Culture Must Be Defunded

This is an 'author's cut' of the second section of 'Defund Culture', which appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of the journal Radical Philosophy. The first section, titled 'The Culture War and the Attack on the Arts', is available here.)

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Understandably, the response of many of those on the left and liberals alike has been to argue against those making such decisions that culture should be publicly funded, and to an increasing extent, not least because Britain’s creative industries are such a success economically and in terms of soft power. The government’s own data shows they contribute £111bn to the economy and are second in this respect only to the country’s financial services. (Clearly, they’re being attacked for reasons other than money.) This has led to initiatives such as The Public Campaign for the Arts. Established in 2020 ‘to protect U.K. culture from the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic’ and now the nation’s biggest arts advocacy organisation, their ‘mission is to champion the value of the arts and creativity in the UK’.

However, while my collaborators and I would strongly refute the Government’s depiction of culture, and of universities, as not being worthy of substantial financial support, it’s also fair to say this left-liberal argument is aiming at the wrong target. For us, part of the point of universities, and the arts and humanities especially, is not so much to act as guardians of tradition as to provide spaces where society’s accepted, taken-for-granted beliefs can be examined and interrogated. Keeping this interrogation of common-sense certainties in mind, perhaps we can see the defunding of culture – somewhat counter-intuitively – not just as threat but also as an opportunity: one that gives us a chance to argue for transformative change by asking whose – or indeed what – culture it is exactly that we want to be funded?

In my 2021 book, A Stubborn Fury, I wrote about how 39% of the UK’s leading people are privately educated (that’s more than five times as many as in the general population), with nearly a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. It’s these predominantly upper- and middle-class individuals who receive most of the financial support for education in the UK. Approximately £3 is spent on students in private schools for every £1 that is spent on pupils in the state system. The majority of this money is channelled to London and the south-east of England, where there are 3.8 and 3.6 private schools per 10,000 pupils respectively, compared to just 1.2 in the north-east.

The upper and middle class also receive the largest proportion of the available support when it comes to the creative arts. It was found in 2017 that half of the country’s poets and novelists attended private school and 44% were educated at Oxbridge. Yet just 7% of the UK population go to private school and approximately 1% graduate from Oxford or Cambridge. Clearly, not everybody has the same opportunity to contribute to the arts and culture. If you want to be a published literary author, best be in that 1%. Ideally, that means coming from the south-east of England, because then you have a 35% chance of gaining a place at Cambridge if you apply, compared to just 26% if you live in Wales. (This figure drops to 19% for Welsh students who apply to Oxford.) It also means being upper class economically: in 2017 it was revealed that more than four fifths of offers to Oxbridge were to the ‘sons and daughters of people in the two top socio-economic classes’, and that the situation is steadily growing worse.

All of which raises the question: should we call simply for culture to be publicly funded and risk continuing to bestow opportunities and resources primarily on those who have long received the bulk of them, thus reinforcing the existing hierarchies? The evidence is that the current institutions and structures are not working for everyone – especially not working-class, Black and Global Majority people, whose parents largely do not belong to the top two socio-economic classes. (Over 50% of Black children in the UK are growing up in poverty, according to analysis of Government statistics by the Labour Party.) Given the injustice of the situation, should a certain amount of those opportunities and resources be disinvested from the cultural sphere as it exists now – which is predominantly upper and middle class and, very often, straight, white, Christian, heteronormative, cis-gendered and male? Should they be strategically transferred to other areas of society, with a view to generating art and creativity in the UK that is more diverse (and hopefully less safe, boring and anti-intellectual as well)?

