Seattle, come out for the 3rd annual Seattle Anarchist Bookfair at the Vera Project! Tables and workshops between the hours of 11-5 on Saturday and 12-5 on Sunday. Visit the AK Press tables staffed by our comrades from SeaSol!
Details and schedule available at: http://seattleanarchistbookfair.org/
Join us at the AK Press warehouse for an exciting event with Haymarket Books author Immanuel Ness as he discusses his new book Ours to Master and to Own: On Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present. Ness is professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a founding member of the Lower East Side Community Labor Organization, an autonomous activist organization in New York City. His research and writing focuses on social and revolutionary movements, labor militancy, and migrant worker resistance to oppression. It promises to be a great event!
About the book (which we will have soon): From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions, fought bitter strikes, and have gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creating institutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. Looking at specific examples drawn from every corner of the globe and every period of modern history, this pathbreaking volume comprehensively traces this often under-appreciated historical tradition.
Ripe with lessons drawn from historical and contemporary struggles for workers’ control, Ours to Master and to Own is essential reading for those struggling to bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.
Join us for a reading and signing with Dominque Stevenson, co-author with Eddie Conway of Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther at the Black and Nobel Bookstore on Erie Ave in Philadelphia.
*Anarchism and Its Aspirations*
presented by Cindy Milstein
Anarchism has always held up the ideal of a free society of free individuals–a world without hierarchy or domination. Do-it-yourself punk emerged directly out of this impulse, and for many years understood itself as not merely trying to create a self-reliant scene but also offering a tangible “fuck you” to top-down power structures generally. Now, do-it-ourselves revolts around the world from Cairo to Madison are proving that self-organization works as the basis for egalitarian communities. The ethical practices that anarchists advocate are becoming powerful “everyday” experiences, with people self-managing everything from child care and food
to civic defense and trash collection. But what exactly does this look like? This workshop will provide an accessible overview of an often-misunderstood political philosophy and living tradition, highlighting its vision and prefigurative experiments.
Cindy is a collective member of Station 40 (in SF) and the Institute for Anarchist Studies, andhas long been involved in political projects ranging from the New World from Below convergence at the U.S. Social Forum, to the “Hope from People not Presidents” and “Don’t Just (Not) Vote” efforts, to the collective Black Sheep Books (in VT). She’s the author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press, 2010), and is collaborating with Erik Ruin on Paths toward Utopia: Explorations in Everyday Anarchism (PM Press, 2012).
Weekend passes for New Direction Fest are $20 in advance, or $25 at the door. One day passes are also available for $15.
Conversation, reading, and conspiring with contributors:
Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, Ralowe T. Ampu, Jayden Donahue, Vanessa Huang, Miss Major, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, Michelle Potts, and Jennifer Worley
Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the enormity of the
prison industrial complex. The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners,
activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight
of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be
grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation, to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications,
and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle.
Preorder your copy today through AK Press (www.akpress.org) • For press inquiries and review copies contact captivegenders@gmail.com
Wheelchair accessible, but no public restrooms available • Fragrance free: To ensure this event is safe and accessible for community members
with environmental illnesses, we request you refrain from wearing any scented products
We were very excited to see David Price’s Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State arrive at our door here in Baltimore last week. Weaponizing Anthropology is the result of years of research into the militarization of the discipline of anthropology, and the ways in which the military and intelligence communities use (and misuse) the field of anthropology, and social sciences in general, to bolster their counterinsurgency efforts and imperialistic agendas.
“David Price once again proves that he is one of America’s most important engaged scholars and insightful public intellectuals. Weaponizing Anthropology is a brilliant analyses of not only how the social sciences are increasingly becoming an integral part of the warfare state but also how knowledge and culture are subject to new modes of militarization, organized in multiple new ways for the production of state violence. This may be one of the most important books written in the last few decades on the merging of the military and intelligence agencies with the academy. Beautifully written and rigorously argued, Weaponizing Anthropology is a must read for students, educators, and anyone else concerned about the fate of the academy, the corruption of anthropology, the militarization of politics, and the future of democracy.”–Henry Giroux, author of University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex
Read the introduction to Weaponizing Anthropology below, then pick up a copy of the book at 25% off list price here!
