Tuesday 07.10.07 – Constituent Imagination – Radical Research

1. about this Tuesday 07.10.07
2. about Constituent Imagination
3. about the Contributors
4. Bridging the Praxis Divide – Benjamin Shepard
5. Fragments on Machinic Intellectuals – Jack Bratich
6. Links

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1. about this Tuesday 07.10.07

What: Panel / Discussion
When: Tuesday 07.10.07
Where: 16Beaver Street, 5th Floor
When: 7:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all

Please join us for a discussion of the new book Constituent Imagination:
Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press). This
collection of essays examines the relationship of radical theory to
movements for social change, and, in the process, redefines the nature of
intellectual practice. Discuss various projects of autonomous knowledge
production and political research with editors Stevphen Shukaitis, David
Graeber, and Erika Biddle and contributors from the book, Jack Bratich,
Ben Shepard, and Kevin Van Meter.

Hope you can make it. Please note that this event will take place on the
5th floor.

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2. about Constituent Imagination

Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization
Edited by Stevphen Shukaitis + David Graeber with Erika Biddle
http://www.constituentimagination.net

What is the relationship of radical theory to movements for social change?
In a world where more and more global struggles are refusing vanguard
parties and authoritarian practices, does the idea of the detached
intellectual, observing events from on high, make sense anymore? In this
powerful and unabashedly militant collection, over two dozen academic
authors and engaged intellectuals—including Antonio Negri and Colectivo
Situaciones—provide some challenging answers. In the process, they
redefine the nature of intellectual practice itself.

The book opens with the editors’ provocative history of the academy’s
inherent limitations and possibilities. The essays that follow cover a
broad range: embedded intellectuals in increasingly corporatized
universities, research projects in which factory workers and academics
work side by side, revolutionary ethnographies of the global justice
movement, meditations on technology from the branches of a Scottish
tree-sit. What links them all is a collective and expansive reimagining of
engaged intellectual work in the service of social change. In a cultural
climate in where right-wing watchdog groups seem to have radical academics
on the run, this unapologetic anthology is a breath of fresh air.

Includes materials from Brian Holmes * Ben Holtzman // Craig Hughes //
Kevin Van Meter * Antonio Negri * Colectivo Situaciones * Gavin Grindon *
Maribel Casas-Cortes + Sebastian Cobarrubias * Angela Mitropolous * Jack
Bratich * Harry Halpin * Jeff Juris * Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma * Ben
Shepard * Kirsty Robertson * Bre * Anita Lacey * Michal Osterweil + Graeme
Chesters * Dave Eden * Uri Gordon * Ashar Latif + Sandra Jeppesen *
CrimethInc Ex-Workers Collective

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3. about the Contributors

Stevphen Shukaitis is a research fellow at the University of London, Queen
Mary and member of the Autonomedia editorial collective.

David Graeber is an anthropologist and activist living in New York. He is
the author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and Towards an
Anthropological Theory of Value.

Erika Biddle is a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective and the
Institute for Anarchist Studies and is managing editor of Perspectives on
Anarchist Theory.

Jack Z. Bratich is assistant professor of Journalism and Media Studies at
Rutgers University and is the author of Conspiracy Panics: Political
Rationality and Popular Culture (forthcoming).

Benjamin Shepard the author/editor of two books: White Nights and
Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic
(1997) and From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in
the Era of Globalization (2002) has worked with ACT UP, SexPanic!, Reclaim
the Streets, Times UP, the Clandestine Rebel Clown Army, the Absurd
Response Team, and the Housing Works Campaign to End AIDS.

Kevin Van Meter is a member of Team Colors, a New York based collective,
which, in both workshops and articles is seeking to address ways to
explore strategic interventions in everyday life.