Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene

We're delighted to announce the first book in our new Critical Climate Chaos: Irreversibility series:

Bernard Stiegler's The Neganthropocene.

As we drift past tipping points that put future biota at risk, while a post-truth regime institutes the denial of ‘climate change’ (as fake news), and as Silicon Valley assistants snatch decision and memory, and as gene-editing and a financially-engineered bifurcation advances over the rising hum of extinction events and the innumerable toxins and conceptual opiates that Anthropocene Talk fascinated itself with—in short, as ‘the Anthropocene’ discloses itself as a dead-end trap—Bernard Stiegler here produces the first counter-strike and moves beyond the entropic vortex and the mnemonically stripped Last Man socius feeding the vortex.

In the essays and lectures here titled Neganthropocene, Stiegler opens an entirely new front moving beyond the dead-end 'banality' of the Anthropocene. Stiegler stakes out a battleplan to proceed beyond, indeed shrugging off, the fulfillment of nihilism that the era of climate chaos ushers in. Understood as the reinscription of philosophical, economic, anthropological and political concepts within a renewed thought of entropy and negentropy, Stiegler’s ‘Neganthropocene’ pursues encounters with Alfred North Whitehead, Jacques Derrida, Gilbert Simondon, Peter Sloterdijk, Karl Marx, Benjamin Bratton, and others in its address of a wide array of contemporary technics: cinema, automation, neurotechnology, platform capitalism, digital governance and terrorism. This is a work that will need be digested by all critical laborers who have invoked the Anthropocene in bemused, snarky, or pedagogic terms, only to find themselves having gone for the click-bait of the term itself—since even those who do not risk definition in and by the greater entropy.

Like all the OHP books, The Neganthropocene is freely available for download from http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-neganthropocene

It is also available in paperback. If you would like to support open access publishing, please consider ordering a copy for your library.

Warm wishes,

Sigi, David, Gary

Registration Now Open for Radical Open Access II – The Ethics of Care

Radical Open Access II – The Ethics of Care

Two days of critical discussion about creating a more diverse and equitable future for open access.

The Post Office

Coventry University

June 26-27, 2018 

Organised by Coventry University’s postdigital arts and humanities research studio, The Post Office, a project of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures.

Find out more at: http://radicaloa.co.uk/conferences/roa2/

Attendance and participation is free of charge but registration is mandatory. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/radical-open-access-ii-the-ethics-of-care-tickets-44796943865

Co-curators: Culture Machine, Mattering Press, Memory of the World/Public Library, meson press, Open Humanities Press, punctum books, POP.

Speakers: Denisse Albornoz, Janneke Adema, Laurie Allen, Angel Octavio Alvarez Solís, Bodó Balázs, Kirsten Bell, George Chen, Jill Claassen, Joe Deville, Maddalena Fragnito, Valeria Graziano, Eileen Joy, Chris Kelty, Christopher Long, Kaja Marczewska, Frances McDonald, Gabriela Méndez-Cota, Samuel Moore, Tahani Nadim, Christopher Newfield, Sebastian Nordhoff, Lena Nyahodza, Alejandro Posada, Reggie Raju, Václav Štětka, Whitney Trettien.

Radical Open Access II is about developing an ethics of care. Care with regard to:

• our means of creating, publishing and communicating research;
• our working conditions;
• our relations with others.

Radical Open Access II aims to move the debate over open access on from two issues in particular:

THE QUESTION OF ACCESS. At first sight it may seem rather odd for a conference on open access to want to move on from this question. But as Sci-Hub, aaaarg, libgen et al. show, the debate over access has largely been won by shadow-libraries, who are providing quick and easy access to vast amounts of published research. Too much of the debate over ‘legitimate’ forms of open access now seems to be about how to use the provision of access to research as a means of exercising forms of governmental and commercial control (via audits, metrics, discourses of transparency and so on).

THE OA MOVEMENT’S RELUCTANCE TO ENGAGE RIGOROUSLY WITH THE KIND OF CONCERNS THAT ARE BEING DISCUSSED ELSEWHERE IN SOCIETY. This includes climate change, the environment, and the damage that humans are doing to the planet (i.e. the Anthropocene). But it also takes in debates over different forms:

• of organising labour (e.g. platform cooperativism);
• of working – such as those associated with ideas of post-work, the sharing and gig economies, and Universal Basic Income;
• of being together – see the rise of interest in the Commons, and in experiments with horizontalist, leaderless ways of self-organizing such as those associated with the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the Dakota Standing Rock Sioux protests.

