Emotionally Mapping the Campus

University of Leeds Cartography Workshop

This week, as a change from teaching cultural theory to first year BA students, I decided to run a cartography workshop to support last week's lecture on space and the city. I set the task of making an emotional map of the campus. These are the three that were awarded first (Amy Dawson - above) and joint second prizes (Bob Palmer and Katerina Lee - below).

Links:
University of Leeds
Emotion Maps - Christian Nold

In people all over the world...we find ourselves.

I picked up this lovely little second-hand pamphlet online called The Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking for Yourself while looking for Situationist journals. It was printed in 2003 in the US and the introduction states that the essay therein was originally published in The Spectacle in 1975.

There is one paragraph that gives an excellent example for helping explain Marxist abstraction, alienation or even the Debordian spectacle. Here it is:

Suppose that you want a cup of coffee from the vending machine at work. First, there is the cup of coffee itself: that involves the workers on the coffee plantation, the ones on the sugar plantation and in the refineries, the ones in the paper mill, and so on. Then you have the workers who made the different parts of the vending machine and the ones who assembled it. Then the ones who extracted the iron ore and bauxite, smelted the steel, and work for the electricity utility which supplies power to the machine. Then all the workers who transported the coffee, cups and machine. Then the clerks, typists, and communication workers who coordinated the production of all things necessary for the others ones to survive. That gives you a direct material relationship to several million people, in fact, to the immense majority of the world's population. They produce your life, and you help produce theirs. In this light, all artificial group identities and special group interests fade into insignificance. Imagine the potential enrichment of your life that at present is locked up in the frustrated creativity of these millions of workers, held back by obsolete and exhausting methods of production, strangled by lack of control over their own productivity, warped by the insane rationale of capital-accumulation which pits one against all and makes life a mad scramble for economic survival. Here we begin to discover a real social identity - in people all over the world who are fighting to win control over their own lives, we find ourselves.

Links:
AK Press and Distribution

There's Summat Going on at Leeds

Click here for film

I made the above film while helping out at Gerry Turvey's Walk+Talk workshop at the Leeds Summat Gathering on Saturday November 26th 2011. It is shot on the University of Leeds campus. The old building that is featured is now a private Halls of Residence but used to be a priory. The university owned it for a period of time.

Links:
Gerry Turvey
The Priory of St Wilfred

J30 N30 ?30 Go!

November 30th 2011 - Public Sector Strike

Well, I've just got back from the public sector strike which took us from outside Old Mining Building, at the University of Leeds, to Woodhouse Moor (see above picture) and then into Leeds city centre. The title of my blog (for those of you old enough to remember) is taken from the Bow Wow Wow single C30 C60 C90 Go! (1980), which doesn't appear to be very revolutionary on a superficial viewing, but in the song the protagonist does challenge a copper for threatening to arrest her for taping a single! My title alludes to the June 30th 2011 strike and today's, obviously, plus any upcoming ones, which I'm sure there will be!

This is where we started our protest, outside our school at the university, on Woodhouse Lane (The School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies). This is Daniel looking very determined and sporting a couple of signs saying 'strike' in different languages.

Here is one of the revolutionary dogs we met during the protest. She was wearing a bandanna and a union badge. Her owner was part of the Socialist Revolutionary Organisation who were carrying the following banner.

Above is our union's banner, the UCU (The University and College Union). But mostly our group carried handmade banners, made by the PhD students/Teaching Assistant's in the school, in an attempt to add a creative flavour to our input to the protest.

There was also face-painting carried out by Sybil, and Gail provided a performance element to the proceedings by reading out notes of support from lecturers who were unable to attend.

I particularly like the following posters which were outside one of the university entrances.

According to the lunchtime news, there were more of us than anticipated. So, it took us a while to get into the city centre. Once we got there there was not enough room for us all to gather outside the Leeds City Gallery and we flooded onto the road and consequently blocked part of the Headrow.

Today's strike was extremely heartening in terms of support, not just from those attending but also from those passing by in their cars, vans and trucks. There was a great communal spirit and plenty of fervour to take us to the next step. Watch out Cameron!

To close my blog I'd like to add a few Situationist slogans that were used in the 1960s and are still relevant today:

No replastering, the structure is rotten!

We'll ask nothing; we'll take, occupy!

Action must not be a reaction, but a creation!

Reform my ass!

Links:
Public Sector Strikes - The Situation at the University
J30: The City is on Strike

The Anti-University

While looking up the situationist Alexander Trocchi online, I came across the above super poster on Peter Watts blog I noticed the anti-psychiatry franchise are on the list (Berke, Cooper and Laing), along with some radical writers and artists of the time. What a great poster it is, not especially for its artistic aesthetic, but because it represents a moment-in-time which is connected to a place - a truly historical document which pinpoints people in space, while attributing them to a specific revolutionary action.

