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Comment by Fabrizio Loce Mandes on January 30, 2012 at 12:36am

Fourth Edition of "Contro-Sguardi: International Anthropological Film Festival "

Theme of the year 2012: "For a culture of Work"

Perugia (Italy)

CALL FOR VIDEO, PHOTOS, SOUNDS AND PERFORMANCE

(Deadline: 20 February 2012)

 

The Ass. “Contro-Sguardi”, in collaboration with the Anthropological Section of the Department Man and Environment (Uomo e Territorio) of the University of Perugia (Italy), the city council of Perugia, Informagiovani and the cultural association Macadam, promotes the fourth edition of “Contro-Sguardi: International Anthropological Film Festival”. Theme of the year 2012: “For a culture of work”.

With this call we would like to solicitate the submission of documentary films, fictions, ethnographic, photographic exhibitions, and proposals for theatrical and musical performances related to the topic in question.

Since 2008 the festival, founded to bring together works of anthropological cinema, is open to diverse forms of visual representations. Since last year the festival became biennial, and each edition will concentrate on a specific thematic topic related to socio-cultural dynamics and contemporary societies. Contro-Sguardi 2012 proposes several kinds of differently structured workshops and debate sessions on a broad range of topics related to the “culture of work”. The aim of this theme is to reflect on the crisis of current economic and social models which progressively shrink the spaces of work, especially of young people, with many repercussions for personal and social life. Specifically, with “Culture of Work” we mean the multiplicity of social contexts, anthropological, economic, political and emotional that define work as a practice, knowledge, and existential status of the human being through which it is realized as well for self-determination.

In the awareness of social research, which increasingly requires a dialogical and experimental comparison of new techniques and technologies with their visual productions, “the Festival” opens a Call for video aimed at filmmakers, students, researchers and teachers.

The video participants at the event will be divided into two categories 1) “Competition” divided into “Documentary” and “Fiction”; 2) “Festival”, which will make the text of the regulation Contro-Sguardi festival 2012.

Partecipants at the "Competition" section are eligible for a award and a short list of selected films will be screen at “Festival do Filme Etnografico do Recife 2012” to be held in Recife in Brazil and Contro-Sguardi is twinned.

Call for photo, sounds and performance

In addition to the videos, we solicit proposals for photo exhibitions, sounds and performance. Ethnographic photos and exhibitions, in relation to different themes, will be exhibited in personal or group exhibition, during the festival in appropriate spaces. The term “sounds” and “performance” refers to audio recordings of various kinds, organic to ethnographic research, and musical and theatrical proposals which are in a critical perspective and reflective the “culture of work”.

Info: www.controsguardi.com ;

controsguardi@gmail.com

controsguardi.blogspot.com ;

Call For Entry Contro-Sguardi festival 2012

Entry Form Contro-Sguardi Festival 2012

Regulation Contro-Sguardi festival 2012

Comment by Toby Austin Locke on December 9, 2010 at 7:57pm

Looks like the post-modernists were right!

“The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, Just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation”
Deleuze 1992

Comment by Eliza Jane Darling on December 6, 2010 at 7:49pm

The following email, threatening to fine the Student Union £15,000 in the event of another student occupation at Goldsmiths, was just sent by Hugh Jones on behalf of SMT:

Dear Bindz [Patel],

I’m emailing to follow up our discussion a couple of weeks ago.

As you know, the Deptford Town Hall occupation in early November has and will lead to significant costs for the College:

- Temporary and permanent repair to the broken window on the Town Hall roof
- Cleaning and Security Costs
- Legal costs incurred in preparing to seek a court order

I’m preparing a detailed schedule of these, but I expect the total to be around £15,000. I’ll forward the schedule to you (with copies of invoices, quotations etc) once I have this finalised.

These costs have to be met by the College, and as you know, SMT’s view is that the costs should be deducted from the Students’ Union budget. It would be helpful to know which budget headings you would prefer to be reduced.

I know from our discussions that this will cause difficulties within the Students’ Union, and SMT is not insensitive to this. In the spirit of good collaborative working SMT has agreed that we will not in fact seek to recover the costs from the Students’ Union budget, on the condition that nothing similar to the occupation occurs.

If there is further occupation or disruption we intend to recover the full costs of dealing with it from the Students’ Union. And, of course, we will additionally seek to recover the costs of the November occupation.

I hope you will see this as a good compromise. We cannot indefinitely bear the costs of student occupation and disruption within the College, and we have on obligation to make sure that the College can function effectively. Equally, we know that you and your colleagues in the Students’ Union are seeking to work constructively with us for the rest of the year, to ensure that the student voice is heard and that student interests remain a priority for the College….

Best wishes
Hugh

Hugh Jones
Registrar and Secretary

Comment by Eliza Jane Darling on December 5, 2010 at 12:22am

Toby: I definitely don't think we should stop studying or reading or exploring during a walkout; like you I think that would signify exactly the opposite of what we're trying to accomplish. Some groups have applied the idea of taking higher education to (quasi) public spaces - for example, the University for Strategic Optimism has been doing lectures on the financial crisis and the HE cuts in places like banks and shops as a form of direct action, which I think is a creative way of using walk-out time to bring what we do best (i.e. critical analysis) to a broader forum.