My title, ‘Defund Culture’, as well as referring to the government’s withdrawal of public backing for the arts, is of course an homage to the contemporary demand for the defunding of the police. This is a demand with a long history connected to struggles over class and racial injustice. In the US Angela Davis and other activists were already calling for the defunding of the police in the 1960s. Davis herself traces the history of this demand back to at least 1935. That was the year W. E. B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America, in which he pushed for the abolition of institutions such as prisons and police forces that he saw as being entrenched in racist beliefs. It was the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020, however, following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and many others, that brought the call for the police to be defunded to renewed prominence in the US and to a lesser extent UK. This demand was then given further impetus in the latter by a number of events that took place in 2021. They include the conviction of Wayne Couzens – a serving officer nicknamed ‘the rapist’ by some of his earlier colleagues in the force ‘as a joke’ – for luring Sarah Everard into his car using his police credentials, and then kidnapping, raping and killing her. The police used force to break up a vigil for Everard on the grounds that it was an illegal gathering under the coronavirus lockdown regulations in operation at the time – a response later deemed to have breached ‘fundamental rights’ by both a parliamentary inquiry and a 2022 high court ruling. There was also the guilty verdict passed on another officer, Mark Kennedy, for having an exploitative long-term relationship with an environmental and social justice activist while undercover; as well as the arrest and eventual jailing of Jamie Lewis and Deniz Jaffer, a pair of police constables who took ‘inappropriate photographs’ of murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, and then shared them in two WhatsApp groups.

As has often been noted, #DefundThePolice does not necessarily mean abolishing all law enforcement – although it’s sometimes interpreted in that way, by its opponents especially, among whom are that powerful minority for whom the role of police is to protect their land, property and interests. Instead, what this demand is perhaps most commonly taken to mean is that if forces are not serving their communities, and are rather harming large sections of them, including women, working-class people and people of colour, their sizes should be reduced. At least some of the public money the police receive to ensure everyone’s safety and security should then be transferred to other sections of society – local residents, voluntary organisations, citizens groups and so forth – to provide community help and resources in different ways. There’s a recognition, too, that the police today are required to deal with a great number of problems they are not properly trained for and that are better handled by others. So Defund the Police can also mean debundling a lot of their responsibilities and redistributing them to the likes of educators, drug clinicians and mental health specialists, instead of requiring officers to act as everything from social workers and peace negotiators to ambulance crew. That said, for some scholars and activists, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba among them, defunding the police is undoubtedly about working toward a police-free future. It’s about forces being fully disinvested and disbanded and cities being without police and even policing (which is not the same as their being without help, public safety or first responders). Whichever way it’s interpreted, though, Defund the Police is concerned with taking a new, different, decriminalising approach to law enforcement, rather than privatising it or reforming it by punishing a few individuals as bad apples. The idea is to present a radical vision of the future in which the structural and systemic issues that lead to crime, such as social and economic inequality, poverty and homelessness, are addressed in a fashion that offers life-giving alternatives to the carceral logic of the prison industrial complex.  

The call to Defund the Police is frequently rejected as unrealistic, as well as threatening. Indeed, the association with #DefundThePolice is one of the reasons Black Lives Matter is often condemned as ‘Marxist’ and extremist, even though as a horizontal and decentralised movement it does not have just one politics. (Most obviously, in the UK, as far as culture is concerned, it is this association that has led the government and some fans to criticise football players for taking the knee, insofar as this anti-racist gesture is perceived as having politically radical overtones.) Yet Defund the Police is a philosophy that is backed up by the available research (much of which is captured in Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing) – to the extent that, as Howard Henderson and Ben Yisrael point out, at least 13 cities in the United States have engaged in policies designed to defund the police. Similarly, in an article on how it was Elinor Ostrom’s inquiries into defunding the police that led to her celebrated work on the commons – that is on how people can manage and share resources in their community – Aaron Vansintjan notes how ‘Indigenous Peoples continue to practice safety without the police, such as a community in Whitehorse, Canada. Indigenous citizens of Chéran, Mexico “threw out” the police and took safety into their own hands. There is now little crime that was otherwise common in this part of Mexico.’

Can an equally radical vision of the future be presented regarding culture in the UK? As with the call to defund the police, until culture is by and for all of society, and not primarily private school and Oxbridge-educated white people from the south-east of England, should we demand that it, too, be defunded – with some institutions even abolished – and the responsibilities for participating in, managing and sharing culture redistributed to others?

This essay is intended more as a speculative provocation than an economic plan. However, there are a number of ways of funding a more radical redistribution of opportunities and resources that it might be worth exploring as a starting point. They include:

• Defunding London and the south-east: for example, by ensuring a disproportionate share of financial support – whether it comes directly from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport or via Arts Council England (ACE) – no longer continues to go to London and the likes of the Tate, National Gallery and V&A (all of which benefited historically from slavery). Despite repeated calls for a change to this policy, an analysis of data for 2018-19 shows that London still attracts around a third of ACE investment. This works out as £24 per person, with other areas of the country receiving only £8.

