VAGABONDS call for pitches, entangled legacies launch, more...
Can climate workers unite? Plus, invite me to play games or talk...
VAGABONDS Spring 2023 call for pitches (until June 15)
VAGABONDS is a series of short and provocative pamphlet-like books edited by me and published worldwide by Pluto Press.
Too ill-mannered for polite academic company yet too considered for the online outrage machine, VAGABONDS are in dialogue with the crucial struggles of our age.
We treasure texts that are radical in politics and approach, rigorous in argumentation and execution, and resonant with a diverse readership.
We welcome pitches on a wide diversity of topics that encompass artistic intervention, social movement agitation, and critical research.
Open to both emerging and established writers, we offer close editorial attention, generative and supportive peer review, and a quicker-than-normal publication schedule.
To learn more and to pitch a book, please visit vagabonds.xyz/pitches.
Pitches are due June 15, 2023.
Entangled Legacies online launch
To celebrate the launch of Entangled Legacies of Empire: Race, Finance and Inequality (eds. Paul Gilbert, Clea Bourne, Max Haiven and Johnna Montgomerie) by Manchester University Press, we at RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, along with Finance and Society and Goldsmiths’ Political Economy Research Centre are pleased to present an online (zoom) launch event with the editors and many of the authors.
June 20, Tuesday, 20 June 2023, 17h00 GMT
(09h00 Pacific, 12h00 Eastern, 18h00 Central Europe, 22h30 IST)
For more information and to register, click here.
Can climate workers of the world unite?
The Berliner Gazette invited me to contribute a text for their 2023 publishing and engagement project ALLIED GROUNDS, which challenges us to imagine the new forms of solidarity the climate crisis necessitates. I wrote, a text in dialogue with their very interesting opening provocation and it is now available in both English and German.
A triumphant, heroic narrative dignifies itself and its protagonists… It’s less about concrete hope for this or that future. It’s more about embodied feeling in the present, a sense that you have value, that your life has meaning, that the struggle is worth it not because it will deliver a better world but because it fills you and transforms you. Can ‘we’ climate workers of the world ever generate such an empowering narrative? And can we succeed in its absence?
Financial Sacrifice
Later this year or early next Goldsmiths Press will publish Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary, edited by Frederik Tygstrup, Torsten Andreasen, Emma Sofie Brogaard, Mikkel Krause Frantzen and Nick Huber. My short essay on sacrifice will appear in that collection, and I’m sharing an early version of it here.
Financialization is in some sense a global order of human sacrifice in which we are all both participants and potential victims. Like the sacrificial empires of old, ours justifies its bloodletting in the name of cosmological necessity: the market demands it, and to fail to heed or feed the market would be to invite both personal and collective doom. In other sacrificial empires elites use mystical theology and gory spectacle to consolidate their rule, and claim that their sacrificial acts are in the public interest. Today, the sacrificial blade and altar are dematerialized and diffused.
Board games as social media and the anti-authoritarian imagination
South Atlantic Quarterly is publishing a special issue titled “Beyond the echo chamber – The tactical use of social media in social movements,” edited by Alex Khasnabish and Rhon Teruelle. In it, an article I wrote with A. T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou will appear, titled “Board games as social media: Towards an enchanted inquiry of digital capitalism.” It’s a part of our ongoing Conspiracy Games and Countergames project, which included a really fascinating podcast.
A preliminary version of the article can be found here.
And here you can find an shorter piece, “Clue-Anon, gaming conspiracy, and the anti-authoritarian imagination,” which we prepared for the Global Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Counterstrategies, to be published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation later this year.
It explains the background to the game ClueAnon, which should be available in print-at-home “beta testing” format later this year.
Invite me to talk or play games with you in 2023 & 2024?
I am grateful to Lakehead University for granting me sabbatical leave in the 2023-24 academic year. I will be based in Berlin, but travelling widely in both North America and Europe (and maybe further afield, if invited) in that time. I even have some very limited funds earmarked to help share ongoing and past work and forge new collaborations.
That means I would be very keen to visit campuses, community spaces and art venues to give talks, participate in workshops and otherwise learn about initiatives and struggles.
I’m especially keen to share things I’m working on now, which include:
Developing anti-capitalist board games. I’m working on several right now and would be happy to playtest them with people and communities. I’m also interested in collaborating with movements and researchers to create new games and think through their potential. This work grew out of the Conspiracy Games and Countergames project, which I also love to discuss.
The ongoing worker as futurist project, in which we are supporting rank-and-file Amazon workers to write specualtive fiction about “the world after Amazon.” I’m looking forward to sharing what we’re learning and why we’re doing the project, and also organizing writing workshops for workers.
New research on scams and capitalism, that will eventually be a book.
The Wages for Dreamwork and Strange Bedfellowship projects, in which I’m working with Cassie Thornton and Phanuel Antwi on the radical materialist and anti-colonial potential of collective dreaming practices.
Many other typical themes, including revenge, financialization, social movements, the radical imagination, human sacrifice, palm oil, radical art, etc.
As mentioned, I have some support for this, and so I don’t request speaking fees from cash-strapped institutions and community groups or require luxurious accommodation. I also often travel with Cassie Thornton, who is generally much more interesting than I am. We also work on the University of the Phoenix interventionist/participatory/performance art project together and would be happy to arrange a haunting and/or revenge consultation.
Family
My father, Larry Haiven, has published an excellent analysis of the bonkers political stalemate in Israel and what it means for Palestine and Palestine solidarity activists.
My mother, Judy Haiven, a prominent political blogger in Canada, has published an important piece on the shocking wrongful conviction of Hassan Diab, a Canadian professor now threatened with imprisonment in France for a crime he could not have committed.
My partner, Cassie Thornton, continues to work on The Hologram, a mutual aid platform, and has recently published great writing about the much-abused discourse of care and the condition of cultural and tech workers.