Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
65
result(s) for
"Autonomism."
Sort by:
Digital Labour in the University: Understanding the Transformations of Academic Work in the UK
Universities have been the site of a variety of shifts and transformations in the previous few decades. Both the composition of students and academics are changing (to a lesser or greater extent), along with the ways in which teaching and research is supported, conducted, and delivered. The effects of neoliberalism, privatisation, precarious employment, debt, and digitalisation have been highlighted as important factors in understanding these changes. However, the ways in which these tendencies are expressed in universities – both in specific and general ways – remain fragmented and under-analysed. In particular, the role of academic labour processes, increasingly mediated through digital technology, remains in the background. There is a risk of viewing these transformations as abstracted, far removed from the day-to-day activities of academic labour on which universities rely. This article will therefore focus on connecting the broader changes in funding, organisation, and digital technology to the labour processes of academics. Rather than seeking a return to a romanticised pre-neoliberal university, this article explores the possibilities of resistance and alternatives to the university as it is now.
Journal Article
The weight of the printed word : text, context and militancy in operaismo
In The Weight of the Printed Word, Steve Wright explores the creation and use of documents as a key dimension in the activities of the Italian workerists during the 1960s and 1970s, as they sought to organise amongst new subjectivities of mass rebellion.
eBook
Beautiful, troubling art: in defense of non-summative judgment
Do the ethical features of an artwork bear on its aesthetic value? This movie endorses misogyny, that song is a civil rights anthem, the clay constituting this statue was extracted with underpaid labor—are facts like these the proper bases for aesthetic evaluation? I argue that this debate has suffered from a false presupposition: that if the answer is “yes” (for at least some such ethical features), such considerations feature as pro tanto contributions to an artwork’s overall aesthetic value, i.e., as merits or flaws which make something have more or less overall aesthetic value. As the case of ethically laden aesthetic evaluation makes clear, however, good aesthetic judgement is irreducibly multi-dimensional, e.g., “the movie has an engaging soundtrack, tasteful camera work, and takes a misogynistically purient perspective on its female lead.” Such a “non-summative” judgement refuses to reduce those various dimensions of aesthetic value to a single aggregate aesthetic evaluation, like “it’s a 6/10” or “it’s a pretty good movie!” I defend both the modest claim that such non-summative evaluations are not mistaken and the extremist claim that summative (i.e., unidimensional) aesthetic evaluation is defective by considering other domains of normative assessment in which summing seems inappropriate, notably including evaluations of people’s character.
Journal Article
Digital Labour in the University: Understanding the Transformations of Academic Work in the UK
Universities have been the site of a variety of shifts and transformations in the previous few decades. Both the composition of students and academics are changing (to a lesser or greater extent), along with the ways in which teaching and research is supported, conducted, and delivered. The effects of neoliberalism, privatisation, precarious employment, debt, and digitalisation have been highlighted as important factors in understanding these changes. However, the ways in which these tendencies are expressed in universities – both in specific and general ways – remain fragmented and under-analysed. In particular, the role of academic labour processes, increasingly mediated through digital technology, remains in the background. There is a risk of viewing these transformations as abstracted, far removed from the day-to-day activities of academic labour on which universities rely. This article will therefore focus on connecting the broader changes in funding, organisation, and digital technology to the labour processes of academics. Rather than seeking a return to a romanticised pre-neoliberal university, this article explores the possibilities of resistance and alternatives to the university as it is now.
Journal Article
A Basque Media War: Who is Ireland’s Friend, Who is Ireland’s Enemy? The Easter Rising’s Influence, Context and Development in the Basque Country
This paper examines the inner debate in Basque nationalism resulting from the Easter Rising between 1916 and 1918. Basque nationalists firmly believed that the Irish Revolution would affect the British war effort, the outcome of the Great War and hence Basque political vindication itself. The official nationalist leadership and its organ, Euzkadi, supported Great Britain, arguing a British military triumph in Ireland and in the Great War would bring a worldwide era of autonomy for national minorities. Pro-independence militants, however, not only expressed solidarity and outspoken support towards the rebels, but also associated their victory with a post-war scenario favourable to independence movements. This study focuses on the two competing Basque nationalist interpretations as presented in the media. Simultaneously, traditionalist parties (i.e. Carlists and Integrists) exacerbated nationalists’ differences in order to weaken a direct political rival.
