"Faith & Sanctuary"

Brian Burch

I was pleased to be asked to speak for a bit to provide some personal
reflections, historical and biblical, on the providing of sanctuary. My
remarks are inherently
from a Christian perspective, but there are similar views expressed by people
from other faith perspectives.

Subcultures and Political Resistance

Call for Papers

Journal: Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice

Author Deadline: July 15, 2004

Guest Editors: Jeffrey Paris (Philosophy, University of San Francisco) &
Michael Ault (Political Science, CSU Bakersfield)

Length: 2500-3500 words

In recent years, the politics and anti-politics of X-generation youth have
been replaced by the resurgence — and in some cases insurgence — of
subcultural groups. Recent attempts to understand these groups have
brought changes to the older discipline of subcultural studies, and have
even been tentatively dubbed “post-subcultural studies.” Changes linked
to the globalization of culture, music and fashion have made subcultures
less bounded, and the fusion of different styles and politics offers the
possible lens for imagining a global youth counter-culture of diverse
practices of resistance.

Melody Carter-Parker writes Call for submissions
subject: Iraq
Deadline: ongoing
.
[R][R][F] 2004 --->XP
[Remembering-Repressing-Forgetting]
http://www.newmediafest.org/rrf2004
global networking is preparing a feature related to Iraq - the war and the periode afterwards, and is looking for proposal of net based art works, papers, articles, comments, links etc which fit in this spectrum.

Accepted works and items must have a clearly defined copyright note and will be included into the new Iraq module to be created. Besides URLs of works or sources, also certain media files are optionally accepted, see specification below.
Please use this form for submitting

1. firstname/name of artist, email, URL
2. a brief bio/CV (not more than 300 words)
3. title and URL or type of media file,
4. a short work description (not more than 300 words),
5. one screen shot (max 800x600 pixels, .jpg)

please send your submission to
rrf2004@newmediafest.org
subject: Iraq

Only these types of media files are accepted:
1. text-->plain email, .txt or .doc
2. image--->.jpg
3. movie--->.swf, .dcr, .mov, .mpeg
.
Deadline -->ongoing
as soon as the first submissions are accepted, they will be included and posted.
**********************
[R][R][F] 2004 --->XP
http://www.newmediafest.org/rrf2004
rrf2004@newmediafest.org
global networking project.

"An Anarchist Terroir"

Rebecca Dewitt, New Formulation (February, 2003)

Reviewing:

Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies

Edited by Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton

New York: Routledge, 2002



Slow Food: Collected Thoughts on Taste, Tradition, and the Honest Pleasures of Food

Edited by Carlo Petrini with Ben Watson and Slow Food Editore

Chelsea Green, 2001

Anarchism and contemporary academic theory ignore each other. On opposite ends of the theoretical spectrum, one tends toward universal ideas and the other towards isolated phenomena. Introducing academic theoretical advances to anarchism is both an affront and a necessity. Anarchism, let me introduce you to Food Studies. Go on, try it, you might like it! Kropotkin’s response to Malthusian sentiments in Mutual Aid, Food Not Bombs as anarchism in action, and mobilizations against biotechnology and other profiteering methods of production are the primary ways in which anarchism utilizes food. While anarchists debate the nature of nature, serve vegan food to the homeless, and protest Monsanto’s(1) conquest of the so-called Third World, is it worth expanding anarchism’s utilitarian use of food? Why this even matters is discernable in the new trend known as Food Studies. Two recent books, Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies and Slow Food: Collected Thoughts on Taste, Tradition, and the Honest Pleasures of Food attest to the new political nature of food and expand upon an international dialogue.

These days it is no longer enough to hand out free food, declare oneself a vegetarian, or shop at your local coop to make a statement about food. The emerging academic field of Food Studies invokes eco-gastronomic movements, analyzes rifts between “foodies” and “fatties,”(2) and elevates slow food over fast food to look at the means of production, transportation, cultural identity, nation building or dismantling, class warfare, and imperialism. To simply demand control over the means of production and access to food, central to anarchist thought, appears to be the equivalent of theoretical vulgarity. If anarchism wishes to take advantage of the increasingly rich fields of Food Studies, it will need to avoid such simplistic reductions while also retaining strong anarchist convictions.

"Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture" is an interdisciplinary journal produced out of RMIT University in Australia. Staff in the Communications & Writing program at Monash University's Gippsland campus produce one special issue each year. This year we invite you to address the broad topic of the politics of consent, along the following lines:

"Manufacturing Consent?"
How can consent be theorised today? What, for instance, are the contemporary means or conditions for manufacturing consent? What is the role of media rhetoric and practice in the formation of consent? What is the place of consent in advanced liberal democracies, or in other non-liberal geo-political contexts? What are the relations between consent and consensus in political or governmental processes? How essential is consent or consensus to the operations of contemporary politics and of global politics in particular? Can consent be gained on a supra-national level? Or must it be conceived, at every level, as unstable and ineffective, as no longer relevant to the study of democracy in its many forms?And what of past theories of consent and consensus, such as the one bound to a notion of “hegemony”? In what ways do contemporary events — “September 11”, “Iraq”, “Tampa”, “Madrid” — invite us to return to and to reconsider such theories and their place (or otherwise) within communication studies, as part (or not) of the history of the discipline?

