"Not only has the education industry been the site of rapid employment growth, it has also been the site of growing labor unrest worldwide in the second half of the twentieth century. According to the VVLG data, the education industry is one of the few industries that has experienced a rising trend of labor unrest in the final decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, the geographical spread of teacher labor unrest has been far greater than was the case historically for the textile and automobile industries."

-Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor, 115

Unbelievable footage from London yesterday of students fighting back against the cops. Behold the potentialities of the liberation of living knowledge that is the book bloc.

Another occupation linkdump

Solidarity twitters from UC to Goldsmiths

Statement from the turbulence collective

The call from Paris, via edu-factory

European calling from Uniriot, with concomitant photo of the new British section of the book bloc

If you've got anything good on what's going on in PR at the moment, send it my way.

Edit: British book bloc in action!

University for Strategic Optimism at Lloyds TBS [High Quality]

this is what the university looks like.

This is a really interesting article about the place of nonacademic university employees in the current, inspiring wave of student occupations and strikes that is erupting across the United Kingdom, from Leeds to Cardiff to Warwick to Oxford to the University of East London.

I've previously written (and feel like a careerist liberal asshole so noting) about the question of how the student occupationist movements ought to rethink the place of service work and workers as central to university capitalism, and I think the tensions this mute piece points out in the current moment speak similarly to the challenges and possibilities of future organizing.

Widening Participation: "

By Anathematician

Despite frequent declarations of solidarity, protesting students and academics are failing to join forces with non-academic staff. Except when police brutality momentarily unites them - writes Anathematician

read more

"

department of shameless plugs

Oh, hey, so my first published work as an academic, "The limits of work and the subject of labor history," appears in the brand new book Rethinking U.S. Labor History from Continuum Press.  My essay looks at the racialized and gendered applicability of the term "labor" as a descriptor for selective human activities, and argues that two projects labor scholars should take up are the continual reexamination of both the shifting geography of the boundaries between work and not work and a corresponding shift in who or what ought to be the privileged subject(s) of labor history.  I think my original draft was rather awful, and I think that the revisions process and intervening year and a half have convinced me that the finished project is significantly less awful, though you are of course welcome to disagree, and if folks who read it want to engage me on it, I'd welcome that, though I'm finding the temporality of publishing somewhat disorienting - i submitted the final draft of the essay 15 months ago and have been working on other projects since - a conference paper here, a diss chapter there, and hadn't really thought much about this essay in the interrim until i realized i needed to be able to say stuff about it for a panel Wednesday night.  I should also note that the other essays in the book that I've read are really interesting, especially Dan Bender's article on the senses and the cultural turn.  I'm also looking forward to reading the essay on home health care workers by Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein.

Today's November 20th.  That makes it the 1 year anniversary of this: At a moment in which the UCPD is pulling guns on protestors, academic neoliberalism continues expansionist coloniality at home and abroad and neoliberal assaults on campus workers, students, and spaces, we need to be inspired by and learn from the struggles of the last two years as we work to build new cycles of whatever. I meant that less in the agamben sense than in the "insert your radical noun here" sense, "insurrection, insurgency, transformation, strikes, resistance, organizing, etc."  They're all problematic and insufficient in one way or another, but also all necessary in one way or another.  Alright.  Solidarity from the purple tendrils of the global network university

NO GOD, NO COUNTRIES, NO YALE!

In honor of the Harvard-Yale game, which I have never been to, and the inevitable flood of nostalgic and slightly jingoistic, though i don't mean to be an asshole, facebook updates from people i haven't seen in at least five years.  Obviously I'm riffing off Ni dieu ni maitre and "for god, for country...", and I don't actually really want to claim secularism as some kind of revolutionary position at this point, when in many ways it's profoundly not and is often complicit in projects like homonationalism and other ways in which folks deploy liberalism to justify postmodern imperial projects like the invasion of Afghanistan.  Plus, I know many great organizers and committed radicals who approach what they do from a (critical engagement with their) religious standpoint, and I have a lot of respect for them.  I also believe strongly in the power of ritual in anticapitalist and antiauthoritarian forms of religious practice, and here i'm thinking of stuff like freedom seders, even though i'm pretty estranged from Judaism - maybe even moreso than i'd like to be.  I should also probably throw in "no bosses," or risk overdetermining the role of the state in relation to the capitalist class whose interests it mediates and regulates.