By David H. Price
Just as it was becoming passe to remark on anthropology’s status as colonialism’s wanton stepchild, George Bush’s Terror War rediscovered old militarized uses for culture, and invigorated new modernist dreams of harnessing anthropology and culture for the domination of others. Because I began in the early 1990s using the Freedom of Information Act, interviews, and archival research to document American anthropologists’ interactions with military and intelligence agencies, by the time the post-9/11 push by the Pentagon and CIA to again use anthropological knowledge as tools for intelligence, warfare and counterinsurgency, I had a decent head start on documenting and thinking about some of this history. By the time America got its terror war on, I had already documented the details of how this worked in the past, and had thought about the core of the ethical, political and theoretical fundamentals of a critical approach to questions relating to the weaponization of anthropology.
But beyond my work on the ways that McCarthyism limited critical political debates in the 1950s, this head start offered little preparation for the wave of American jingoistic support for all things military and CIA as the nation willfully forgot the CIA’s past involvement in torture, illegal arms deals, assassinations, undermining foreign democratic movements not to its liking, and embraced new forms of militarization as if this past had nothing to do with the rise of anti-American militarism around the globe.
Today’s weaponization of anthropology and other social sciences has been a long time coming, and post-9/11 America’s climate of fear coupled with reductions in traditional academic funding provided the conditions of a sort of perfect storm for the militarization of the discipline and the academy as a whole. While all societies have links between the production and use of knowledge and larger economic and political structures, in the United States, the structural desires and holes that anthropological knowledge are desired to fill have been apparent for at least the past century.
Anthropology has always been funded to ask certain types of questions, or to know certain types of things: sometimes this has meant that there were more funds available to study the languages and cultures of specific geographic regions, in other times this meant entire theoretical approaches were fundable (like the simplistic culture and personality studies of the post war period, used to study our enemies at a distance), while others (critical Marxism, ca. 1952), were not. But even while the directions taken by anthropologists were frequently steered in general directions by the selective availability of funds, this arrangement allowed for some great variations in approaches or areas of study. Bu the post-9/11 world brought new variations on these old themes where a new form of the National Security State now wanted to cherry-pick individuals early in their careers and secretly place them in departments even while they maintained secret relationships and contacts with the CIA and other agencies. As the chapters on Minerva and the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Programs argue, these new initiatives are built out of a recognition that military and intelligence agencies are ill-prepared to confront the issues and problems raised first by Bush’s Terror Wars, and then Obama’s Counterinsurgency Wars. instead of freely funding social scientists to conduct research of their own choosing, the government now funds academics to think in increasingly narrow institutional ways–ways that are institutionally linked to the damaging narrow ways that the Pentagon, CIA and State already approach these problems.
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This is the first year for the Boston Anarchist Bookfair and we’re excited to be there! Stay tuned for more information…
One of our favorites, this bookfair is like the bastard child of an anarchist bookfair and a street festival, complete with a jazz parade and to-go cups of strawberry daiquiri. Convinced? Come on out and say hi to AK Press!
If you’ll be attending this year’s American Studies Association conference in Baltimore, stop by our booth and check out the latest titles! Stay tuned for news of special author appearances!
Each year hundreds of educators both locally and nationally gather to network, explore empowering learning environments, and develop a learning community. Join us at this year’s Teaching for Social Justice conference (the 11th annual!) for workshops, resource fair, and speakers. Free and open to the public, with free childcare!
Opening Keynote Speaker: Gloria Ladson-Billings, renowned education professor at University of Wisconsin and author of The Dreamkeepers and Education Research in the Public Interest: Social Justice, Action and Policy
Afternoon Keynote: Patrick Camangian, assistant professor at University of San Francisco’s Urban Education and Social Justice program, Co-director and teacher, East Oakland Step to College, Mandela High School