Background

In 2015 the inaugural international Radical Open Access Conference addressed an urgent question: how should we set about reclaiming open access from its corporate take-over, evident not least in the rise of A/BPC models based on the charging of exorbitant, unaffordable and unsustainable publishing fees from scholars and their institutions? The conference saw participants calling for the creation of new forms of communality, designed to support the building of commons-based open access publishing infrastructures, and promote a more diverse, not-for-profit eco-system of scholarly communication. With these calls in mind, the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) was formed immediately following the 2015 conference as a horizontal alliance between like-minded groups dedicated to the sharing of skills, tools and expertise. Since then it has grown to a community of over 40 scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other projects. The members of this alliance are all invested in reimaging publishing. And what’s more, are committed to doing so in a context where debates over access—which in many respects have been resolved by the emergence of shadow libraries such as Sci-Hub—are increasingly giving way to concerns over the commercial hegemony of academic publishing. So much so that the issue addressed by the 2015 conference—how can open access be taken back from its corporate take-over? —now seems more urgent than ever.

In June 2018, Coventry University’s postdigital arts and humanities research centre, The Post Office, will convene a second Radical Open Access conference, examining the ways in which open access is being rendered further complicit with neoliberalism’s audit culture of evaluation, measurement, impact and accountability. Witness the way open access has become a top-down requirement - quite literally a ‘mandate’ – rather than a bottom-up scholar-led movement for change. Taking as its theme The Ethics of Care, the concern of this second conference will be on moving away from those market-driven incentives that are frequently used to justify open access, to focus instead on the values that underpin many of the radical open access community’s experiments in open publishing and scholarly communication. In particular, it will follow the lead of Mattering Press, a founding member of the ROAC, in exploring how an ethics of care can help to counter the calculative logic that otherwise permeates academic publishing.

What would a commitment to more ethical forms of publishing look like? Would such an ethics of care highlight the importance of:

• Making publishing more diverse and equitable - geographically, but also with respect to issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality?
• Nurturing new and historically under-represented cultures of knowledge - those associated with early career, precariously employed and para-academics, or located outside the global North and West?
• Ensuring everyone is able to have a voice – not least those writing on niche or avant-garde topics or who are conducting hybrid, multimodal, post-literary forms of research, and who are currently underserved by our profit-focused commercial publishing system?

Indeed, for many members of the ROAC, a commitment to ethics entails understanding publishing very much as a complex, multi-agential, relational practice, and thus recognising that we have a responsibility to all those involved in the publishing process. Caring for the relationships involved throughout this process is essential, from rewarding or otherwise acknowledging people fairly for their labour, wherever possible, to redirecting our volunteer efforts away from commercial profit-driven entities in favour of supporting more progressive not-for-profit forms of publishing. But it also includes taking care of the nonhuman: not just the published object itself, but all those animals, plants and minerals that help to make up the scholarly communication eco-system.

Radical Open Access II is community-driven, and is being co-organised and co-curated by various members of the ROAC in a collaborative manner. It includes panels on topics as diverse as: Predatory Publishing; The Geopolitics of Open; Competition and Cooperation; Humane Metrics/Metrics Noir; Guerrilla Open Access; The Poethics of Scholarship; and Care for the Commons. The conference is free to attend and will also be live streamed for those who are unable to be there in person.

Launch of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, 7 Feb 2018

Launch of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures

7th February 3.00pm Disruptive Media Learning Lab

Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/launch-of-the-centre-for-postdigital-cultures-tickets-41968258190

You are invited to the launch of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC), a new Faculty Research Centre at Coventry University. The launch will include keynote talks by 3 internationally esteemed speakers:

Cornelia Sollfrank (Zurich University of the Arts)

Monika Bakke (Adam Mickiewicz University)

Mark Amerika (University of Colorado Boulder)

Sign up here (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/launch-of-the-centre-for-postdigital-cultures-tickets-41968258190) to attend and to: 

• Listen to talks by ground breaking theorists and artists   

• Find out about Coventry University’s newest research centre 

• Meet the Postdigital Cultures community 

• Enjoy a unique performance from the Sound Book Project and a glass of wine!

The Centre for Postdigital Cultures brings together media theorists, practitioners, activists and artists. It draws on cross-disciplinary ideas associated with open and disruptive media, the posthuman, the posthumanities, the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene to explore how innovations in postdigital cultures can help 21st century society to respond to the challenges it faces at a global, national and local level:

 

• how we receive, consume and process information  

• how we learn, work, and travel  

• how we engage and regenerate our communities  

 

In particular, the Centre for Postdigital Cultures endeavours to promote the transformation to a more socially just and sustainable ‘post-capitalist’ knowledge economy. To this end, the CPC’s research includes projects funded by Jisc, the EU, the National Lottery Fund, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Members of the CPC are involved in editorial work for peer-reviewed journals such as Cultural Studies and Culture Machine, and in developing innovative organisations such as Open Humanities Press and the Radical Open Access Collective.

