It’s night time and a man is crawling around on his hands and knees, looking for his car keys underneath a lamp post. A woman comes along and starts to help him. After they’ve been searching together for a while the woman asks the man: “Are you sure this is where you dropped them?”

Based on empirical research around two events that happened in response to the G8 meetings in Germany in summer 2007, this paper examines relations between the organizational practice and the discourses that set up and guided both these events. One of them was a meticulously coordinated blockade action ("Block G8") close to Heiligendamm, and the other a theory-inspired "summit" calling initiatives to unalign from the education agenda of the G8. While the "Block G8" was an action with a clearly determined goal (blocking several roads), the outcome of “summit” was left open. Both events endorsed practices of self-organization, aiming to function in a horizontal, transparent, open and inviting, as much as in a critical, manner.
Despite the different objectives of the events, their aims appeared similar, and indeed some similar problems and organizational symptomatologies emerged in their course. By investigating and juxtaposing the conceptualisations and praxes of "Block G8" and "summit", we hope to address strategies for negotiating the conflicts that arose, so as to further the potential for translations of such rhetoric into practice and vice versa.

Loren Goldner will be giving a talk on the subject of the Korean working class at Housmans bookstore in Kings Cross, London at 6pm on Saturday 19th of January.

More details: http://www.metamute.org/en/Three-Talks-by-Loren-Goldner

ABSTRACT

Saint Petersburg is besieged by elite-backed architectural mega-projects and micro-interventions. Dmitry Vorobyev and Thomas Campbell describe the dominant strains of 'renovation' and the popular resistance to them arguing that, in St. Petersburg, class conflict takes the form of opposed visions of urban renewal and historic preservation

The current tube strike in London demands guarantees that the insolvent Private Public Partnership (PPP) Metronet will not seek to cover its losses at the expense of labour. Unterschreber unravels the matrix of blame

Occupation by locals and activists of New Orleans offices of HUD-contractor, Housing Agency of New Orleans. At least they got a press conference, though will be unlikely to attract Yes Men-like levels of media attention - the other recent intervention to expose HUD's malfeasances in New Orleans, specifically the one of barring displaced residents from returning to structurally intact but economically unsound public housing where they lived in those misty pre-Katerina days when such people were still suffered to live. Miami Workers Center Friday, Aug. 31, 2007 at 7:51 PM joseph@theworkerscenter.org http://miami.indymedia.org/news/2007/08/9131.php

Due to some back room bungling at Mute, this article failed to make it online before the Mental Health Bill received royal assent last Thursday to become law. Here mental health activist and editor of Mad Pride: A Celebration of Mad Culture traces the history of this deeply unpopular bill, from the early '90s to the present day. As of 19 July 2007, psychiatric service users can expect to be forcibly medicated even when not institutionalised and importantly when deemed 'untreatable'. The expanded number of health professionals given the powers to section patients will undoubtedly also result in more people being incacerated - predictably amongst the most vulnerable and discriminated against groups

I'm posting this as the second [see http://www.metamute.org/en/Students-protest-and-occupy] of a series of posts related to student responses to the neoliberalisation of the university system (in Europe).

Going back to the discussions raise in Mute Issue 29 [http://www.metamute.org/en/node/414] around the neoliberalisation (read privatization) of the university in the UK, the potential for radical recomposition around the university and the politics of knowledge has been haunting European educational institutions for some years.