Two new open access books in OHP's Critical Climate Change series

Open Humanities Press is delighted to release two new open access books in its Critical Climate Change series:

Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, vol.1 — edited by Tom Cohen (University at Albany)

Freely available at: http://openhumanitiespress.org/telemorphosis.html

The writers in the volume ask, implicitly, how the 21st century horizons that exceed any political, economic, or conceptual models alters or redefines a series of key topoi. These range through figures of sexual difference, bioethics, care, species invasion, war, post-carbon thought, ecotechnics, time, and so on. As such, the volume is also a dossier on what metamorphoses await the legacies of “humanistic” thought in adapting to, or rethinking, the other materialities that impinge of contemporary “life as we know it.”

# Introduction: Murmurations—“Climate Change” and the Defacement of Theory
Tom Cohen

# 1. Time
Robert Markley

# 2. Ecotechnics
J. Hillis Miller

# 3. Care
Bernard Stiegler

# 4. Unicity
Justin Read

# 5. Scale
Timothy Clark

# 6. Sexual Indifference
Claire Colebrook

# 7. Nonspecies Invasion
Jason Groves

# 8. Bioethics
Joanna Zylinska

# 9. Post-Trauma
Catherine Malabou

# 10. Ecologies of War
Mike Hill

# 11. Notes Toward a Post-Carbon Philosophy
Martin McQuillan

# 12. Health
Eduardo Cadava and Tom Cohen

Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, vol.2 — edited by Henry Sussman (Yale University)

Freely available at: http://openhumanitiespress.org/impasses-of-the-post-global.html

The diverse materials comprising Impasses of the Post-Global take as their starting point an interrelated, if seemingly endless sequence of current ecological, demographic, socio-political, economic, and informational disasters. These include the contemporary discourses of deconstruction, climate change, ecological imbalance and despoilment, sustainability, security, economic bailout, auto-immunity, and globalization itself.

# Introduction: Spills, Countercurrents, Sinks
Henry Sussman and Jason Groves

# 1. Anecographics: Climate Change and “Late” Deconstruction
Tom Cohen

# 2. Autopoiesis and the Planet
Bruce Clarke

# 3. Of Survival: Climate Change and Uncanny Landscape in the Photography of Subhankar Banerjee
Yates McKee

# 4. Global Warming as a Manifestation of Garbage
Tian Song

# 5. The Physical Reality of Water Shapes
James H. Bunn

# 6. Sacrifice Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood (A Speculative Essay)
Rey Chow

# 7. Security: From “National” to “Homeland” … and Beyond
Samuel Weber

# 8. Common Political Democracy: The Marrano Register
Alberto Moreiras

# 9. Bare Life
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

# 10. Sustainability
Haun Saussy

# 11. The Global Unworld: A Meditative Manifesto
Krzysztof Ziarek

# 12. Bailout
Randy Martin

# 13. Auto-Immunity
Henry Sussman

Pirate Radical Philosophy

Much has been written about the ‘crisis of capitalism’ and the associated events known, for short, as the Arab Spring, student protests, Occupy and the August riots. Yet to what extent does our contemporary situation also pose a challenge to those of us who work ‘in’ the university – a challenge that would encourage us to go further than merely endeavouring to ‘just say “no”’ to the idea of universities operating as for-profit business in order to serve the economy, and demanding a return to the kind of publicly financed mass education policy that prevailed in the Keynesian era? What if we, too, in our capacity as academics, authors, writers, thinkers and scholars want to resist the continued imposition of a neoliberal political rationality that may appear dead on its feet but, zombie-like, is still managing to blunder on? How can we act, not so much for or with the anti-austerity protesters, ‘graduates without a future’, ‘digital natives’ and ‘remainder of capital’ (protesting alongside them, accepting invitations to speak to and write about them and so on), but in terms of them, thus refusing to simply submit critical thought to ‘existing political discourses and the formulation of political needs those discourses articulate’, and so ‘defusing’ what Merleau-Ponty called ‘the trap of the event’?   What if we desire a very different university to the one we have, but have no wish to retain or restore the paternalistic, class-bound model associated with the writings of Arnold, Leavis and Newman? While appreciating the idea that there is an outside to the university is itself a university idea, and that attempts to move beyond the institution too often leave it in place and uncontested, is it possible to take some impetus nonetheless from the emergence of autonomous, self-organised learning communities such as The Public School, and free text-sharing networks such as AAAAARG.ORG (to name but two)? Does the struggle against the ‘becoming business’ of the university not require us, too, to have the courage to try out and put to the test new economic, legal and political systems and models for the production, publication, sharing and discussion of knowledge and ideas; and thus to open ourselves to transforming radically the material practices and social relations of our academic labour?