 

What Do We Mean By Postdigital Cultures?

The Centre for Postdigital Cultures belongs to the broader digital humanities field. Today, however, ‘the digital’ can no longer be understood as a separate domain of media and culture. If we actually examine the digital - rather than taking it for granted we know what it means - we soon see that digital information processing is now present in every aspect of our lives. This includes our global communication, entertainment, education, energy, banking, health, transport, manufacturing, food, and water-supply systems. The very idea of digital humanities – based as it is on a presumed difference between computing and the digital on the one hand, and the humanistic and human on the other – is therefore somewhat anachronistic and inappropriate. Attention needs to turn from ‘the digital’ to the various overlapping processes and infrastructures that shape and organise the digital, and that the digital helps to shape and organise in turn. The CPC investigates such enmeshed digital models of culture, society, and the creative economy for the 21st century world.

 

This is why the CPC has adopted the term postdigital cultures. Postdigital cultures describes what comes: after the digital; after the digital humanities; and after the humanities - including humanism and the human (i.e. the posthumanities).

Research areas covered by the centre include:

• Post-capitalist Economies

• Creative Archiving and International Heritage

• Digital Arts and Humanities

• Posthumanities

• Affirmative Disruption and Open Media

• The 21st Century University and Art School

One of the aims of the CPC is to envisage alternative forms for society in the 21st century world of postdigital media cultures, beyond the all-pervasive algorithmic surveillance and control of market capitalism and its metrics. Exploring issues of collaboration, community, the commons and the ‘Capitalocene’, the goal is to facilitate new articulations of culture and society that call for a radical rethinking of the relationship between the human, technology, the economy and the environment.

To celebrate our launch we have invited 3 internationally esteemed artists and academics to deliver public keynote lectures, which will be followed by a drinks reception and a performance by the Sound Book Project.

Where:

The Disruptive Media Learning Lab, 3rd floor, Lanchester Library, Coventry University. 

When:

February 7th 3-8pm

Schedule:

3:00-3:15pm: Opening introduction

3:15-4:00pm: Keynote Monika Bakke

4:00-4:45pm: Keynote Cornelia Sollfrank

4:45-5:15pm: Coffee break 

5:15-6:00pm: Keynote Mark Amerika and closing

6:00-8:00pm: Wine reception and performance by the Sound Book Project

 

Sound Book Project is a group of collaborating artists and musicians who use books as instruments. Books will be wound, sprung, strummed, slapped and thrown to create a soundscape that evolves around the performers. By interacting with books in new and surprising ways, the Sound Book Project enable books to speak for themselves.

The Inhumanist Manifesto: Extended Play

A new, longer version of The Inhumanist Manifesto has been published in the experimental Techne: Art+Research E-Pamphlet series.

In The Inhumanist Manifesto, Gary Hall writes that “[i]f the inhuman equals the human intertwined with the nonhuman, then the inhumanities are the humanities.” Articulating the latest version of his radical theories on posthumanism, piracy, Marxism, open access and the commons, this bold remix of Hall’s self-proclaimed pirate philosophy details his strategic repositioning of practice-based research as an alternative form of social critique.'

TECHNE is a practice-based research initiative in the digitally-expanded intermedia arts and writing founded in 2000 by Professor Mark Amerika at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The lab develops innovative research methodologies that lead to the invention of new forms of knowledge associated with intermedia art, writing, performance and scholarly research. 

Three New Research Posts in Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University

Research Fellow in Postdigital Cultures

https://staffrecruitment.coventry.ac.uk/tlive_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC107GF.open?VACANCY_ID%3d991793H3NU%1BUSESSION=B87CF7351E8749A1B1EFB0A41EE81080&WVID=1861420Izv&LANG=USA

Research Associate in Postdigital Cultures

https://staffrecruitment.coventry.ac.uk/tlive_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC107GF.open?VACANCY_ID%3d749637H3NU%1BUSESSION=B87CF7351E8749A1B1EFB0A41EE81080&WVID=1861420Izv&LANG=USA

[Please disable ad blockers before clicking on these links. But any problems, contact me. I'm told the following also  works: 

Go to www.coventry.ac.uk

·         Click on the ‘Careers’ tab

·         Click on ‘view current job vacancies’

·         In the section called ‘Job Title’ enter the keyword ‘research’

·         In the section called ‘Faculty / School of Service’ select ‘Faculty of Arts & Humanities’

·         At the bottom of the page Click ‘Search’

·         It will return both the ‘research associates’ and the ‘research fellow’ posts ]

---

Job title: Research Fellow in Postdigital Cultures

Job reference: REQ005591

Application closing date: 10/12/2017

Faculty / School or Service: Faculty of Arts & Humanities

Salary: £37,713 - £53,698 per annum

Package: As one of Coventry's biggest employers, we offer some pretty impressive benefits including an excellent pension scheme and generous holiday allowances. 

