramon Lobato (Swinburne/Australia), HD Mabuse (CESAR/Brazil), Gabriel Menotti (UFES/Brazil), Paul McDonald (University of Nottingham/UK), Pedro Mizukami (FGV/Brazil), and Jonas Andersson Schwarz (Sodertorn University/Sweden). We welcome proposals from a wide range of topics within this universe, and encourage the participation of PhD candidates and early career researchers. Participation in the workshop is free of charge (as is attendance at the symposium), but all participants must cover their own transportation and accommodation costs. All participating works will be considered for publication in a special edition of an international, blind peer-reviewed journal.

To submit a proposal, send a text file (doc, docx, rtf) containing a short abstract about your research (~250 words) and bio (~150 words) to the email besidesthescreen@gmail.com with the subject PROPOSAL – PIRACY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. The deadline is 2nd Feb 2015. Selected participants will be notified by 9th Feb 2015.

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Besides the Screen is an international research network active since 2010, involving participants from the UK, Mexico and Brazil. It means to investigate the continuing development of audiovisual practices from a materialistic perspective, deploying artistic and unorthodox methodologies in the context of cinema studies. Its ever-expanding constellation of topics revolves around techniques of projection, the centrality of marginal processes, and the manifold systems of movie storage and transmission. Information about previous events can be found at http://besidesthescreen.com

Videos from Open Education: Condition Critical event

To coincide with the publication of Open Education: A Study in Disruption (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2014), which was co-authored by Coventry University’s Open Media Group and Mute Publishing, the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry organised a panel discussion last October called Open Education: Condition Critical. The video recording of this panel is now online, and you can find it on our YouTube channel or embedded below.

The video includes presentations by Sean Dockray (The Public School and aaaaarg.org), Richard Hall (University of Leicester), Shaun Hides (Coventry University/Disruptive Media Learning Lab), Sharon Irish (University of Illinois/FemTechNet), Pauline van Mourik Broekman (Mute). For more information on the panel, please see here.

Open Education: A Study in Disruption is available for free, open access, here: http://bit.ly/1tI3XEV. It is also available to purchase as either a paperback or hardback from Rowman and Littlefield International: http://www.rowmaninternational.com/books/open-education.

(To buy Open Education: A Study in Disruption in North America, go here: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783482085) 

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Open Education: A Study in Disruption

Summary
What for decades could only be dreamt of is now almost within reach: the widespread provision of free online education, regardless of a student’s geographic location, financial status, or ability to access conventional institutions of learning. But for all the hype-cycle that has been entered into over MOOCs, many experiments with Open Education do not appear to be designed to challenge the becoming business of the university or alter Higher Education in any fundamental way. If anything, they are more likely to lead to a two-tier system, in which those who can’t afford to pay (so much) to attend a traditional university, will have to make do with a poor, online, second-rate alternative education provided by a global corporation.

Open Education thus engages critically with the creative disruption of the university through free online education. It puts into political context not just the 2012 batch of extremely publicity-savvy MOOCS (Edx, Udacity, FutureLearn etc.), but also TED Talks and Wikiversity along with self-organised ‘pirate’ libraries such as libgen.org and aaaaarg.org, and ‘free universities’ associated with the anti-austerity and student protests and global Occupy movement. Questioning many of the ideas open education projects take for granted, including Creative Commons, it proposes a radically different model for the university and education in the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents
Preface
1 The University in the 21st Century
2 A Radically Different Model of Education and the University
3 The Educational Context
4 Open Education
5 Open Education Typologies
6 Towards a Philosophy of Open Education
Conclusion: Diverse ‘disruption’ (including Media and Cultural Studies PLC)
Bibliography
Index

Endorsements

An exceptionally lucid study of actually existing practices of ‘open education’, this book is also a passionate call for proactive experimentation with emergent media technologies and forms of collaboration that might yet generate a radically different idea of the university. Sober, critical and energizing in equal measure, Open Education: A Study in Disruption is an indispensable guide to those forces of creative destruction that are currently transforming the academy. It should be read by anyone working or studying in contemporary higher education.
David Cunningham, Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster and member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective

In a refreshing change from the simplified (and shallow) treatment in popular media, the authors unveil the layers of complexity needed to truly address the concepts of "Disruption" and "Open Education". While it may contain more questions than answers, this is a critical step in looking beyond strategies of solutionism. Grounded in a consideration of the societal, economic, and cultural influences on the future of higher education, combined with the practical experience of Coventry University, this book will be foundational for any institution that wants to have a hand in crafting their own future.
Alan Levine, Learning Technology Consultant and blogger at cogdogblog.com

Open Education aims at starting new conversations, encouraging a thoughtful engagement with its subjects. Open education emerges through this text as a space of possibility, and opportunity, but also a space which demands an ethical, critical approach.
Jesse Stommel, Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of Hybrid Pedagogy


Author biographies
Pauline van Mourik Broekman is co-founder, Mute, and Mute collective member.

