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PROGRAM DAY TWO
paper and / or session titles are links to pdf-files                                                        


9.00-11.00 Session IV: Post-Politics, The Common and Alternative Futures (link)
Location: Annedalsseminariet, Lecture Hall 220
Participants: Mekonnen Tesfahuney, PhD, Senior Lecturer, Karlstad University; Itay Snir, Philosophy Department, Tel-Aviv University, Common-Sense as the Necessary-Impossible Condition of the Political. Matías Leandro Saidel, Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, Naples, Italy, Re-thinking the Common: Political/(Im)political perspectives.


9.00-11.00 Session V: Urban Futures
Location: Annedalsseminariet, Lecture Hall 204
Chair: Sylva Frisk, Director of Studies for Master Programme in Global Studies, University of Gothenburg.
Participants: Lucy Finchett-Maddock, Birkbeck College, Fanning the Spark of History through Activating the Memory of the Commons: The Future in the Now of the UK Social Centre Movement; Åsa Wahlström, Brunel University, School of Social Science, Department of Anthropology, Claiming “the Common”: The Case of Lone Asylum Seekers in the London Borough of Hillingdon; Michael Perukangas, Postgraduate of Human Geography at the University of Helsinki, Right to the City – Reclaiming the Commons.


9.00-11.00 Session VI: Aesthetics and the Common
Location: Linnésalen, School of Journalism
Participants: Meira Ahmemulic/Signe Vad, artists/writers, Berlin/Copenhagen, Presentation of a Video Work on Location South of Jaffa's Old Port; Philipp Kleinmichel, University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe/ZKM, The Common Spectator; Åse Løvgren & Karolin Tampere, Freelance curators, Common Lands: The Common as a City-Development Tool and a Starting Point for Artistic Research.


11.00-11.30 Coffee Break


11.30-13.00 Session VII: Political Economy
Location: Annedalsseminariet, Lecture Hall 220
Chair: Lennart Nilsson, Associate Professor, Centre for Public Sector Research, University of Gothenburg.
Participants: Stephen Engelmann, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago, The Common and Political Economy; Sophia Mihic, Associate Professor, Northeastern Illinois University, Penumbras of Publicity: A Distinction Between Liberalism and Neoliberalism; Jorge Buzaglo, Associate Professor, University of Gothenburg, Global commons and Common Sense, The Real New Deal.


11.30-13.00 Session VIII: Literature and the Common
Location: Annedalsseminariet, Lecture Hall 204
Chair: Edme Dominguez, Associate Professor, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg.
Participants: María Carreño & Jordi Claramonte, Researcher in Literary Theory of the Santiago de Compostela University, Professor of Aesthetic Theories in UNED (Madrid), Aesthetic Commons; José Nuno Matos Institute of Social Studies (ICS), University of Lisbon, Laughing: From Feast to Work; Johannes Thumfart, Researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the Freie Universität Berlin, Communication as Common Good and Foundation of Global Democracy: Francisco de Vitoria’s Performative Conception of the Commons.


13.00-14.00 Lunch


14.00-15.30 Session IX: Politics of Writing
Location: Annedalsseminariet, Lecture Hall 220
Chair: Sven-Erik Liedman, Emeritus Professor, History of Ideas and Science, University of Gothenburg.
Participants: Daniel Loick, Institut für Philosophie, Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Competing Universalities and the Politics of Translation: The Idea of the Common in Judith Butler; Anat Ascher, PhD student at the Philosophy Department, Tel Aviv University, Considering Rousseau's Notion of the Common through Rancière's Concept of La Mésentente; Juha Koivisto, Academy of Finland / University of Helsinki Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism as a Common Project.


14.00-15.30 Session X
Location: Annedalsseminariet, Lecture Hall 204
Chair: Åsa Wahlström, Brunel University, School of Social Science, Department of Anthropology.
Participants: Zac Zimmer, Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University Ithaca, NY USA, Copyleft as Training Ground: The Digital Horizons of Intellectual Property; Vesna Tomse, sociologist/political scientist, Researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy (Maastricht, the Netherlands), Privatising St. Petersburg: Neoliberal Urban Restructuring and the Destruction of Commons; Ignacio Valero, Associate Professor of Humanities and Sciences, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, California, EcoDomics: Building An Ecological Aesthetics of the Commons.


