Four events: Pirate Enlightenment; Indigenous Futurism; Are Universities Doing Enough...
One in Berlin, one in London, two online
Upcoming events
BERLIN: This February, those in Berlin can join us for a reading group focusing on David Graeber’s posthumously published new book Pirate Enlightenment, Or the Real Libertalia. We meet on Fridays, starting on February 10, at 17h30 CET in Friedrichshain (S/U Ostkreuz).
ONLINE: As part of the events committee of Lakehead University’s Department of English, I am part of organizing a webinar on February 10 at 3pm EST on the important topic “Are Canadian Universities Doing Enough to Support Outspoken Racialized Faculty?” The webinar is free, open to the public, and on zoom:
ONLINE: As part of that same committee, I am pleased to be able to announce that the university’s 2023 MacLeod speaker will be Chelsea Vowel, speaking on March 7 on the topic “Like a String of Beads/âniskôhôcikan: Indigenous Futurisms.” This event is also free, online, and open to the public.
LONDON: To celebrate the publication of The Entangled Legacies of Empire: Race, Finance and Inequality, the public is invited to join the co-editors (Paul Gilbert, Clea Bourne, Max Haiven, and Johnna Montgomerie) and several of the authors at University College London’s Institute for Advanced Studies on March 30.
Still looking for Amazon workers who wish to write
Applications are still open until Feb 12 for current and former Amazon workers who would like to join a group to be paid to write speculative fiction about the world after Amazon, part of the Worker as Futurist project, detailed in my previous newsletter.
Games
In the coming months, expect to hear more about beta releases and play-testing opportunities for a few analogue games I’m making, including:
Clue-Anon: A deduction/bluffing game about what makes conspiracy theories so much fun… and so dangerous.
The Bastards: A card game about billionaires and guillotines.
We Dreamed a Dream: A game to encourage the ancient art of dream-guessing.
If you’re in Berlin, you can join my playtesting group by signing up to our Telegram group. We meet about once a month to test new games.
Over the coming years, RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab will be launching a range of activities aimed at promoting analogue games as platforms for the radical imagination. To that end, we also helped to inaugurate SPRAG: The Society for the Promotion of Radical Analogue Games, which hosts an email list and Discord server.
In the future, I’d be very keen to work with activists, researchers and organizations to develop fun games that help explore crucial topics. Please email me if you want to talk about possibilities!
Recently in print
Gilbert, Paul, Clea Bourne, Max Haiven, and Johnna Montgomerie, eds. The Entangled Legacies of Empire: Race, Finance and Inequality. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2023.
Haiven, Max, A.T. Kingsmith, and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. “Interview with Wu Ming 1: QAnon, Collective Creativity, and the (Ab)Uses of Enchantment.” Theory, Culture & Society 39, no. 7–8 (December 1, 2022): 253–68. [open access].
Haiven, Max. 2022. "Financialization and failure." The Routledge International Handbook of Failure: Critical Perspectives from Sociology and other Social Sciences, edited by Adriana Mica, Mikołaj Pawlak, Anna Horolets and Paweł Kubicki, 346-362. London and New York: Routledge.