IMproPRieTies

Friday, April 22, 2011

Cost-per-action in San Marino

SCEPSI - European School of Social Imagination
Conference 20-22 May 2011, Republic of San Marino

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM:
PRACTICAL INFORMATION:

Reinventing the autonomy of knowledge is the task of our time. It’s not only a political task. The epistemic foundation of research and learning as autonomous activities is at stake, when dogmas of profit, growth, competition take the lead in the old institutions of production and transmission of knowledge. This is why we are calling students and researchers, artists and scientists and social activists to gather in the first conference of SCEPSI that will take place in San Marino, on 20-22 May 2011.

Protests against the financial aggression and the destruction of the
public school in the European continent are spreading, but we have to
create new institutions, aimed to self organization of cognitive workers
and to the reactivation of social sensibility and imagination. The
conference will be the first act of the activity of the European School of
Social Imagination, that in the next year will organize seminars in San
Marino, and in European cities like Helsinki, London, and Oslo.

The activity of the School starts from four question[s]: 1. How can we think
the consequences to every day life in the face of a possible economic
failure of the European Union? 2. How can art and poetry arouse new
energies and revitalize the social field weakened by precarization and the
alienation of (digital) labour? 3.How can emergent scientific imagination
reconstitute the social body? 4. How can we open up spaces for the
autonomy of knowledge within the process of the marketisation and
capitalisation of the education system?

These questions will be foundational for the emergent curriculum of the first year of seminars and engagements of the European School of Social Imagination. The following is the program of the conference, that may change slightly during the next weeks.

One apparently must go to San Marino to find people talking about something worthwhile. Of course we USians gave up the autonomy of knowledge early on - was it at the time we decided that all speech should be impregnated by advertising? Or was it endemic to our method of escaping history -- making all speech, all public records, merely somebody else's marketing, to which we triumphantly suggest our counter-marketing?

If Europe is concerned for the destruction of the public school, it is now in need of referring to our history.

Labels: all thungs JSTOR, epistemology, Europe is superior to USia, gathering darkness of all USian culture, public school, public speech, university education in USiA today

Friday, February 01, 2008

Civilized society not ready for Prime Time

Société Générale says wayward trader Jérôme Kerviel lost the bank $7.2 billion. But that was last week. He's now on his way to cult celebrity -- and he still hasn't lost his job.

Firing has never been easy in France, where on-the-spot dismissals à l'américaine are viewed as brutal and very un-French. "This is not like America or England. We have rules that protect employees, no matter what they do wrong," says Stéphane Boudin, a Paris lawyer specializing in labor disputes. $

Labels: Europe is superior to USia

Thursday, August 02, 2007

We don't need no steenkin JSTOR

Directory of Open Access Journals -- via Dialogic. It lists 66 journals of Philosophy alone, including various publications from places like the Ecole normale supérieure, the University of Florence, the University of Dublin, the Universidad Central de Venezuela, the University of Trieste, the Queensland University of Technology (Foucault studies), Rhodes University, South Africa, the University of Limerick, the Society for the Advancement of Philosophy, Zagreb, Croatia, the Universidad del Zulia, Centro de Estudios Filosoficos, and lots more, even a couple of USian universities.

Then there are dozens of journals for arts, music, religion, languages, linguistics, etc. Have a look around. Look up something you're interested in. They are not JSTOR, or PROJECTilevomitMUSE, or SCIENCE. They'll actually let you in.

Here's a bit of a letter from David Amram, published in Chapter & Verse from the University of Leeds:

I spent the first day in Windber giving concerts, and hosting a screening of Pull My Daisy, the film in which I collaborated with Kerouac in 1959, prior to a marathon 12 hour reading of On the Road the next day, for which I provided some of music, as well as playing between and during the readings with local musicians. I also had a show of my caricatures of everyone from that era.