Academic Border Patrols

Since this topic came up in our CCS program monitoring (course review) session today, I think it would be useful for people to know that there is considerable opposition on campuses to involvement on the part of university staff in the dirty work of the UK Border Police. Below I reproduce the Academic Union’s recent [...]

Shimla – July 14-15 2009

An abstract for a talk at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, ‘Television in India’ conference -  July 14-15 2009 – Shimla News Media or Politics Show: Terror Reporting and the Box. If a regional encounter with the apparatus of television is to be approached critically, it may be the case that an exclusive use [...]

Salute Vera Lynn

My mother was pretty much an unreconstructed (though we made the effort) anglophile, despite having lived 54 of her 65 years in Australia, but for sure she would have been wholeheartedly supportive of Vera Lynn’s current dalliance with the legal process. All salute Vera Lynn, at 91 still doing the job for an anti-fascist Britain [...]

Walter Mignolo at Goldsmiths 5-3-09

Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option A talk by Walter Mignolo Thursday 5 March 6pm, Ben Pimlott Lecture Theatre, Goldsmiths Walter Mignolo is a leading figure in Latin American Studies and Postcolonial Studies. He is the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Director of the Center for Global Studies and the [...]

Gaius and the Ten Hour Day

Laura and I finished our article on BSG – called ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Gaius Balthar’. We decided we have a whole other chapter on Gaius’s sex life, so we excised this bit. For the record: Robots are sexy – the False Maria, the pleasure-bot in Bladerunner, 7 of 9, and the seductions of Caprica [...]

Goldsmiths occupied, twinned…

Goldsmiths Students Occupy Deptford Town Hall! The occupation comes after the college refused the provision of scholarship programmes for Palestinian students… Please offer messages of support or join the fray! Regards, Luke See a commentary here. And a first blog post here. There is a facebook site as well. See here. And tomorrow a union [...]

Retro music formation

I’ve been searching through the remnants of my old vinyl collection and my first records, including the classic ‘hooks album “Living in the Seventies”, whose lyrics, somewhat sadly, say it all. There were about a dozen bands I played in during the late 70s – all of which never got anywhere. Moment of vacuous glory: [...]

Theatre-Border

Slowly the form of our meeting in Berlin has been taking shape, via disparate (and desperate?) emails, haphazardly. That will no doubt continue, but I think it good to gather it together here (in dialogic form): John: I’ve no idea yet as to just what the Berlin workshop should be in April (week of 20th) [...]

snowed out

I have always been more amazed that London cannot cope with mildly warm temperatures like 30 Celsius, than I am that everything stops also for snow. Mind you, it is a lot of snow I reckon, and well cold, so I am only going outside to build a snowperson, and to join the occasional impromptu [...]