Entangled legacies launch, March 30 in London
I’ll be in London on March 30 for the launch of the collection Entangled Legacies: Race, Finance and Inequality, which I edited with Paul Gilbert, Clea Bourne and Johnna Montgomerie for Manchester University Press. The book includes 22 phenomenal chapters linking financialization to the histories and legacies of empire, colonialism and racialization. The launch will take place at 17h at UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies in Bloomsbury and will include comments from the editors and contributors. It is open to the public and I’d love to see you there. More information can be found here.
For the refusal of unpayable debts roundtable
A little over a year ago, I was fortunate to share the stage at the transmediale festival with the artists Dele Adeyemo, Ahmed Isamaldin, Bahar Noorizadeh and Gary Zhexi Zhang to discuss the topic “IOU: Capital, debts, and promise.” Now, a version of that roundtable is slated for publication in the Journal of Cultural Economy later this year, as part of a special issue I am editing with Clea Bourne, Johnna Montgomerie and Paul Gilbert on the theme “Finance Capital and the Ghosts of Empire.” You can read a preliminary version of “For the refusal of unpayable debts: An artists’ roundtable” here.
Anxiety and self-sabotage
Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and I have penned an essay for a forthcoming collection from Manchester University Press titled Clickbait Capitalism: Economies of Desire in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Amin Samman and Earl Gammon. Our contribution, “Anxiety and self-sabotage in the neoliberal university,”
…begin[s] by outlining the way financialisation has raised a generation, now making their way through university, who are profoundly, indeed constitutively, anxious. We then turn to the way capitalism has historically both feared and sought to incorporate sabotage, including the way that finance itself represents a form of capitalist sabotage. Finally, we reframe students as workers within an apparatus of financialised cognitive capitalism and suggest that, from one angle, anxiety represents a particular form of sabotage.
You can read a preliminary version of the chapter here.
Clue-Anon, gaming conspiracy, and the anti-authoritarian imagination
Later this year, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation will publish the Global Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Counterstrategies. There, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, A. T. Kingsmith and I have a short chapter sharing a bit of our thinking on conspiracy and games, the subject of our ongoing Conspiracy Games and Countergames project, which you might know also from the podcast and also other writing we’ve published.
This time, we present 11 theses that have guided our thinking, as well as a preview of Clue-Anon, an easy-to-learn social deduction and bluffing game for 3-4 players that I developed with help from Aris and Adam over the past two years. Stay tuned for more information and reflections about the game, as well as for a Creative Commons-licensed, print-at-home “beta” version, to be released later in 2023.
More games…
I make board and card games for the radical imagination. Clue-Anon, detailed above, is the most advanced design, but expect more news about these games later this year, including:
Billionaires & Guillotines (a game for 3-4 players about…)
Commoners & Witches (a one-player game about resisting the enclosures, inspired by Caliban and the Witch)
Rebel City (a two-player game where the cops give chase and the people rise up, inspired by Confessions of the Fox)
We Dreamed a Dream (a meditative party game for many players that aims to rekindle the ancient art of dream-guessing)
Karl… (a party game about Marx’s struggles to find time to write Kapital I)
Panopticon (a classroom/workshop game about Bentham’s famous folly and Foucault’s famous theory)
Most importantly, these games are actually fun.
Along with a wonderful team at RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, we are in the process of slowly launching a workshop for radical analogue/tabletop games that will produce print-at-home prototypes of these and other games under Creative Commons licenses. We’d also love to partner with a game company or publishing company to help make snazzier versions of these games that might be ordered online. But that’s for the future.
Meanwhile…
If you’d like to learn more about these games, email me.
If you’d like to join the playtesting circle, please also email me. We play in person in Berlin, but i’d gladly send you a PDF you can print at home in return for your feedback!
I also offer in-person workshops for small groups of non-gamers (even game-haters!) on how to use board game design to think through key questions for social movements and those dedicated to a critical understanding of society. Please invite me (it’s part of my job, so it’ll be cheap or free)!
If you know a game company or publisher who might want to work with us, let me know.
Indigenous Futurisms
As part of my duties as chair of the Lakehead University English Department’s events committee, I have helped to organize our annual Macleod lecture, this year to be delivered by Chelsea Vowel, "Like a String of Beads/âniskôhôcikan: Indigenous Futurisms," which will take place on March 7 at 14h30 Eastern time on Zoom. More information and free registration links can be found here.