Bucharest, Romania, Oct. 17-18, 2014

Media and Communication in and after the Global Capitalist Crisis: Renewal, Reform or Revolution?
ESA RN18 Mid-Term Conference 2014
University of Bucharest, Romania
October 17-18, 2014

Full Call Text and additional information:
http://fuchs.uti.at/wp-content/RN18_2014.pdf

Call for Participation and Abstracts

European Sociological Association, Research Network 18: Sociology of Communications and Media Research
http://www.europeansociology.org/research-networks/rn18-sociology-of-com...

Submission deadline for abstracts: July 1st, 2014. Submission per e-mail to christian.fuchs@uti.at
Abstracts should be written in a word processor, have 250-500 words, and contain title, author name(s), email address(es), institutional affiliations, the suggested presentation’s abstract.

The world has experienced a global crisis of capitalism that started in 2008 and is continuing until now. It has been accompanied by a crisis of the state and a general crisis of legitimation of dominant ideologies such as neoliberalism. Responses to the crisis have been variegated and have included austerity measures of the state that have hit the weakest, an increased presence of progressive protests, revolutions and strikes that have made use of digital, social and traditional media in various ways, the rise of far-right movements and parties in many parts of Europe and other parts of the world, the Greek state’s closing down of public service broadcaster ERT and increased commercial pressure on public service broadcasting in general, new debates about how to strengthen public service media, increased socio-economic and class inequality in many parts of the world and at a global level, precarious forms of work in general and in the media and cultural industries in particular, the emergence of new media reform movements, an extension and intensification of the crisis of newspapers and the print media, an increasing shift of advertising budgets to targeted ads on the Internet and along with this development the rise of commercial “social media” platforms, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the existence of a global surveillance-industrial complex that operates a communications surveillance system called “Prism” that involves the NSA and media companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, Skype, Apple and Paltalk; discussions about the power and freedom of the press in light of the Levenson inquiry, shifting geographies of the political and media landscape that have to do with the economic rise of countries such as China and India.

Given this context, the main questions that ESA RN18’s 2014 conference asks and to which it invites contributions are: How has the crisis affected the media and communication landscape in Europe and globally and what perspectives for the future of media and communications are there? What suggestions for media reforms are there? How feasible are they? What kind of media policies and reforms do we need today? Which ones should be avoided? Are we in this context likely to experience a renewal of neoliberalism or something different?

"Kali's Day" Reading with Bonny Finberg, Feb. 3, 2014, New York City

Come celebrate the publication of Bonny Finberg's new novel,
"KALI'S DAY" (Autonomedia/Unbearable Books)

Monday, February 3rd, 2014 @ 7PM
SAINT MARK’S BOOKSTORE
31 THIRD AVE., New York City

PENNY ARCADE, BRUCE BENDERSON, THADDEUS RUTKOWSKI
and the author will read selections from the book.
Emceed by JIM FEAST

London CryptoFestival
Tools and Analysis for a Post-PRISM Internet

https://www.cryptoparty.in/london_cryptofestival

Saturday, November 30th
Doors open 10.30 / Start 11am sharp

New Academic Building
Goldsmiths, New Cross
London
Location: http://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/

Free, all welcome

What happens to the internet after the Snowden revelations?
Do we just sit tight and let the most important cultural and economic force of the last two decades get turned into a giant surveillance honeytrap? London CryptoFestival is the biggest public and academic manifestation in the UK after the spy-network has been exposed. The unique day-long festival is aimed at showing paths beyond the logic of fear and coercion offered by the state on the one hand, and business models based on surveillance on the other.

London CryptoFestival brings together leading security engineers, computer scientists, civil rights groups, hackers, activists and artists to evaluate the current situation and to show ways forward.

Accelerationism: A Symposium on Tendencies in Capitalism
December 14, 2013, 10-20hr, Berlin Alexanderplatz

http://xlrt.org/

Contemporary capitalism is an object of high abstraction. The symposium is an invitation to discuss and disclose the anonymous and inner tendencies of capitalism, to study its monetary, algorithmic and energetic viscera. How can one grasp the living drives of financial markets and technological innovation? And more importantly: who really produces and controls those drives and how could any alternative political subject emerge without such a complex knowledge?

The recent debate on accelerationism and the philosophical scene of Speculative Realism just reminded of an old question posed by Deleuze and Guattari: Which is the real revolutionary path? To withdraw from the world market or, on the opposite, to go further and "accelerate the process", as Nietzsche already suggested long before the current Stillstand? For example today Germany finds itself in the eye of the storm: a mild social democracy at the center of Europe watching neoliberalism freely devastating the rest of the world.

Bristol Radical History Group Autumn Program

Bristol Radical History Group have announced their autumn programme of talks, gigs and meetings. Full details can be found from the links below or at http://www.brh.org.uk/site/events/

Hope to see you at some of these events....

CeDEM14 Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government
Danube University, Krems, Austria
May 21–23, 2014

www.donau-uni.ac.at/cedem

The international Conference for e-Democracy and Open Government brings
together e-democracy, e-participation and open government specialists
working in academia, politics, government and business to critically
analyse the innovations, issues, ideas and challenges in the networked
societies of the digital age.

Narco-Mania! And Other Parodies of the War on Drugs
Films by Greg “Gringoyo” Berger

Friday, August 3, 7pm - 9:30pm
Alwan for the Arts, 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10004
alwanforthearts.org / Map

Fundraiser for www.gringoyo.com and The Fund for Authentic Journalism.
Sliding scale admission, $0-$20. Suggested donation $10.

"Exposes the interests of the United States in the war against narco-trafficking." - Arturo Rodríguez García, Proceso.

"Berger spins out political parodies...to an audience eager for his lampoons." - Maddie Oatman, Mother Jones

Filmmaker Greg "Gringoyo" Berger and other collaborators will present the films. Co-Presented by El Museo del Barrio.

Filmmaker, journalist, and self-proclaimed “recovering documentary filmmaker” Greg Berger (known in Mexico as “Gringoyo”) has spent the last three years making satirical comedies about the Mexican War on Drugs. In the process, he has also documented the rise of the largest mass movement against the Drug War since Richard Nixon’s 1971 declaration. Disgusted by the absurdity of the War on Drugs, Berger stopped making documentary films for television and started making short satires distributed online through the website Narco News.

Colloquium -- Foucault/Deleuze: A Neo-Liberal Diagram

Start: 9 Mar 2012 - 10:00am
End: 9 Mar 2012 - 5:30pm
Timezone: Etc/GMT-5
Location:

Ryerson University, Rogers Communication Centre, room 202
Toronto, Canada

Foucault/Deleuze: A Neo-Liberal Diagram

Friday, March 9, 2012

Ryerson University, Rogers Communication Centre, room 202

This colloquium brings together some of the most respected and
promising scholars of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to discuss
how their work has served to inform a diagrammatic critique of
contemporary political economy, finance capital, and the possibilities
for progressive social change. The colloquium will investigate how
contemporary critics of neo-Liberalism (Stengers, Stiegler, Lazzarato,
Bifo, Esposito, Marrazi and others) have developed new theoretical
trajectories out of the seminal works and posthumously published
interviews, essays, and lectures of Foucault and Deleuze.

Organizer: Greg Elmer, gelmer@ryerson.ca, hosted by the Infoscape
Centre for the Study of Social Media, Ryerson Unviersity