Studies in Transversality: Militant Research
hosted by Micropolitics Research Group
Tuesday October 13th
PUBLIC LECTURE by Colectivo Situaciones (Buenos Aires)
17.00 19.00
Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre, Goldsmiths College
Wednesday October 14th
PUBLIC SEMINAR with A Traversad por la Cultura (Madrid), Colectivo
Situaciones (Buenos Aires), Euromayday Hamburg, S.a.l.e. (Venice),
Universidad Nomada (Barcelona), and many others.
14.00 19.00
RHB room 342 (in red brick main building), Goldsmiths College
Studies in Transversality is a series of encounters between
researchers, cultural workers, and organisers who are concerned with
the contexts and consequences of their practices beyond their
respective fields of specialisation, and who wish to open new lines of
subjectivation. This session is the first of the year and brings
together the practices of Colectivo Situaciones (Argentina), and a
number of groups who are researching and organising around questions
of creative labour, knowledge production and contemporary social
movements in the UK and Europe today. Working through the notion of
militant research, the session aims to examine the separations between
university based academic research, cultural workers, and activists,
the reason why these separations exist, and to share the working
methods of these groups.
About Militant Research
Militant research is a concept-tool that works on the premise that all
interpretation of the world is linked to some kind of action. Related
to practices of co-research and institutional analysis, militant
research proposes that all new knowledge production affects and
modifies the bodies and subjectivities of those who have participated.
Rather than use research as a tool to categorise and separate
knowledge from practice, militant research operates transversally,
becoming part of the process that organises relationships between
bodies, knowledge, social practices and fields of action.
See Marta Malo de Molina?s two recent articles on militant research at:
http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en#redir
http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0707/malo/en
Colectivo Situaciones is a collective based in Buenos Aires. Emerging
from Argentina?s radical student milieu in the mid 1990s, they have
developed a long track record of intervention in Argentine social
movements, including work with the unemployed workers? movement of
Solano, HIJOS, the organization of the children of the disappeared
during the dictatorship and Creciendo Juntos, an alternative school
run by militant teachers. Their books and pamphlets are dialogues with
social movements, activists and many other groups, and explore the
question of power, tactics of struggle, and how to think about
revolution today. In addition to their publishing work, they are also
working in a collectively run, alternative school. In a note printed
on the back of many of their books, they describe their work as follows:
?we intend to offer an internal reading of struggles, a phenomenology
and a genealogy, not an ?objective? description. It is only in this
way that thought assumes a creative, affirmative function, and stops
being a mere reproduction of the present. And only in this fidelity
with the immanence of thought is it a real, dynamic contribution.
For published texts in Spanish and English, see:
http://www.situaciones.org
http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivosituaciones/en
http://info.interactivist.net/node/5490,
http://www.constituentimagination.net
http://www.commoner.org.uk/index.php?p=15
About Micropolitics Research Group
The Micropolitics Research Group investigates the forces and
procedures that entangle artistic production and the flexible
subjectivities of its producers into the fabric of late capitalism.
Based primarily in London, the group carries out analysis of issues
ranging from the production of subjectivity in creative work,
diplomacy, institutional analysis, radical pedagogy and concrete
situations of free labour, 'carrot work', and creative industry.
Directions:
Goldsmiths College, University of London, Lewisham Way, New Cross SE14
6NW
New Cross or New Cross Gate RAIL, or buses: 21, 53, 453, 171, 172, 36,
436
Directions and Campus Map: http://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/
http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/campus-map.pdf
This event is supported by: London Centre for Arts and Cultural
Exchange, Goldsmiths Department of Art Research Support Award, and
Goldsmiths College Research and Knowledge Transfer Award