Gary Hall is Professor and Director of the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University, UK, and visiting professor at the Hybrid Publishing Lab – Leuphana Inkubator, Leuphana University, Germany. He is also co-founder (in 1999) of the open access journal Culture Machine, a pioneer of OA in the humanities, and co-founder (in 2006) of Open Humanities Press, which was the first open access publisher explicitly dedicated to critical and cultural theory. He is the author and editor of several books on digital culture and the idea of the university, the best known of which is Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minnesota University Press, 2008)

Ted Byfield is a New York–based independent researcher and writer. He served for over a decade on the design faculty of the New School University, and is a former visiting fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project. He co-founded the Open Syllabus Project research network, and since 1998 has co-moderated the <nettime> mailing list.

Shaun Hides is Head of Department of Media and Co-director of the Disruptive Media Learning Lab, Coventry University, UK. He authored the Department’s Open Media strategy, led a JISC-funded OER project on open-connected teaching innovation and has spoken at numerous events on OER, Innovation and the impact of disruptive technologies on education. He is an advisor to the British Council.

Simon Worthington is a Research Associate at the Hybrid Publishing Consortium – Leuphana Inkubator, Leuphana University, Germany.

Capital at the Brink - new book from OHP

A new open access collection, Capital at the Brink: Overcoming the Destructive Legacies of Neoliberalism, is now available open access from Open Humanities Press, with essays by Paul A. Passavant, Noah De Lissovoy, Robert P. Marzec, Jennifer Wingard, Zahi Zalloua, Jodi Dean, Andrew Baerg, Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Christopher Breu and Uppinder Mehan.

Capital at the Brink reveals the pervasiveness, destructiveness, and dominance of neoliberalism within American society and culture. The contributors to this collection also offer points of resistance to an ideology wherein, to borrow Henry Giroux’s comment, “everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit.” The first step in fighting neoliberalism is to make it visible. By discussing various inroads that it has made into political, popular, and literary culture, Capital at the Brink is taking this first step and joining a global resistance that works against neoliberalism by revealing the variety of ways in which it dominates and destroys various dimensions of our social and cultural life.

Contents

Introduction: The Wrath of Capital — Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan

I. Race, Violence, and Politics

1. Neoliberalism and Violent Appearances — Paul A. Passavant

2. The Turn to Punishment: Racism, Domination, and the Neoliberal Era — Noah De Lissovoy

3. Neoliberalism, Environmentality, and the Specter of Sajinda Khan — Robert P. Marzec

4. Rhetorical Assemblages: Scales of Neoliberal Ideology — Jennifer Wingard

5. Neoliberalism, Autoimmunity and Democracy: Derrida and the Neoliberal Ethos — Zahi Zalloua

II. Literature, Culture, and the Self

6. Complexity as Capture: Neoliberalism and the Loop of Drive — Jodi Dean

7. Neoliberalism, Risk, and Uncertainty in the Video Game — Andrew Baerg

8. Neoliberalism in Publishing: A Prolegomenon — Jeffrey R. Di Leo

9. The Post-Political Turn: Theory in the Neoliberal Academy — Christopher Breu

10. Neoliberalism, Post-Scarcity, and the Entrepreneurial Self — Uppinder Mehan

Viva Culture Machine!: Latin American Mediations

We are pleased to announce the latest issue of the open access journal Culture Machine <http://www.culturemachine.net> titled VIVA CULTURE MACHINE!: LATIN AMERICAN MEDIATIONS, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota. For more details about the issue and the journal please see below.

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CULTURE MACHINE 15 (2014)
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current

VIVA CULTURE MACHINE!: LATIN AMERICAN MEDIATIONS
edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota

In her 2013 book The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti complains about critical thought ‘after the great explosion of theoretical creativity of the 1970s and 1980s’: it was as if ‘we had entered a zombified landscape of repetition without difference’, she writes. And no doubt poststructuralist theory did in certain hands become another orthodoxy. Yet given the degree of emphasis currently being placed on monistic, realist, object-oriented and materialist ontologies in what is perceived as the ‘cutting-edge’ critical thought of today, it is hard not to wonder: are we in danger of embarking on another journey into theoretical orthodoxy?

Sharing the frustration of Braidotti and others with the decline of so much post-Marxism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis into mere repetition without difference, Culture Machine has over the years published essays and issues on various aspects of monism, realism and materialism. Nevertheless, in an effort to ensure the journal avoids succumbing to a zombified future by doing just more of the same, we have decided to celebrate Culture Machine’s 15th anniversary by transferring much of its editorial oversight to scholars located in Mexico. By placing this bet on Mexico, we are endeavouring to force the Culture Machine journal into inventing a different, unorthodox future for itself that is at once both singular and unpredictable.