• Defunding private education by taking away the public subsidies and charitable status of private schools and reallocating their endowments, investments and properties with a view to gradually abolishing these establishments. (The policy of abolishing private schools featured in the 1979 Labour Party Manifesto and was approved by the Labour Party conference as recently as 2019.)

• Defunding Oxbridge, since as we have seen it, too, is not working for all of society. Money could then be redirected to encourage projects such as the attempt of Cambridge PhD student Melz Owusu to set up The Free Black University in the wake of the Black Lives Matter2 protests. Owusu wants to decolonise higher education by redistributing knowledge and funding, and putting Black students and staff at its centre, along with a radically reconceived university structure, curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment system. As Owusu recounts: ‘I was like, hmm, this idea of transforming the university from the inside and having a decolonised curriculum isn’t going to happen with the way the structures of the university are.’ Many universities are ‘built on colonisation – the money, buildings, architecture – everything is colonial’.

(I’m not advocating abolishing Oxbridge, or universities, or indeed all liberal cultural institutions. I prefer to go beyond modernist-left liberal discourses to advocate a radically pluralized politics that is capable of including the modernist-left, the liberal and the pluriversal at the same time. However, I’m aware there are those who do advocate abolishing the university as well as the police and prisons. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, for example, write that the left slogan ‘“universities, not jails,” marks a choice that may not be possible. … perhaps more universities promote more jails. Perhaps it is necessary finally to see that the university produces incarceration as the product of its negligence. Perhaps there is another relation between the University and the Prison – beyond simple opposition or family resemblance – that …. of another abolitionism’.)

It’s so apparent as to have become almost a cliché, but the impacts of Sars-CoV-2 have offered us a chance to present a radically different vision of what the future of society can look like and how we can make it happen. (Both the BBC and Guardian are running major series, titled Rethink and Reconstruction After Covid respectively, to explore how society should change in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.) Such a transformative change will be disruptive of the status quo. Yet with respect to culture (and much else besides) the coronavirus has already been disruptive of the status quo – albeit in ways that have sometimes served the interests of the Government and their allies in business and the media. Moreover, as the Conservative Party’s response to the Covid-19 crisis shows, we can make transformations in our priorities today that previously would have been considered unreasonable. Ideas about big state intervention in social life that might once have been dismissed as Marxist or socialist were suddenly the only thing that could save us. Between February 2020 and July 2021 the UK Government devoted a total of £370 billion to dealing with the pandemic and its economic impact. Not to introduce profound changes in the financing of arts and culture is therefore clearly a political decision, not a pragmatic one.

In arguing for the defunding of culture I appreciate there’s a danger of building a case that could quite easily appear to lead to a further stifling of critique of the Government, Brexit, authoritarian nationalism or the free market by undermining liberal institutions such as the National Theatre and National Trust. However, the likes of #DefundtheBBC and proposal of Dowden’s successor, Nadine Dorries, to axe the corporation’s licence fee, which issue from the right, are not the only alternatives to advocating for financial assistance to be given to those social and cultural elites who have long received the lion’s share of it. The creative industries can be taken in a very different direction to either of these options. It may seem a strange thing to say at a time when liberal democracy is under violent attack in many parts of the world, including from both populist authoritarianism and antiliberalism. But the undermining of certain liberal institutions is precisely what is required if we want to reconstruct a better world after the coronavirus crisis.  A world in which it is not private school and Oxbridge-educated straight white cis people from London and the south-east who receive the vast majority of support when it comes to participating in art and culture, while others in society are marginalised, overlooked or otherwise silenced.

Glitch Poetics by Nathan Allen Jones: new open access book from Open Humanities Press

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Glitch Poetics by Nathan Allen Jones.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Glitch Poetics is available to download for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/glitch-poetics/

Glitches are errors where the digital bursts or creeps into our everyday lives as fragmented image, garbled text and aberrant event. Today, when computational technology is integrated ever more closely into bodies and social structures, glitches are considered by artists and companies alike as critical and commercial opportunities, revealing tears in the real-virtual binary. Glitch has also increasingly become a metaphor for understanding the political and ecological shocks the world pushes into the mediasphere each day. In Glitch Poetics Nathan Jones shows how contemporary writers and artists are integrating the glitch as a literary effect, an affective critique and a realist reflection, at a time characterised by breakage, corruption and crisis.