Steve: I know what you meant, but I don't understand why you feel you have to be so nasty about it. I wrote the below hurriedly as am traveling and you're right, the privatisation did not originate there - that was sloppy. Furthermore if the phrase I used is associated with a homophobic epithet I didn't know that, and I retract it. However if we're talking about oddities, what about your language? This certainly isn't the first thing I've written about the cuts, though this is the first thing you've chosen to respond to despite my earlier invitations for comment/critique/correction, including on a nine-page document I put together a month ago in a specific attempt to try to historicise and contextualise the Browne Review + government response so that we had some background info to work with gathered into one FAQ which I hoped would evolve with comment. You chose to ignore that, and instead attack me publicly here based on a snippet written on a digital wall. I don't know where it's coming from and I don't appreciate it. I'm more than happy to engage in debate and correct my mistakes but what's with the bullying attitude?

Comment by Stephen Nugent on December 4, 2010 at 9:54pm

Odd language and sweeping generalizations are hardly as obvious as you claim.

'Corrections' refers to an analysis that includes a starting point indicating Labour origins of privatization in the late 1990s + the placing of higher education cuts at the centre of a target of cuts that is much broader than those specifically affecting the HE sector.

Comment by Eliza Jane Darling on December 4, 2010 at 9:33pm

No, of course that wasn't the implication. The implication is very obviously the spectrum from we don't like the cuts but there's nothing we can do about them so the plan is to roll with the punches (a la the warden's open meeting in the wake of the Browne Review) to the retrenchment of services is a good thing so let's get started on it (a la SMT's policy toward the nursery, which began long before the Browne Review even appeared).

And excuse me? While I'm "making corrections?"

Comment by Toby Austin Locke on December 4, 2010 at 9:33pm

I would certainly be in support of a general strike or a strike backed by unions as the union backing in itself may potentially force more dialogue with government.

I feel what we are defending is the ability to engage in 'education for educations sake' rather than for economic utility. As such I will not stop studying during any form of strike. I will not stop reading the books I enjoy or exploring the various academic disciplines which interest me. I am sure that no one else will stop doing this either.

Why then, should the practice of learning falter in the face of political attack. I don't think it can, will or should. It may make a much stronger message to perhaps engage in education 'outside' of the university system; take lectures in Trafalgar square, engage in mass presentation outside town halls across the country, set up debate forums in public places. How can the police kettle this? How can the media write it off as 'violent protest' and 'juvenile misbehaviour'? It also symbolises that education is for all; it is public. This kind of act also shows in the most obvious symbolic manner that education is not and economic affair.

Maybe I am just being naïve, but I just feel that much of the current action plays into the hands of the government too much. They are able to write these protests off as 'radical students' and suggest the participants had 'misunderstood' the legislation.

Comment by Stephen Nugent on December 4, 2010 at 9:03pm

The shift of burden from public purse to private began long before 'Labour in the late 1990s'. And check out what happened to the UGC while making those corrections.

An SMT gamut running from 'limp-wristed to the outright reactionary'? Did I hear right? You mean like like homos and John Birchers? Names please.

Comment by Eliza Jane Darling on December 4, 2010 at 1:55am

Please distribute this link to advertise our teach-in (Unkettling Education) on Monday 6 December.

Comment by Eliza Jane Darling on December 3, 2010 at 3:05pm

There is no empirical evidence to suggest that the government's aim is to "help poorer students." All the data in our possession suggest that the government's aim is to complete the privatisation of higher education initiated under Labour in the late 1990s by shifting the cost of teaching from the public purse onto the backs of students and their families. The ultimate effect of this will be to make disciplines like anthropology - if they survive, which is not at all guaranteed - even more elite (and whiter) than they already are. Education is always going to be "politicised" (how could it not?), but this is a very particular politicisation agenda informed by a set of neoliberal ideologies which clearly reveal capitalism's suicidal tendencies. This is a purely political assault, which is why the maths of it make no sense even on the government's own terms.

The question of what to do about this is a legitimate one, and I believe there is going to be a debate at Monday's teach-in on the efficacy of university walk-outs. As for "dialogue," no dialogue seems possible with a government which looks you in the eye, makes a pledge and then breaks it, which is simply a raw and unabashed bid for power which makes an utter mockery of democracy. Nonetheless Nick Clegg was invited to our teach-in, and has declined even to answer us. You'll get more dialogue out of his tie.

Given what we're facing, I see no choice but direct action. Whether walking out of lectures is an efficacious form of direct action is another question altogether. It seems to imply that leverage can be applied through faculty and administration, and that is the sticking point. Goldsmiths SMT (and some of its faculty, including some in our own department) have run the gamut from the limp-wristed to the outright reactionary. If the intended outcome of the walkouts is to pressure them to put pressure on the government, then it seems to me that sporadic and unsustained walkouts are unlikely to accomplish this. More likely, SMT and pro-government/apathetic faculty will shrug it off and continue on doggedly, as long as colleges and universities are running more-or-less as usual.

In my opinion, a sustained shutdown in the form of an outright strike backed by all three unions is what this ultimately must come to.Given the encouraging levels of organising going on in other sectors, our greatest hope is that this will lead to a general strike.

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