Journal Article
Theorising Disablement through the Collective-Materialist Approach to Disabling Capitalism
This article offers a theory of disablement within contemporary capitalism by complementing and building on the UPIAS-inspired social model of disability. It first explores a variety of divergences between different models of disability, to then propose five tenets for the collective-materialist approach to disablement . These tenets are: considering disablement as both oppression and exploitation; using the “subjects of disablement” 1 as a collective and non-identitarian concept alongside already-existing identity terms; centring the “collective” alongside the “social”; struggling for autonomy and Independent Living, and adopting an anti-productivist politics. The abolition of disabling capitalism and the transformation of the institution of work are the ultimate goals of the collective-materialist approach and its related practice.
Journal Article
Environmental Aesthetics in the Age of Climate Change
As climate change alters the environment, people’s associations with and appreciations of the environment change too. Environmental aesthetics, an area of knowledge informed by philosophy and ethics, offers an important vantage point on human wellbeing in the age of climate change. Contributors to the literature have attempted to imagine how changing environmental conditions might change aesthetic encounters with nature. Some have contemplated the prospect of aesthetic enjoyment becoming tainted by knowledge of the societal forces and human folly that have damaged nature. One strain of argument rests on the view that aesthetic value in nature is an inherent property of the natural entity itself, and thus independent of moral considerations and other interests, which are viewed as external. The irrelevance of moral consideration to estimations of aesthetic value is the crux of the “autonomist” understanding of environmental aesthetics. From this perspective, condemnation of peoples’ enjoyment of climate-altered nature is beside the point, since moral concerns have no bearing on the intrinsic, aesthetic qualities of the observed entity. This paper argues that the autonomist perspective is challenged in a world of increasingly pervasive and negative encounters with climate-altered nature. Expectations for more frequent, widespread, and severe impacts from climate change suggest a rethinking of salient questions bearing on aesthetic experience. This article raises the prospect of pleasurable aesthetic experiences becoming increasingly rare in a climate-changed world and the prospect of moral pressures becoming more immediate and personal. Also challenged is the thesis that people will ably adjust to climate change and thereby secure aesthetic comfort.
Journal Article
Unions in Digital Labour Studies: A Review of Information Society and Marxist Autonomist Approaches
A developing research agenda in digital labour studies draws on aspects of information society theory and Marxist autonomism to understand examples of unionisation in digital workplaces and among digital labourers. In this article, I trace core concepts of information society theory and autonomism to demonstrate how unions have been framed by prominent figures in the field. I argue that both approaches tend to relegate unions to industrial capitalism and its historically-specific set of class relations. Information society theorists argue that capitalist class conflict has been transcended, perceiving unions as an obstacle to flexibility and entrepreneurship. Autonomists maintain a focus on class conflict, yet, based on their analysis of contemporary class composition, tend to prioritise other forms of organisation over unions. Digital labour studies research has developed, in part, as a critique of information society theory and draws on aspects of autonomism, including the concepts of precarity and immaterial labour. Authors studying empirical examples of unionisation among digital labourers identify different challenges and opportunities for unionisation among digital labours, and demonstrate the utility of unions for improving the conditions of digital labourers and promoting new working-class subjectivities.
Journal Article
From Cyber-Autonomism to Cyber-Populism: An Ideological Analysis of the Evolution of Digital Activism
The analysis of digital activism has so far been dominated by a techno-determinist approach which interprets the logic of activism and its transformation as directly reflecting the properties of the technologies utilised by activists. This line of interpretatoin has been manifested in the popularity acquired by notions as “Twitter protest” or “revolution 2.0” in the news media and in academic discourse. Moving beyond this reductionist trend, this article proposes an ideological approach to the study of digital activism and its hisstorical transformation, which can better account for the combination of political, cultural and social factors involved in shaping it. I identity two main waves of digital activism, corresponding not only to two phases of technological development of the internet (the so-called web 1.0 and web 2.0), but also to two different protest waves, the anti-globalisation movement, and the movement of the squares that began in 2011, each with its own dominant ideology. I argue that reflecting the seismic shift in perceptions and attitudes produced by the 2008 crash, and the connected shifts in social movement ideology, digital activism has moved from the margins to the centre, from a countercultural posture to a counterhegemonic ambition. I describe this turn as a transition from cyber-autonomism to cyber-populism as the two defining techno-political orientations of the first and second wave of digital activism. Reflecting the influence of neo-anarchism and autonomism in the anti-globalisation movement cyber-autonomism saw the Internet as an autonomous space where to construct a countercultural politics outside the mainstream. To the contrary cyber-populism, informed by the populist turn taken by 2011 and post-2011 movements, sees the Internet as a “popular space”, which needs to be appropriated by ordinary citizens, turned away from consumption activities and towards the purpose of popular mobilisation against the neoliberal elites. This shift that substantially modifies the way in which activists conceives of and utilise digital media goes a long way towards explaining the differences in digital activism practices, and their contrasting views of the internet as a tool and site of struggle.
Journal Article