Based on a range of close readings of contemporary literature by writers including Linda Stupart, Sam Riviere, Keston Sutherland, Ben Lerner, Caroline Bergvall, Erica Scourti, David Peace and the internet novelists, and drawing on theories of error, shock, glitch, critical posthumanism and code, Jones lays the groundwork for writing that can productively engage in the new situation for literature in the context of AI, the Anthropocene and the post-digital age. His book articulates the working of error in literary and media practice at the horizon of human and machine language.

Glitch Poetics resists technofuturism, reinventing errancy as a necessary aesthetic value of (and crucially against) our time.

    - Charles Bernstein, Professor Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania.

So, body-machinic posthuman reader, consider the shock to your system(s) when a glitch-error interrupts the coding-decoding mechanisms that govern your operations. Disruption to the textual condition occurs as voice misrecognition and cycles of translation malform and corrupt the poetics of authorial production. The desire for ideological resistance may or may not be short-circuited by the predictive algorithm manifest in remediating performance and its disruption of literary habits. The old attachment to tactical intervention remains, an aspiration still making its way through the charged circuits of culture, looking for a way to break down the rule-governed barriers between aspiration and effective agency. The pathetic subroutines, often destined to crash, derive from provisional looping of interference patterns that constantly reorder our codified reality. In Glitch Poetics Jones selects vivid examples of the ways the glitch can be used deliberately to produce an uncomfortable intervention in the current conditions of posthuman capitalist culture. Or can it? Read and decide, based on your own bodily-machinic receptivity to ‘technological timings’ and ‘leaky intrusions’ across the ‘creepy porousness’ of your boundaries.

    - Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information Studies, UCLA.

Glitch Poetics figures glitch radically as a key aesthetic condition of the contemporary moment. A powerful exploration of how glitch works across writing, art and bodies, it reconfigures our understanding of technology as an aesthetic force that structures our world.

    - Olga Goriunova, Professor of Media, Royal Holloway University of London.

Author Bio

Nathan Allen Jones is Lecturer in Fine Art (Digital Media) at Lancaster University. Exploring the dynamic relationship between the newest media, language and the art discourse, he has written and made artworks about unicode, blockchain, speed readers and peer-to-peer networks. He is also a co-founder (with Sam Skinner) of Torque Editions, whose publications include Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (2017) and The Act of Reading (2015), and exhibitions with Tate, Furtherfield and FACT, Liverpool.

The Culture War and Attack on the Arts

This is an 'author's cut' of the first section of 'Defund Culture', which appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of the journal Radical Philosophy.

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For more than a decade the British Conservative Party, supported by the country’s right-wing media, relied heavily on a hostility to one of the mainstays of the post-war liberal world order, the European Union, to help win elections and remain in power. Aware that it’s far easier to unite people as an imagined community around what they are not than what they are, they achieved this by linking the grievances of a number of different sections of society – about immigration, national sovereignty, the loss of secure jobs, the metropolitan liberal elite – at least enough to be able to form a government.

After Britain’s January 2020 withdrawal from the EU, however, Brussels and its professional class of political technocrats can no longer be blamed quite so convincingly for the UK’s problems. What we have seen since is the Conservative Party devoting more of its attention to the wider ‘culture war’ it began during the vote leave campaign of 2016. Research reveals that the total number of articles published in the UK press each year concentrating on the ‘existence or nature’ of the culture war increased from a mere 21 in 2015 to 534 in 2020. This was followed by another huge rise in 2021 to 1,470.

Yet this conflict is far from confined to the pages of newspapers and magazines. It’s also being conducted on the battlefield of the country’s elite institutions. Witness the reaction to:

• the National Trust heritage charity acknowledging in 2020 that almost a third of the stately homes it owns, including Winston Churchill’s country estate Chartwell, have links to slavery and colonialism. Sir John Hayes, a former minister and the founder and chair of the Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs, has gone so far as to tell the House of Commons that ‘defending our history and heritage is our era’s Battle of Britain’. (Subsequently, a group of ‘anti-woke’ insurgents called Restore Trust was established to fight this particular aspect of the culture war by seeking to have its candidates elected to the National Trust’s governing council.

