the provisional university
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
Revolt in Quebec
In February, the Liberal government in Quebec, led by Jean Charest, announced a proposed tuition fee hike of 82% to be phased in over the next five years. This dynamic is by now becoming familiar, as are the justifications. Charest argued that the fee increase was intended to bring Quebec’s universities in line with neighboring provinces. Even after the tuition fee hike, it was argued, students in Quebec would be paying less than students in other parts of Canada, not to mention America or even the UK. The fees were about making things more ‘equal’ but they were also about ‘economic common sense’: how could Quebec’s universities compete globally without financial contributions? This is the same form of argument that justifies the commodification of knowledge, privatization of university spaces and the subordination of research and teaching to vacuous output measures.
Continue Reading ›Activist research: workshop on collective research for social change
Where: Seomra Spraoi
Activist research is a way of doing just that. Forget your prejudices about academic research - this is about using research to engage with and change the world. This workshop provides some tools, some ideas and some activities to learn about how activist research works and how we might use it.
Register by sending an email to mickbyrne@gmail.com
Openhere conference-festival 28th june-01 July
Open-here is kicking off a series of workshops and discussions around the themes of digital commons and open-source production/exchange this Thursday at the science gallery.
You can see the programme here: http://openhere.data.ie/
Some Provo Uni people are just back from a conference on the knowledge commons in Leicester which addressed a lot of these issues, so we’re looking forward to this. One of the highlights looks to be the discussion on ‘the communism of capital’ on Sunday at 3pm, which will (presumably) address the ambiguity of the commons with regard to capitalist valorization in the context of immaterial/cognitive capitalism, on the one hand, and forms of production/exchange which are excessive to capital, on the other.
Crisis and Revolution now available in English
Crisis and Revolution, the sixth book from the Madrid-based activist research collective Observatorio Metropolitano, is now available as a free-to-download PDF. Mick O’Broin and Patrick Besnihan from the Provisional University were part of the team that translated and edited the book.
You can download the PDF here.
Mick O’Broin also has a review of the book in the latest issue of Interface: a journal for and about social movements, which you can access for free here.
Some of you may remember the talk we organised with Bea and Mario from the Observatorio Metropolitano in Seomra Spraoi, in the Autumn of 2010, or their text ‘Towards a Euro-mediterranean social strike’ which we translated a while back.