This is an extract from an article on the open access debate and 'pirate philosophy' published in the journal Radical Philosophy, 173, May/June, 2012. The full text of this article is available as a FREE download from the Radical Philosophy website: http://fb.me/1DZmgrmNV

Radical Philosophy are also interested to hear readers’ views on these issues and to debate them in the journal. Email short pieces to mark.neocleous@brunel.ac.uk or write to Radical Philosophy at admin@radicalphilosophy.com.

Access to Radical Philosophy: Principles and Policy

As an independent journal of the Left, collectively self-published in A4 magazine form, and non-profit-making, Radical Philosophy has always aimed to maximize access while generating sufficient revenue to fund production. Currently, we do this by keeping the cover and individual subscription prices as low as possible, giving individual subscribers free access to our forty-year archive in electronic form on the web, and making more than 50 per cent of the archive available open access. We charge university libraries for full web access, in order to make up the deficit on sales to individuals. Downloads of individual articles that are unavailable to those without university or individual subscriptions cost £3 each – about 20 per cent of commercial rates.

But why isn’t Radical Philosophy freely available in its entirety to all on the web? Because we would not then be able to produce it as a hard copy magazine, since we would not generate sufficient income from institutional subscriptions. Much of what is intellectually and culturally distinctive about Radical Philosophy,we believe, is connected to its format and low-priced availability in bookshops and to individual subscribers. However, we are also exploring the possibilities of new formats.

RP

Creative media activism - a free, open class #creativact

Between January and March 2012 we (i.e. the Media Department at Coventry School of Art and Design)  launched an undergraduate class focused on Creative Activism. We also made the class freely available online on an open basis to enable anyone worldwide to participate in the class, join in the discussions or even rip and remix our content.

The class explored the potential of creative media activism by encouraging the participants to experiment with creating ‘live’ interventions as well as getting involved in a number of crucial cultural, political and social debates. Over the ten week course we looked at how media activists, creatives and campaigners have used their media knowledge, connections and skills to ask difficult questions, provoke debate and raise awareness of important issues and problems in their local, national and international communities.

We have now put most of the materials from the class on our website: http://www.creativeactivism.net
You can also download the content and participate in the ongoing class discussion through iTunes U and the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). Please feel free to share.

If you would like to find out more about the class, and our plans for developing the project, please contact Pete Woodbridge <p.woodbridge@coventry.ac.uk>.

To date, the class has been supported by a range of collaborators and guest speakers, whom we would like to thank. They include:

Emily James: Director of ‘Just Do It’- A Feature Documentary about Climate Change Activism

John Jackson, Activist and Co-author of ‘Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity and Ingenuity Can Change the World

Joey Skaggs, A Prolific New York Based Artist, Culture Jammer and Prankster who uses the Media as his Canvas

James Cook, A Stand-up Comedian who explores what we can learn from Comedy and Satire as a means of Political and Cultural Activism

Sam Gregory, Programme Director and Human Rights Advocate at WITNESS, whose work addresses the importance of video and change

Tessa Houghton, Assistant Professor in Media and Communications, University of Nottingham Malaysia who analyses Hacktivism and the Public Domain

Matt Mason, Author of bestseller ‘The Pirate’s Dilemma’ and Executive Director of Marketing at Bittorent

Chris Jury, Activist, Broadcaster and Lecturer at Bath Spa University who presents a radio show called ‘Agitpop’- exploring the role of music and protest

Charles Tsai, Campaigner at the Creative Visions Foundation and Social Creatives- Organisations that encourage creative thinking to affect positive change

Ken Fero, Award Winning Radical Documentary Filmmaker – Whose work explores Power, Inequality and Injustice.

Open media seminar series

The programme for the next series of Open Media seminars has now been posted by Janneke Adema.

Coventry School of Art and Design and the Department of Media invite you to a year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.

Podcasts of previous Open Media seminars are available here.

For more information see here.
 
Programme: January – March 2012
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January 31st:
Tessa J. Houghton (University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus) – ‘#blackout: the viral counterpublicity of online protest’ (Read More)
 
February 14th:
Paolo Ruffino (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘How to open an engine: narratives of production and consumption in video game culture’
 
March 6th:
Cornelia Sollfrank (net.artist) – ‘title tbc’
 
March 20th:
Stefan Herbrechter (Coventry University) – ‘Just Gaming: Digital Games, Remediation, Electracy’
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When: 1:45-2:45 on selected Tuesdays in January, February and March
Where: ICE, Media and Communications room
 
Institute for Creative Enterprise (ICE)
Coventry University Enterprises
Puma Way, Coventry
CV1 2TT
 
All seminars are free to attend and open to all.
 
