What is radical research? Does it emanate from grass roots social movements, the universities, both, or neither? Melancholic Troglodytes review AK Press’s recent collection of ‘militant research’ with an illustrated tour following the book's line of enquiry from the ‘ivory tower to the barricades’

Professor,
take off your bicycle glasses!
I myself will expound
those times
and myself.

– Vladimir Mayakovsky

This collection of essays by self-described activists, academics, artists, anarchists, autonomist Marxists and situationists is an attempt to theorise the ‘social movement’. The topics under investigation cover a broad range from struggles within universities and factories to guerrilla gardening and anti-racist pedagogy. What unites them is the adoption of qualitative research methods influenced by postmodern currents within the social sciences.

If government and corporate media are increasingly ‘tactical’ and ‘devolved’,
do tactical media projects mirror strategic capitalist objectives or create real opportunities for oppositional expression? Brazil’s ‘third way’ government has made high speed internet access on open source platforms available to its people through Telecentros across the country. David Garcia reports on a non-governmental project which tried to help the urban poor use these new resources to their own ends

This summer’s Tech_2 in Lancaster included a Small Sustainable Energy Systems Workshop, led by Hugh Pigott. Techies, artists, activists and critical energy consumers spent three days of intensive study, learning to design, build and use wind, hydro, and photovoltaic systems to power anything from singing bus shelters to wireless network nodes. Saul Albert reports

> Sunset at Morcambe.

> Tech_2 participants hard at study. The contents of the photocopies can be found on Hugh Piggott’s website [http://homepages.enterprise.net/hugh0piggott/]