15.30-15.45 Coffee Break


15.45-17.00 Session XI: The Iranian Revolution, Thirty Years Later
Location: Linnésalen, School of Journalism
Chair: Mikela Lundahl, Director of MUSEION, University of Gothenburg.
Participants: Artist Intervention by Ross Birrell, Disagreement, based on a performance at Vasaplatsen, Gothenburg, 10 October 2009; Ali Alizadeh, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, The Production and the Reclaiming of the Common Space of Politics in Iran: From the Islamic Revolution to the Green Movement; Vahid Valizadeh & Parisa Nasrabadi, Tabatabai University, Tehran, The Iranian Revolution: Past and Future; Dariush Moaven Doust, Space, Masses and the Common.


17.00-18.30 Key Note: David Harvey
Location: Linnésalen, School of Journalism
The Right to the City and the Urban Commons
The "right to the city" idea conceptualized by Henri Lefebvre in relation to the urban social movements that sprang to life in the 1960s has in recent years been dusted off and re-applied as a "cry and a demand" for marginalized and disenfranchised peoples all around the world. Right to the city clauses exists in the Brazilian constitution and right to the city alliances have emerged from Croatia and Poland to Los Angeles and New York. The loss of the commons is likewise seen as a way to think of neoliberal privatization and the politics of reclamation of the commons has therefore become a focus of left initiatives. But both the right to the city and the commons are, in themselves, empty signifiers that desperately need to be theorized and rendered concrete in terms of political agendas. This is the key question I wish to reflect upon.




Documentation of the Conference is made in cooperation with FilmCentrum Väst


NEWS

Unfortunately, we learned that Mr Rancière will not be able to deliver his keynote speech on Sunday.


All our paying participants are entitled to member-price (80 Swedish kronor instead of full price) to attend the Gothenburg Electroacoustic Festival on 9 & 10 October, for details see:

INTERVENTIONS 2

Interventions 2 is postponed to the 2010 program. Details will be announced in April 2010.

 

WHAT IS THE COMMON?

An International Conference

10-11 October 2009
Gothenburg, Sweden

David Harvey
Antonio Negri
Yitzhak Laor
Jacques Rancière

In the shadow of the global crisis of capitalism, the common, somehow obliterated in the recent past, has emerged as an indispensable and central notion. The conference addresses this notion both as a real movement and as an already present horizon, a dynamic principle, for societal life. It is a critical topic today, not only because the public, administrated by the state, is reduced to expendable assets for regulating a supposedly self-regulating machine called Market, but more importantly because the emerging forms of the common impose themselves with an unprecedented acuity and in opposition to the doxa of the private property.

The common refers not only to primary resources, such as water or ecological conditions on a planetary level, but it is at the same time a political force that traverses diverse fields of tension such as art and culture, law and gender relations. The question "What is the Common?" is addressed as a real agenda that conditions the thought. The conference is a program that extends over 4 years. Each year will treat two themes. The conference 2009 will welcome papers related to the following two axes:

1. The Common and the Economy
Which are the specific emerging forms of the common today and what defines its relation to the material conditions of production of values in contemporary capitalism? Under this axis, both theoretical discussions and case-specific investigations in areas such as autonomous popular organisations, regional movements or global changes in one specific economic sector are welcome.

2. The Philosophical Understanding of what the Common Is
The common has since Plato's Republic been a central question for the philosophical thinking. What is the relation or non-relation between the common and the totality of social relations? In which form and based upon what ontological or existential categories does it emerge? What is the difference between the common as the name of a real movement and the nostalgies of the return to a simple life?

About the Organization
The conference is organized upon an original proposal by Dr Dariush Moaven Doust. He is also responsible for the organization of the conference and the head of the Scientific committee in which Tomas Jonsson, researcher at CEFOS, Professor emeritus Sven-Eric Liedman, History of Ideas, Professor Lennart Nilsson, CEFOS, Professor emeritus Jan Ling, Mikaela Lundahl head of Museion Interdisciplinary Centre, Sylva Frisk, Director of Studies at the School of Global Studies participate. The host for the conference is the School of Global Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences.

Text by Dariush Moaven Doust, November 2008