For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx
 
How to get to ICE, see:
http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=&daddr=52.403937,-1.505545
 
All enquiries please contact:
Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk|
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections 

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Digital Media have become ubiquitous. Our experiences are on the verge of being mediated and augmented non-stop via mobile and web-based recording devices which offer the possibility to merge, mix, and mash up texts, images, sound and other data formats. In the digital age we seem to be no longer confined by the boundaries that have governed traditional media. Notions of authorship, expertise, authority, stability, ownership and control from above are being challenged by the prosuming multi-user and crowd-sourced use of borderless multimedia applications. People can produce and publish their own books via Lulu.com, promote their art on online gallery sites, and advertise their music via Myspace and Youtube. They can follow an education via iTunesU, call friends abroad via Skype for free, connect and update the world via Facebook and Twitter and fund projects via Kickstarter.

These developments have led many to claim that the web and digital media offer unprecedented democratizing options for media producers, consumers and critics. However, reality is more complicated. Many (public and tax-funded) media are still behind pay-walls. Our private data are hosted and distributed via commercial social media platforms. Blogs are still not taken seriously in the academic world. Google is digitizing our books. Music mash-ups are sued for copyright infringement and fears for ebook piracy rule the literary world.

The concept of openness constitutes a radical critique against the closed-off worlds of what we might call the ‘traditional media’. It urges for the right to transparency, the ethics of sharing, the value of re-use and the benefits of connecting. However, openness also has its drawbacks. If cultural products are freely available, who pays the producers? Do open data pose security risks and who gets to control this data? Who governs our creative output? In what way can we control and keep check on the media we use? Is there still a place for authority and expertise in open media or are these notions explicitly being challenged? In what ways can media be open, and can they really be truly open? Where does openness end? Should we rather focus on specific aspects of openness? How can we generate a media critique when media are constantly updated and changed, including our critique itself?

In this lecture series various examples and aspects of openness in media will be explored. Special attention will be paid to the benefits and drawbacks of openness and the kind of possibilities openness offers for the future of media production, use and critique.

Withdrawal of labour from publishers in favour of the US Research Works Act

Open access advocate Peter Suber has recently announced he ‘will not referee for a publisher belonging to the Association of American Publishers unless it has publicly disavowed the AAP's position  on the Research Works Act’. The latter, which was introduced in the US Congress on December 16, 2011, would prohibit open access mandates for federally funded research in the US. The Research Works Act would thus in effect countermand the National Institutes of Health’s Public Access Policy along with other similar open access policies in the US. Suber has invited others to join him both in taking such action and in going public with their decision.

To show my support for both open access and this initiative I have therefore decided that, from this point onwards and until further notice, I am not  prepared to publish with, or otherwise give my labour to, presses in favour of the Research Works Act. This applies to the peer-reviewing of journal articles, book proposals, manuscripts and all other forms of scholarly and editorial work. 

This is not a decision I have taken lightly - not least because I have a number of friends who edit journals  published by some of these presses. However, as a long-standing advocate of open access in the humanities it is an issue I feel strongly about, so hopefully they will understand and perhaps even feel encouraged to put pressure on their publishers to either withdraw from the AAP because of its support for this bill, or join MIT and a number of other presses in publically disavowing the AAP’s campaign in favour of the Research Works Act.

A list of the publishers belonging to the AAP is available here.

Among the publishers of critical and cultural theory on this list at the time of writing are:

• Sage (who publish numerous journals in the area including Theory, Culture and Society and New Media and Society)
• Palgrave Macmillan (publisher of Feminist Review)
• Stanford University Press
• Fordham University Press
• Harvard University Press
• NYU Press
• Cambridge University Press

Peter Suber has created a regularly updated list of those AAP members who have already publicly disavowed the AAP position on the Research Works Act here. At the time of writing it includes:

• MIT Press
• ITHAKA
• Council on Library and Information Resources
• Penn State University Press
• Rockefeller University Press
• University of California Press

More information on the Research Works Act is available here.

For a take on the subject written from the perspective of a scientist based in the UK, see Mike Taylor’s ‘Academic Publishers Have Become the Enemies of Science’.