New Anarchist Research Group, London, meetings

New Anarchist Research Group, London

Meetings in September and October to be held in the MayDay Rooms,  88 Fleet Street, London EC4Y 1DH

Saturday 28 September 2019 2:00pm - 4:00pm
An Attempt at Anarcho-syndicalism in a time of crisis
Shiri Shalmy

Over the past five years, UVW members won significant improvements to pay and conditions through militant workplace organising and a diversity of direct action tactics. Recently, UVW started organising sex workers, legal workers and cultural workers - three sectors that were typically un-unionised and considered unorganisable. This autumn, UVW members will take strike action across seven different workplaces, including universities, hospital and the Royal Parks, where they demand the London Living Wage, occupational sick pay and an end to the exploitative practice of outsourcing. 

We will discuss UVW's unique organising principles and methods, the complexities of horizontal trade unionism and the union's work to develop a community of solidarity in a time of social and political crisis. 

Shiri Shalmy is an organiser at United Voices of the World, a members led trade union organising some of the UK's most marginalised, low waged and precarious workers

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 Saturday 26 October 2019 2:00pm - 4:00pm 

Anarchist education as prefigurative practice; tensions and possibilities
Judith Suissa

Hannah Arendt

In this talk, I will revisit some earlier work on the idea of anarchist education as prefigurative practice to explore some of the tensions suggested by such work. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's reflections on educational authority and on recent work on utopian pedagogy, I will explore ways in which, from an anarchist perspective, these tensions can be seen as productive pedagogical tensions rather than weaknesses.

Judith Suissa is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the UCL Institute of Education. She is the author of Anarchism and Education (PM Press, 2010) and (with Stefan Ramaekers) The Claims of Parenting; Reasons, Responsibility and Society (Springer, 2012).

Our meetings are friendly and informal, but please note that we do ask for a donation to cover the cost of the venue.

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See previous post for other autumn listings
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Reminder from Autonomy Now
This Land is Ours: The Fight for Land Justice
Speakers from the Anarchist Communist Group.
7pm start, Thursday September 26th.
Free entry. No booking required.
Venue: Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
King’s Cross, N1 9DX
Maps/directions here.

New Anarchist Research Group Programme Update

* Venue:  MayDay Rooms, 88 Fleet Street, London, EC4Y 1DH  - please note that we take a collection at the end of the afternoon to cover the cost of hiring the room.  

Here are the details of the next three meetings of the New Anarchist Research Group: 

Saturday 27 April, 2019, MayDay Rooms 2:00-4:00 pm*

          This month's meeting is slightly different from our usual format, as the presentation will be given by one of the other groups that often meet at the MayDay Rooms on the same day as we do - Plan C.    

Anarchists like us! Communists like us!

Plan C is a unique organisation in the UK, one that sits at odds in both the Left and the traditional Anarchist scene. Though it draws its history from both Anarchist and Communist movements, Autonomist Marxist Feminism, New left Populist movements as well Anti-Capitalist struggles, it has refused to be drawn into dogmatic and scholastic schisms that categorise the left, opting to put its energy into developing communities of care and resilience, and developing new alliances and forms of action through an ecology of movements. 

In this talk, a founder member of Plan C LDN  presents the history and formation of Plan C from its beginning in 2012, the fusion of various ideas within the Post “anti-capitalist” movement of the early 2000’s that met the student movement of 2010, and the emergence of ideas like social strike, social reproduction, luxury communism, commons and forms of constituent power all the way to our current conjecture.  

Saturday 25 May 2019, MayDay Rooms 2:00-4:00 pm* 

Anarchy or Chaos: M.P.T. Acharya and Indian Anarchism

Ole Birk Laursen

M.P.T. Acharya 1887-1954 libcom image

This talk explores the life and activities of the Indian anarchist M.P.T Acharya from his anticolonial activities to life in Russia during the Revolution, and more than three decades in the international anarchist movement.

Ole Birk Laursen is a Lecturer at New York University in London.  His research concerns anti-colonialism and anarchism in the early twentieth century 

Saturday 22 June, 2019 MayDay Rooms 2:00-4:00pm*

Anarchist Theory in Landscape Planning

Tim Waterman

Kropotkin in 1864 - wikipedia image

Anarchism’s influence on landscape theory and planning, dating back to Proudhon, but perhaps more importantly to Elisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, is powerful, but has long been suppressed or denied. This makes it difficult to understand just how strong anarchism’s undercurrents have remained in landscape theory, and how continuous a lineage anarchist planning possesses, through figures such as Patrick Geddes and Colin Ward. This talk will trace the emergence of the contemporary idea of landscape as situated social ecology within green anarchist theory since the 19th century and show how it is an emancipatory ecological, social, cultural, and intellectual framework for planning and design 

Tim Waterman is Senior Lecturer in Landscape Architecture History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is also a non-executive director at the radical digital arts collective Furtherfield. He is at work on the book Landscape Citizenships and has recently edited two others: Landscape and Agency: Critica Essays with Ed Wall and the Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food with Joshua Zeunert.