As Peter Watts states on his blog: "The London Anti-University was formed after participants at 1967′s Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation at the Roundhouse decided they wanted to continue to explore some of the themes and conversations that had started there (sample debates: The Future of Capitalism; Black Power; Imperialism and Revolution in America)." I love the titles of these classes. They are pretty much standard university modules in Cultural Studies nowadays, even if the titles then were much more polemic than the contemporary ones. Today we like to seduce our students with 'Postcolonial Theory' and 'Capital and Critique', in order that they don't get too scared and sign up for something more innocuous - and less revolutionary - instead.

The London Anti-University seemed like a great idea (check out the excellent film on Peter's blog at the above link). I especially like the hotch-potch of donated chairs for the students.

Links:
Notes on institutions, anti-institutions and self-institutions
Revolutionary educational practice

The Student Movement / Moving the Students

The recently published The Assault on Universities (edited by Michael Bailey and Des Freedman) contains a very up-to-the minute essay, by John Rees, on the current situation as it pertains to students and education cuts. Here I shall include a couple of paragraphs from the essay with some anecdotal commentary of my own.

The student movement of 2010 was the largest for a generation. It transformed the political atmosphere around the Tory-Liberal Democrat Coalition government’s cuts programme and popularised the 'rejectionist' argument that the deficit could be paid for by taxing the rich, the corporations, and the banks or by cutting Trident and the war budget for Afghanistan. It undermined the legitimacy of the government by exposing a larger democratic deficit: the election of 2010 had revealed an electorate that voted centre left, but the government they got was a monetarist and right wing. (page 118)

Having been, prior to this moment, someone who was questioning the general lack of engagement in political life that appeared to be happening in some of the young people in society, I was very impressed by the student protests of 2010/11. As a mature undergraduate student, and now a teaching assistant at university, I have been exposed to many young people since 2005. While I don't want to make generalisations, nor conjure up stereotypes, I was a bit puzzled by the lack of fervour in relation to current issues in some students prior to this point. And, while I would not use the term 'apathy' in the way it was being used, I didn't really understand why the young of today were different than 'we' were in the 1970s.

By the time I was fifteen years old we had been on strike twice at my school (in regards to school policy). I had also had my own one-woman revolution. We striked 'at the drop of a hat'. It was our default position. If we were unhappy about something we were going to have our say. Which is interesting, as this was a period when children had even less of a voice than they do today.

While doing my BA in Cultural Studies (2005-08) we read Mary Wollstonecroft's On the Vindication of the Rights of Women. At the time our teaching assistant asked us if we thought that women had now reached equality in society. As a 45 year old who can remember a time when there was not a law for equal pay in regards to gender, since I thought the answer was pretty much overdetermined I decided that I would not answer it and would allow someone else to offer their opinion. No-one answered the question or even made a comment until I allowed my exasperation to be expressed. After the seminar I was left feeling confused: their parents were the same age as me, had they not communicated these issues to their daughters? Was there a certain level of wealth in particular groups in society that created a buffer of comfort and therefore there was no reason to question political life? Or, was something much more disturbingly hegemonic going on?

I didn't, and don't, still have a simple answer to this. However, the recent student protests have been inspiring and I hope that students and public sector workers can come together over current government cuts, and that students will realise that education cutbacks are actually situated in a larger context of capitalist ideology, the repercussions of which don't only just effect them.

This is what John Rees says about strikes and protests in relation to students and workers supporting each other:

The students can...cause a social crisis into which workers...are drawn. But for this to happen the student struggle itself, the occupations and demonstrations, need to be sustained and spread. The trade unionists in the education unions will find it easier to become involved in the struggle if this is the case, and this can be a bridge to other workers becoming involved. Occupations are key to this because they make the campuses ungovernable for the university authorities and present the staff with the question of taking sides in a way that demonstrations alone do not. (page 122).

Links:
Public Sector Strike Flyer
The Students are Revolting
University and College Union

Public Sector Strike - The Situation at the University

My university and school are currently preparing for next week's Public Sector Strike (Wednesday 30th November 2011). The Guardian newspaper says that Britain's three largest trade unions are backing the strike.

I have created a Situationist stylie flyer (see above). Please feel free to download, distribute and print. It is in jpg format and A5 size, so two fit neatly onto a landscape A4. Or you can enlarge it to A4 size for a poster. The stats on there are 'generic' and apply to both students and lecturers.

Links:
University and College Union
The Students are Revolting