• reports that Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory were to be dropped from the BBC’s 2020 Last Night of the Proms (dubbed the ‘Black Lives Matter Proms’) as result of pressure from movements for racial justice because of their associations with colonialism and slavery. Oliver Dowden, then Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, intervened to say he shared the ‘concerns of many about their potential removal’ and that he had raised the issue with the BBC. ‘Confident forward-looking nations don’t erase their history, they add to it’, he declared. Dowden, currently Co-chairman of the Conservative Party, has since doubled down on this idea, claiming in a 2022 speech to the Heritage Foundation thinktank in the US that a ‘West confident in its values would not be obsessing over pronouns or indeed seeking to decolonise mathematics’.

• the decolonisation agenda within the country’s museums and galleries. In 2021 Dowden was involved again, this time in the vetoing of Dr Aminul Hoque, a lecturer in the Educational Studies Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, from being reappointed to serve a second term as a member of the board of trustees of the Royal Museums Greenwich because of his backing for decolonisation.

Declaring war on the ‘wokeism' that is held as leading to the removal of statues (such as that commemorating Bristol slaver Edward Colston) or to the renaming of buildings (including Edinburgh University’s David Hume Tower because of the philosopher’s writings on race), has several other advantages. It distracts from the UK Government’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus contagion and Omicron wave, as well as Afghanistan, Brexit, the Ukrainian refugee situation and the economy: rising energy prices, food, labour and petrol shortages, and the cost of living crisis. And that’s without even mentioning the revelations concerning cronyism, corruption and the Partygate scandal. The 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia and its domination of the news cycles saw the Conservatives calling something of a truce in the culture war. Yet, as with so much of what they do at the moment, this was less an indication of a change of ideological conviction on their part and more a matter of political expediency. As such, it was always going to be temporary – especially when Nigel Farage and his allies are in the process of opening a new post-Brexit front around net zero that is designed to oppose action on the climate emergency. Sure enough, at the Tory’s party’s 2022 spring conference the war in Ukraine was positioned as necessitating an end to criticism of British history and debates about statues: ‘we don’t need to be woke, we just want to be free’, prime minister Boris Johnson emphasised in his keynote speech.

The reason political outliers such as Farage are contributing to the culture war, even when they are not members of parliament themselves, is because doing so enables them to help shift what is considered to be politically impartial and ‘balanced’ a notch or two to the right. This is another of the culture war’s advantages for conservatives. The Department of Education’s new rules concerning the teaching of imperialism, racism and, indeed, the climate emergency in England’s schools provide further evidence of this rightward drift. But the culture war also helps to create an environment in which it is acceptable for the Government to reduce the amount of support it provides to those sectors that are liable to be critical, both of its socially conservative politics – on asylum, the right to protest, secrecy laws and so forth – and of democratic capitalism’s constitutive inequalities (in terms of class, race, gender, sexuality etc.). Public, local government and business investment all having fallen since 2008, many arts organisations have been left struggling to survive during the pandemic due to a lack of a public funding package. (Which isn’t to say the Conservatives can’t still get things badly wrong. A 2020 Government-backed advertising campaign encouraging ballerinas to retrain for jobs in cybersecurity had to be quickly withdrawn after it generated a barrage of protests.)

Nor has the antagonism toward those areas of society perceived as fostering critical thought and dissent been confined to the arts, heritage and media sectors. It is now a decade since Michael Gove, as education secretary, excluded the creative arts from the core school curriculum. A lot of institutions have subsequently scrapped their art, music and theatre programmes. At the same time, well-off private schools have been able to invest in substantial arts centres so their alumni can continue to lead the field.

Yet if the Tories are not committed to protecting the creative industries, they are in favour of introducing the teaching of Latin. In 2021 the Department of Education announced a £4m Scheme to do just that, with plans to roll it out across 40 schools as part of a four-year pilot programme for 11- to 16-year-olds, beginning in September 2022. It’s a prospect that returns us to an era when, as Richard Beard shows in Sad Little Men, his book about the institutions that shaped both Conservative prime ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson, Britain’s private schools were quite explicit in placing greater emphasis on the ‘development of character’ than on the ‘acquisition of knowledge’. Traditionally, such schools taught very little history, geography or even science, focusing more on sport to exhaust and distract their pupils so they wouldn’t be tempted to have sex with one another. ‘Compliance was more important than critical thinking’, writes Beard. When it came to academic subjects these schools concentrated mainly on the classics and religion. Along with their nostalgic instinct to ‘hide in a glorified’ – and often fictitious – past, evident right down to their ‘almost accurate historical costumes’, and associated aversion to new ideas and to difficulty and complexity, this goes a long way toward explaining why so much culture in England, in particular, has tended to be rather safe, homogenous and anti-intellectual.

