‘Heteropolitics’: Refiguring the Common and the Political
We’ve just come across the Urban Commons Handbook, “a handbook for those interested in starting, growing and supporting community-led projects”. “Which ingredients of a cooperative community project most help it succeed? What are urban commons and how do they fit into current activist and civil society debates? And what tools and methods do commoners need to strengthen their work? These are the three questions at the heart of The Urban Commons Cookbook“.
P2P Models, a EU-funded research project based at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain, with Principal Investigator and advisors from the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, is looking for a postdoc researcher “to lead social research of Collaborative Economy communities which may enable the development of software prototypes grounded on social theory”. The deadline for applications is 1 September 2020. For more info, see https://p2pmodels.eu/jobs/
A new paper by Yiannis Pechtelidis and Alexandros Kioupkiolis, titled Education as Commons, Children as Commoners: The Case Study of the Little Tree Community, has just been published in Democracy & Education. Here’s the abstract:
This paper presents the emergent paradigm of the “commons” as an alternative value and action system in the field of education, and it critically draws out the implications of the commons for refiguring education and its potential contribution to democratic transformation. The paper delves into an independent pedagogical community, Little Tree, which is active in early childhood education and care, aiming to explore the ways in which children conduct themselves in accordance with the ethics and the logics of the commons and to show how they thereby unsettle the conventional meaning of citizenship. Proceeding from an enlarged notion of the political, the collective action of children and adults on social relations and subjectivities in their ordinary activities and intercourse in the Little Tree community are explored, and the dominant beliefs and ideas about the political ability of children are contested. This enlarged take on the political is crucial to empowering children and to enhancing their participation in public life. This pedagogical community is taken up as an instance of commoning education, that is, of configuring education as a common good, which is collectively governed by its community on terms of freedom, equality, active and creative participation.
Readers of our blog who are interested in exploring the application of commons-based models to drug development, there is a very interesting online event with Dr George Papanikolaou (P2P Foundation) and Marianella Kloka (Praksis) on Wednesday 18 March on the topic of open science and what it means for the development of pharmaceutical drugs. For more info, see https://www.eventbrite.com/e/open-science-in-drug-development-coronachallenge-tickets-99547613592
The Transnational Institute (TNI) is launching a new series on Digital Futures and is asking for essays that address the question how do we recover the emancipatory potential of technological change and bring it back under popular democratic control? For more info, here’s the call: https://www.tni.org/en/article/call-for-essays-technology-power-and-emancipation
The Journal of Digital Social Research (JDSR) has just published a special issue on Doing Digital Ethnography, which is a must-read for the community of Internet researchers:
“This special issue, guest edited by Crystal Abidin and Gabriele de Seta collects the confessions of five digital ethnographers laying bare their methodological failures, disciplinary posturing, and ethical dilemmas. The articles are meant to serve as counseling stations for fellow researchers who are approaching digital media ethnographically. On the one hand, this issue’s contributors acknowledge the rich variety of methodological articulations reflected in the lexicon of “buzzword ethnography”. On the other, they evidence how doing ethnographic research about, on, and through digital media is most often a messy, personal, highly contextual enterprise fraught with anxieties and discomforts.”
A new paper by Alexandros Kioupkiolis, titled ‘The Commons and Music Education for Social Change‘, has just been published in the European Journal of Philosophy in Arts Education. Here’s the abstract:
This paper spells out the value of an alternative paradigm of the commons for thinking social change and for refiguring education, in general, and music education, in specific. It sets out from the different strands of thought on the commons as a collaborative mode of living, acting and organizing on terms of collective autonomy, equal freedom, creativity, diversity and participation. It analyses the bearing of the various commons on contemporary music practices –horizontal work, open-source musicianship, individual experimentation, collectivized authorship- and education. Education as commons is transformed into a collective good which is co-created by all parties involved on a footing of equality, autonomy and creative freedom. Commoning music education, more specifically, would imply: an opening of music, and education in music, to any and all; a blurring of the divides between professionals and amateurs, teachers and students, producers and consumers; an endeavour to minimise unequal power relations, whereby the teacher relinquishes the role of the authority and becomes an assistant, an advisor, an animator and a facilitator; collective self-governance of educational processes; equal freedom through individual creativity, diversity, openness, collaboration, hybridity and experiment.
On Wednesday 19 February, Alexandros Kioupkiolis will be a guest of Rosa Nera in Chania for a very interesting discussion on the subject of the ‘commons, movements and cultural goods‘. You can find more information about the event (in greek) on the Rosa Nera website.
Just stumbled upon this recently published (Oct. 2019) issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ), which is dedicated to the commons. Featuring articles by theorists such as Silvia Federici, Massimo De Angelis, Ugo Mattei and Carlo Vercellone, which explore various themes related to the commons from a theoretical as well as historical perspective, it is a must-read for those who wish to delve more deeply into the subject.