KPFA - Against the Grain Against the Grain

A protracted but determined struggle to defeat an airport construction project produced an extraordinary victory. In the face of brutal police repression, Isabelle Fremeaux, Jay Jordan, and others created an autonomous zone and prevented the construction of a massive international airport on 4,000 acres of fields, forest, and wetlands in western France. Fremeaux and Jordan recount the now iconic struggle at the “zad” and describe how they understand the relationship between art, resistance, and commoning. (Encore presentation.)
Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan, We Are “Nature” Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones [1] Pluto Press/Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, 2021
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination [2]
The ReImagining Value Action Lab [3]
The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest [4]

(Image on main page by Bstroot56.)

[1] https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745345871/we-are-nature-defending-itself/
[2] https://labo.zone/?lang=en
[3] https://reimaginingvalue.ca/
[4] https://www.joaap.org/

In the United States, few things seem as wholesome as camping, letting us temporarily escape the daily grind and commune with nature and each other. But Phoebe Young argues that camping has a complicated history, which tell us a lot about Americans’ notions of nature and the nation. She discusses the various forms that camping has taken in this country, from recreational camping to the encampments of those without shelter to Occupy Wall Street. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:
Phoebe S.K. Young, Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement [1] Oxford University Press, 2021


[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/camping-grounds-9780195372410?cc=us&lang=en&

Most of us assume that our medical data is protected under U.S. law -- but, as sociologist Mary Ebeling illustrates, that’s wrong. Even when we don’t collect it ourselves with fitness trackers and health apps, our most sensitive health information is gathered from across the web, and package and sold as data commodities by brokers like the credit bureaus Equifax and Experian. Ebeling discusses the afterlives of our medical data, as well as the lack of medical data privacy in a post-Roe world.

Resources:

Mary F.E. Ebeling, Afterlives of Data: Life and Debt under Capitalist Surveillance [1] UC Press, 2022

[1] https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520307735/afterlives-of-data

David Graeber, the radical anthropologist and prominent activist, had a lot to say about police and policing, both historically and in contemporary society. Andrew Johnson [1] examines a number of Graeber’s assertions and also articulates his own views on the history of policing, the role of police today, and the value of breaking the spell of police authoritarianism.

Andrew Johnson, “Bureaucrats with guns: Or, how we can abolish the police if we just stop believing in them” [2] Anthropological Notebooks
(Image on main page by Bartosz Brzezinski.)

[1] https://www.polsci.ucsb.edu/people/andrew-johnson#:~:text=Andrew%20is%20currently%20finishing%20his,Black%20Studies%20and%20Sociology%20departments.
[2] http://notebooks.drustvo-antropologov.si/Notebooks/article/view/507/402

Did Lincoln free the slaves? Or did they just as much free themselves? And what were the ramifications of their seemingly impossible achievement — immediate and uncompensated emancipation — for other oppressed groups? Historian David Roediger discusses that revolutionary period in U.S. history — and the consequences of its failure today. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

David R. Roediger, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All [1] Verso, 2015

[1] https://www.versobooks.com/books/2021-seizing-freedom

They are among the biggest companies in the world: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon have an outsized impact on the global economy and on our daily lives. Rob Larson examines the companies that have become synonymous with the glories and ills of contemporary capitalism. He makes the case for online socialism.

Resources:

Rob Larson, Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley [1] Haymarket Books, 2020



[1] https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1381-bit-tyrants