CfP: Anarchist Technologies Repair Manual

Anarchist Technologies Repair Manual
fixing the world through resistance and repair

CFP: Call for Papers for an Edited Book

Anarchism is experiencing a renaissance in locations all across the
world. Facilitated by information technologies, new anarchist
communities are forming and more established ones are gaining greater
recognition. The decentralized, non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer nature of
the relationships and social bonds which characterize these communities
has inspired a recent surge of interest within both scholarly geographic
and activist circles. Articles, conference sessions, and special issues
of geographic journals have all appeared in recent years provoking
debate and research within scholar-activism. Meanwhile, on the streets,
these social forms which have recently become a subject of geographic
study are broadening their scope, coalescing to form non-hierarchical
movements which directly enable more equitable resource distribution
while demanding an end to structural violence.

Anarchism in its most basic form is the theory and practice of
resisting, organizing, living and creating worlds without domination.
Anarchist practice of resistance is twofold: firstly, fighting the range
of exploitations and oppressions imposed by nation-states, corporations,
international oligarchies and other systems of domination. Secondly,
applying techniques of self-critique, acknowledging that the exercise of
power results in an internalization of oppressive mechanisms, and
fighting these as well. Organizing in spaces where the state does not
provide reliable basic services such as health care, education, or
access to food and clean water, collectives of people practicing
horizontal decision-making work to meet basic needs and repair their
communities.

Within the domain of information technologies anarchism has also driven
projects to protect populations from structural violence by creating
security infrastructures which shelter their communications from
surveillance. Rather than approaching internet surveillance with a
“nothing to hide” attitude, anarchists understand governments as
oppressive institutions; based on an arcane calculus of power justified
as morality, governments are liable to arbitrarily categorize any number
of activities sanctioned one day as prohibited the next. As people
living on lands that have been privatized by capitalist property
relations backed with state force, we are constantly subject to the
whimsical decisions of those in power about who will constitute the
oppressed class, be that on gender, class, racial, sexual, ethnic or
spiritual lines.

Information technologies have largely facilitated communication across
many regions of the Earth, inspiring new ways of approaching problems,
increasing access to resources and forming a new space for radical
subjectivities to emerge. With the exponential expansion of information
technologies over the past decades we have seen the practices of
resisting violence and oppression change in spontaneous, dramatic and
creative ways that have captured the attention and inspired the
imagination of people all around the world. We need not describe here
the manifold ways in which the networked world enables collaborations
and intersections only dreamed about in the past, but it is important to
be reminded of the material base it is built upon. Alluded to in the
saying “there is no cloud, it’s just other people’s computers,” data
centers share with popular movements the fact that there are actual
physical locations where they exist. Counterposed to this, the
non-physicality of internet communications creates a theoretical and
practical space like none we have known before.

However, alongside growth of information technologies it is important to
also recognize that the creation of these technologies themselves are
subject to the often blood-drenched flows of capitalist commodity
production and distribution. From the war-zones of coltan ore-mining
operations in the Congo to the sweatshop conditions of the Shenzhen
assembly line, the construction of the microchip leaves in its wake a
fallout of both human and environmental destruction. The use of these
devices enables massive industries to capture billions of dollars even
with business models based solely on metadata, creating a massive
concentration of wealth and new lines of exclusion. And finally when the
machines are discarded, toxins are released damaging and transforming
both the living and non-living environment.

This book requests proposals for chapters exploring anarchism in both
theory and practice as it relates to all aspects of information
technologies for audiences that include the general public, activists
and early career scholars. While the call is open, preference will be
given to proposals for chapters that specifically focus on anarchism and
information technologies within repair (in all metaphorical and material
aspects), security, communications, organizing resistance movements,
access to hardware and approaches to dealing with the destruction of
both the human and more-than-human that occurs from creation to wasting.

Please submit abstracts of up to 350 words, a short bio of up to 200
words and any other pertinent information to the editors by July 1st,
2016. Authors will be informed of selection by September 1st, 2016.
First drafts of chapters will be due February 28, 2017, then following
revisions, a final publication date will be around September 1st, 2017.
Please feel free to contact the editors with any questions.

Contact information:

Erin Araujo: ela120 mun ca
Bill Budington: bill inputoutput io

About the Editors:

Erin Araujo is a PhD Candidate in the department of Geography at the
Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada as well as a member of the
Cambalache Collective, a money-less economy located in San Cristobal de
las Casas, Chiapas as well as other parts of Mexico. She has resided in
Chiapas for around nine years, is a life long anarchist and artist and
has participated in a number of resistance movements throughout the
Americas.

~~~~ https://www.embersrekindled.org/cfp/