The City and the Political is an ongoing open class and research group at The Public School, Berlin, that invites anyone to join in discussions between theories and spatial practices of "the city" and "the political."
The city is home to modern man. This class begins at the scale of the city in order to open up all levels of discourse on spatial production. What is space? What is public vs. private space? What is democratic vs. controlled (neoliberal) space? How should architects, urbanists, politicians, developers create space? How should the people take back space?
The political hints to a wide range of concepts regarding man's relation to one another, institutional formations, and potentially radical acts of protest. The spatial production of our cities cannot be divorced from a serious theoretical understanding of our contemporary politics, as representative democracy, the social movements within our cities, and strategies of radical political emancipation.
as an introduction see green open hardware
Hi,
The idea of the class would be to give an idea of few mathematical concepts and theories (basics and advanced!), also for people who didn't or don't have to do with maths in the everyday life (btw:...this is just what you think :) )
However, besides being a science, an art, and a phylosophy, maths has also an own language, and I am sure understanding it is also part of the game
(if you ever tried to open an advanced mathematics book, you probably know that...).
The program can be organized depending on the interests, and if there will be enough people interested we could fix few topics in the first meeting.
(Set theory, prime numbers, analysis, up to computational mathematics... and phylosophycal digressions are also welcomed)
I wouldn't like to dedicate too much time to discussing technical problems with monetary system majority of people cultivates nowadays, rather focus on various alternatives we have alerady available or under development. For 'big picture' overview of monetary system you can watch those documentaries, they somehow repeat same thing but in a different way:
NOTE: I definitely don't want to drift into talking about any conspiracy theories if someone gets impression any of those videos suggesting them, rather would encourage everyone to focus on issues with: fractional reserves, principal/interest, money 'creation' mechanisms etc.
The Money Fix
Money as Debt
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5352106773770802849
Zeitgeist Addendum
We talked a little bit about evil in yesterday's class (Desire, Love and Revolution). As this is a topic that I've been thinking a lot about lately, I'd be interested in doing a whole class on evil, if there's more people that wanna do this. I cannot teach it, but I do think it's a topic that people have some thoughts about anyway, and that we can just center on a bunch of texts without a teacher.
This topics seems overhelming to you? Let me put it simple: I am searching for people for the next gardening season to grow own food (permaculture not agriculture) and play around with open hardware, so it combines the - in my eyes most future relevant - topics self sufficiency and OpenSourceHardware.
copied from LA via NY:
copied from NY - sounds great to me - SD:
I'd like to schedule a weekly 3- or 4-session class devoted to reading and discussing Peter Weiss's novel The Aesthetics of Resistance volume 1, published in German in 1975. I read it five years ago, and think reading it in a group now, with OWS in the background, would be immensely productive and interesting. It's not an easy book. But it's a rewarding one.
How knowledge is being produced and communicated, how it circulates is one of the main interests of philosophy and art – in short of human culture. But how do we not know what it is we don’t know? How is miscommunication, failure, not-knowing, ignorance produced and communicated? Is there a circulation of that what we don’t know?
Based on researches of Postcolonial Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies the seminar deals with mechanisms and consequences of European colonialism and imperialism.
German (mass-) media contributes extensively to the White German’s sense of self and the other by transporting images. Thus social power relations are discursively constructed and reproduced.
Postcolonial approaches observe significantly not only identification processes of groups and individuals of former colonialized societies but challenge the own self-concept and self-image of colonialized societies.
After all colonial-racist patterns of thinking and acting are not established and forced overnight and form the sense of the self and of the other over a long term. In Germany a self-critical and comprehensive debate is emerging only hesitantly and started mainly in academic circles since the 1990ies.