Che Guevara, Paulo Friere and the Politics of Hope:
Reclaiming Critical Pedagogy

by Peter Maclaren

On a recent voyage to the rain forests of Costa Rica, I rode a bus through
the beautiful city of Cartago. From my window I noticed a young man with a
long ponytail running beside the bus. As the bus passed him, he glanced up
and our eyes momentarily met; I noticed that he was wearing a Che T-shirt
with the inscription ‘¡Che Vive!’. A fleeting sensation of plaintive
connectedness overcame me, and I managed to give him a quick ‘thumbs-up’
gesture of affirmation just in time for him to return a broad smile to the
crazy gringo. For a brief moment, I felt that this ponytailed stranger and I
were linked by a project larger than both of us. During that instant, I
could tangibly sense between us a collective yearning for a world free from
the burdens of this one, and I knew that I was not alone. The image of Che
that he wore on his breast like a secular Panagia pointed to a realm of
revolutionary values held in trust by all those who wish to break the chains
of capital and be free. Che has a way of connecting—if only in this
whimsical way—people who share a common resolve to fight injustice and to
liberate the world from cruelty and exploitation. There was no way of
knowing the politics of this young man and how seriously he identified with
the life and teachings of El Che. But Che’s image brings out the promise of
such a connection and the political fecundity of even this momentary
reverie.

Melody Carter-Parker writes --->
[R][R][F] 2004 --->XP
[Remembering-Repressing-Forgetting]
http://www.newmediafest.org/rrf2004
global networking project created and developed by Agricola de Cologne. The first suite of physical installations/presentations started on Friday, 5 March 2004 (running until 30 April 2004) at National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucaresti/Romania
http://www.mnac.ro/next.htm,
Bergen Center of Electronic Arts Bergen/Norway http://www.bek.no
later -->20-28 March
New Media Art Festival Bangkok/Thailand http://thailand.culturebase.org
.
[R][R][F] 2004 --->XP
consists of an adimistrative and an artistic body.
The administrative body contains all basic project information,
the artistic body the "Memory Channels" of R][R][F] 2004 --->XP
--->all details on http://www.newmediafest.org/rrf2004

The basic part of [R][R][F] 2004 --->XP
is [R][R][F] version 2.0 including following curators
and their selection of artists --->
Gita Hashemi (Iran/Canada), Raul Ferrera-Balanquet (Cuba/USA)
Calin Man and Stefan Tiron (Romania), Eva Sjuve (Norway)
Bjoern Norberg (Sweden), Raquel Partnoy (USA/Argentina)
Agricola de Cologne & Melody Parker-Carter (both Germany)
Featured is the ongoing curatorial environment, entitled
"Women: Memory and Repression in Argentina".
Please find all curators and selected artists on
http://www.newmediafest.org/rrf2004/
.

Zizek Watch

Scott McLemee, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 2, 2004

The world's leading cultural theorist has held exactly the same academic title for a quarter of a century. Slavoj Zizek is a "researcher" at the Institute for Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, in Slovenia. He attributes his great intellectual vitality to the fact that he has no reason to work very hard. "I'm on a permanent sabbatical," he tells Zizek Watch. "I have a pure research job, where I do nothing."

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Rickie Lee Jones Gets Political"

Dan Grunebaum, Japan Today

There's a point not too far into American singer Rickie Lee
Jones's new album — in the first verse of the first song in
fact — that makes one do a double take. Could this be the
insouciant piano girl that brought us 1979's gently mocking,
"Chuck E's in Love?"

The song, "Ugly Man," doesn't pull any punches. As soon as
Jones lilts into her first verse, we get a strong hint as to
who the target is: "He's an ugly man/he always was an ugly
man/he grew up to be like his father/an ugly man." And just
in case we had our doubts, she soon puts them to rest,
delivering in deadpan style the lyric, "Revolution/now it's
finally going to come/everywhere that you're not
looking/Revolution."

"The Spaces of a Cultural Question"

Brian Holmes interviewed by Marion von Osten

[In preparation of
"Atelier Europa: A Small Post-Fordistic Drama," opening April 2,
2004 in the Munich Kunstverein.]

Marion: You are editing the next issue of Multitudes on cultural and
creative labor. Can you explain why and out of what perspective you look
on cultural labor and creative work, i.e. do you think it is possible to
explain the inner dynamics of post-Fordist production modes due to this
specific form of work and its conditions?