Check out this month’s issue of The Mutation including ‘Social Centres Vs Campaigns: autonomy and conflict’; ‘Arts, politics, cuts and cracks’; and the 2nd installment of a three part series of interviews with Spanish social centre activists.
Better Questions
We are…outcasts in this city. O there is no conspiracy against us, no pressures are brought to bear on us, we are free to come and go, to congregate, to hatch plots even, if we wish; we are - he shrugged - free. But what does it signify, this objectless freedom? Only that we are not feared.
Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Durban Shack Dwellers' Movement →
The Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement began in Durban, South Africa, in early 2005. The movement’s key demand is for ‘Land & Housing in the City’ but it has also successfully politicised and fought for an end to forced removals and for access to education and the provision of water, electricity, sanitation, health care and refuse removal as well as bottom up popular democracy. Their struggle has been met with often brutal state repression and criminalisation.
"Everything interesting begins with one person in one place, though the places can become many, and many persons in the form of influences will have gone into the making of that single woman or man. No one comes out of nowhere; one room or town or locality can be made into an everywhere. The universal is the local, but with the walls taken away. Out of the particular we come on what is general, which is our great comfort, since we call it truth, and that truth has to be continually renewed. What is general and true has to be found again. If we resort to what is already general in this quest, all we are likely to find is the stale air of the imitative."
John McGahern
On the University →
This text was written to accompany the workshop in Cork. It is not complete or conclusive. It is the expression of questions and ideas that have emerged through different conversations. It marks the beginning of a collective effort to think about the university in a different way, opening up possibilities for different situations to emerge.