As a way of beginning the process of reinvention, for this 15th anniversary issue of the journal we have invited a number of scholars, writers, activists and artists from Latin America to provide us with a series of contaminating mediations of Culture Machine and its history. The issue is therefore designed to constitute something of a critical retrospective, both offering new contributions and inviting the readers to revisit some of the earlier work that was published in Culture Machine. This is only a first step, however. The intention for future issues is to invite increasing numbers of non-Anglo collaborators to participate in Culture Machine, in English and in Spanish (and hopefully in other languages too later on), and in this way join those in the English-speaking world in helping to generate a more distributed, decentred, multi-polar academic gift economy for the production, publication and dissemination of contemporary theory.

Contents

* Culture Machine Editorial Collective / Viva Culture Machine!

* Gabriela Méndez Cota / Fifteen Years: a Textual Celebration

* Benjamín Mayer Foulkes interviewed by Gabriela Méndez Cota / Towards the Post-University: Experimenting with Psychoanalysis and Institutions

* Stefania Haritou / Creativity in Practice

* Emilia Ismael Simental / Re: Recordings

* Nestor García Canclini and Maritza Urteaga interviewed by Emilia Ismael Simental / The Hyper-affective Turn: Thinking the Social in the Digital Age

* Euridice Cabañes and María Rubio / Arsgames: A Political Take on Videogames and Social Networking Platforms

* Benjamín Moreno interviewed by Juan Pablo Anaya / The Electronic Literature of Benjamín Moreno: Affect and Sense Outside the Conventions of the Literary

* Alberto López Cuenca / Writing Errancy: Outcasts, Capitalism and Mobility

* Beatriz Miranda / Traveling through Remembrance as Praxis with Disability Baggage

* Vivian Abenshushan interviewed by Gabriela Méndez Cota / The No-Work Paradox

* Etelvina Bernal Méndez / The Flood Is Elsewhere

* Néstor Braunstein / Economics (and) the Politics of Attention

* Francisco Vergara Silva / Universal Bio-cosmopolitics, Or the Perspectivism of Canine Life

* Gabriela Méndez Cota / Digital Humanities: Whose Changes Do You Want to Save?

Technographies: new book series from Open Humanities Press

In celebration of Open Access Week, we are pleased to announce a new open access book series, Technographies, edited by Steven Connor, David Trotter and James Purdon.

According to Aristotle, the modes taken by the ‘art of representation’ (mimesis) differ in ‘means’, ‘object’, and ‘manner’. Some translations offer ‘medium’ instead of ‘means’, as though Aristotle had seen McLuhan coming from a very long way off. Others have argued that the term poses the question ‘in what?’: in what (language, genre, form, etc.) has expression taken place? ‘Through what?’ might instead be the question for a series which aims to explore the cultural (written) history of material technologies.

Technographies aims to answer the question ‘through what?’ in a variety of ways, with varying degrees of literalness. The term itself seeks to recuperate some of the strangeness that has been lost in the course of the long naturalization of ‘technology’. Originally a genre of writing — a treatise on a practical art or craft — a ‘technology’ soon came to denote the end product of such arts and crafts, and eventually became associated with the machinery or equipment used in production. Today, we tend to assume that a ‘technology’ is a machine, a system, a piece of kit: a term for a discourse or a way of thinking has over the centuries been transformed into a term for an object, or a set of objects.

By contrast, the term ‘technography’ came into use during (and possibly in reaction to) the late-nineteenth-century turn from words to things. A technography is a description of technologies and their application with primary regard to social context. Technography, itself technologically mediated like all forms of writing, is a reflection upon the varying degrees to which all technologies have in some fashion been written into being. It examines the crucial role writing has played, not just in the description of technological objects and their functions, but in the inscription of technologies within social and cultural life.

Technographies aims to encourage investigation of a wide variety of writing ‘about’ technology. It is not committed to the furtherance of any single methodology, nor is it period-specific; instead contributions are sought that will develop new, ambitious and scholarly approaches to technological mediation using the tools of literary criticism, theoretical elaboration, rhetoric, poetics, gender studies and queer theory, material culture, media archaeology, the history of science, and similar disciplines.

How was it that technology and writing came to inform each other so extensively that today there is only information? Technographies seeks to answer that question by putting the emphasis on writing as an answer to the large question of ‘through what?’. Writing about technographies in history, our contributors will themselves write technographically.

To contribute to the series, please contact Steven Connor, David Trotter or James Purdon

Advisory Board

• Emmanuelle André (Paris Diderot)
• Edward Dimendberg (University of California, Irvine)
• Sebastian Gießmann (University of Siegen)
• John Guillory (NYU)
• Jondi Keane (Deakin University, Melbourne)
• Tanya Krzywinska (Falmouth University)
• Charlotte Sleigh (University of Kent)
• Susan Merrill Squier (Penn State University)
• Sherry Turkle (MIT)
• Gregory L. Ulmer (University of Florida)