The withdrawal of support from the creative subjects by successive Conservative governments is also having an impact on universities, and specifically on what courses are available for students to take at which institutions.  Again, arts and humanities education – including media studies, philosophy, history of art, music, dance and performing arts – can continue (in some form at least) at the kind of wealthy, ‘global-brand’ institution that admits a lot of private school pupils in a manner it cannot so easily at others. The result? Between 2009-10 and 2019-20 the number of university students enrolled in humanities courses in the UK declined by 18%.

In fact, universities are an explicit target in this culture war: for their supposed left-wing campus politics, ‘no platforming’ and ‘cancel culture’. (What’s more they’re a target despite research showing that ‘there’s not a great deal of awareness or particular focus among the UK public about universities being in the front line’ of the culture wars, or of being particularly left-wing.) Within this there has been open government hostility toward the arts and humanities due to their assumed teaching of ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘critical race theory’, and ‘low value’ and ‘dead end’ degree courses. (Again, this is in spite – or is it because – of the fact that, across the West, younger people today are actually quite radical and left-wing.) Just as many cultural organisations and venues have suffered from a lack of financial aid during the pandemic, we now have the arts and humanities being deliberately defunded because they are not considered ‘strategic priorities’. According to the University and College Union, the cuts ‘halve the amount of money available for creative and arts subjects’ from the beginning of the 2021/22 academic year. ‘The reforms are part of government plans to prioritise funding for “high-value” courses like STEM and medicine.’

Art & Knowledge

This is the abstract for a talk I am due to give with Mel Jordan as part of the programme of events (also featuring Emily Seghal and Joanna Drucker) organised to accompany the Bibliotech exhibition, Liverpool, May 5, 2022. The exhibition includes installations by Erica Scourti, Anna Barham, Silvio Lorruso and Diagonal Press.

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Mel Jordan and Gary Hall, Art & Knowledge

For us, the arts and humanities are a site for the invention and testing of new knowledges, new practices, even new subjectivities, not least for the artist and author. Working with a range of different collaborators we carry out such tests in spaces traditionally associated with the institutions of the university and art school. We do so by reimagining various media-material aspects of the creation, circulation and sharing of art and knowledge, including books, journals, pamphlets and presses. See the Freee art collective’s choral reworking of pre-existing manifestos, or the processual texts of Open Humanities Press's two liquid and living books series. But we are also concerned to conduct such tests in the public sphere by collaborating on the reimagining of galleries, libraries, archives, museums and other elements of municipal infrastructure. In both cases we operate very much in terms of those social movements dedicated to radical open access, peer production, internet ‘piracy’ and the anti-privatised knowledge commons. We are now working on the following question: can the collaborative, performative approaches to art and knowledge we have developed with initiatives such as the Partisan Social Club and Media Gifts be translated to cities? The idea is to help reinvent them, too, through the provision of a diverse repertoire of counter-institutional alternatives to those galleries and libraries that are currently being provided by the state and corporate realms, often under the rubric of 'smart'. In the era of AI, blockchains and NFTs, do such counter-practices have the potential to generate a more socially just and environmentally sustainable way of living and learning in cities in the future?

Announcing the Open Humanities Press reading group

We are currently in the process of organsing an Open Humanities Press reading group. The idea is to gather a group of people who are interested in discussing continental philosophy and critical theory. The group will meet every month via Zoom. We will host two meetings per text: the first with the author present to discuss their work with the reading group's participants; and the second to discuss material related to the primary text, this time without the author present.

The programme, put together and led by Slyvie Makower,  currently includes:

Claire Colebrook discussing Death of the PostHuman;

Daniel Ross, discussing The Neganthropocene;

Nathan Jones discussing Glitch Poetics;

Noah Roderick discussing The Being of Analogy.

Details of more names and texts will follow soon, along with conformation of dates and times.

The reading group is open to anyone who is interested. If you wish to join please enter your email address here.