Job category/type: Research

Job description: Full-time, Permanent 

The Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) is a new Faculty Research Centre established in 2017. Led by Prof. Gary Hall, the Centre explores how innovations in postdigital cultures can enable 21st century society to respond to the challenges it faces at a global, national and local level: 

-        how we receive, consume and process information

-        how we learn, work, and travel

-        how we engage and regenerate our communities   

The Centre for Postdigital Cultures is a major new initiative that builds on the strong and distinctive track record of scholars at the university encompassing a range of disciplines in the arts and humanities. This is the chance for you to join the CPC team at the beginning of its journey and to play a significant role in the development of impactful research activity within the emerging field of postdigital cultures. 

What Do We Mean By Postdigital Cultures?

"The digital" can no longer be understood as a separate domain of media and culture. If we actually examine the digital - rather than taking it for granted we already know what it means - we soon see that today digital information processing is present in every aspect of our lives. This includes our global communication, entertainment, education, energy, banking, health, transport, manufacturing, food, and water-supply systems. Attention therefore needs to turn from "the digital", to the various overlapping processes and infrastructures that shape and organise the digital, and that the digital helps to shape and organise in turn. 

The CPC investigates such enmeshed digital models of culture, society, and the creative economy for the 21^st century "postdigital" world. 

Research Areas covered by the Centre include: 

-        Creative Archiving and International Heritage

-        Digital Arts and Humanities

-        Post-humanities

-        Affirmative Disruption and Open Media

-        The 21st Century University and Art School

-        Post-capitalist Economies

The Research Fellow post will report to the Executive Director and will focus on:  

1.     Planning, developing and managing own and collaborative research activity, using specialist knowledge.

2.     Publishing as principal author or co-author, and disseminating research findings through papers, books, presentations at conferences (including international peer-reviewed conferences), exhibitions, performances, short courses for knowledge transfer. 

3.     Using research as a driving force for cultural, social and political change at a global, national and local level.

4.     Initiating ideas for generating income and seeking funding opportunities preparation and submission of bids and tenders.

5.     Developing research objectives, projects and proposals, and conducting individual or  collaborative research projects that demonstrate impact.

6.     Taking lead responsibility for small/medium research projects or major part of a large research programme.

7.     Contributing actively to applied research groups or communities of practice internally and/or externally. 

8.     Supervising and examining PhD students with appropriate support.    

Requirements for the post: 

-        PhD in a relevant subject.

-        Substantial experience working in research in digital culture with a national reputation in the relevant field.

-        Peer reviewed publications/ conference presentations/ other media dissemination activities nationally/internationally.

-        Competency to plan, develop, manage and lead individual and collaborative research projects

-        Willingness to participate in a multidisciplinary research team.

-        Facility to take responsibility for developing their own career in partnership with the University. 

Interview scheduled for 19 December 2017 

Click here for Job Description and Person Specification

  ---

Job title: Research Associate (x2)

Job reference: REQ005592

Application closing date: 10/12/2017

Faculty / School or Service: Faculty of Arts & Humanities

Salary: £31,611 - £40,002 per annum

Package: As one of Coventry's biggest employers, we offer some pretty impressive benefits including an excellent pension scheme and generous holiday allowances. 

Job category/type: Research

Job description: Full-time, Permanent 

The Research Associate post will report to the Executive Director and will focus on: 

1.     Planning, developing and managing own and collaborative research activity, using specialist knowledge.

2.     Using research as a driving force for cultural, social and political change at a global, national and local level.

3.     Initiating ideas for generating income and seeking funding opportunities.

4.      Developing research objectives, projects and proposals for own or collaborative research, that incorporates the principles of impact planning.

5.      Identifying new areas for research, developing new research approaches, applying innovative research methods and extend the research portfolio.

6.      Planning and managing small-scale research activities using resources, labs, studios, maker spaces and workshops as appropriate.Participating and assisting with funded projects

7.      Undertaking supervision of students. 

       
Requirements for the post: 

-         PhD in a relevant subject (or having submitted a PhD dissertation by September 2019)

-         Prior research experience related to digital cultures. 

-         Ability to write up research for publication in high profile monographs and peer reviewed journals.

-         Competency to conduct individual and collaborative research projects.

-         Willingness to participate in a multidisciplinary research team.

-         Facility to take responsibility for developing their own career in partnership with the University. 

Interview Date:  19 December 2017 

Click here for Job Description and Person Specification