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- Convenors:
-
Dimitris Dalakoglou
(Vrije University Amsterdam)
Roger Sansi Roca (Universitat de Barcelona)
Christos Giovanopoulos (VU Amsterdam)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Music Building (MUS), Harty Room
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The first decades of our century have been ridden with interconnected events of crises and ongoing transformation. Infrastructure and solidarity lie at the heart of such processes of crisis and change; either as enabling actors for improved social life or as fields permeated by crisis.
Long Abstract:
In the light of the 4th industrial revolution the 'infrastructural turn' in anthropology has effectively un-black-boxed the uneven relations of power embedded in the techno-material domains of infrastructure. At the same time, in the context of crisis and the retreat of the welfare state, examples of grassroots solidarity, mutual-aid and the commons proliferated in diverse political contexts, socio-technical settings -analogue, digital and phygital- and geographies - local, global and cosmolocal, urban or not- capturing the attention of social scientists. In this course the notion of infrastructure has been established as an analytical category to understand enabling or hindering habitats of sociality and belonging, while solidarity and the commons have been examined as prefigurative examples of hope and/in post-capital modes of social organization. In addition, inroads have been made in the ways techno-material arrangements condition human and social agency, in synch with the permeation of ubiquitous technologies and know-how in everyday life and environs.
Yet, the interaction between infrastructure, solidarity and the commons has remained mostly in the margins of those debates. While the qualities of social movements of solidarity and the commons as infrastructure that induces social change have been examined, the ways in which the qualities of solidarity and the commons effect or are wired into the techno-material domain of infrastructure has escaped attention. Alike, while the synergetic and cross-scale potential embedded in digital technologies has been approached (e.g. digital commons, platform cooperativism), the ways in which emerging, or existing, infrastructure facilitates, or hinders, solidarity and commoning remains under-studied.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper approaches the self-organised network of solidarity schools in Greece as infrastructure of both solidarity and education. It examines how urban communities assert their right to education by infrastructuring participatory modes of education, decision making and, effectively, commoning.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper we examine the infrastructural qualities of self-organised educational solidarity entities that appeared in Greece in the last ten years. We do so in a twofold way. First we examine them as infrastructure of solidarity. As enablers of social participation, mutualism and commoning which while aim to meet immediate educational needs they also generate (and infrastructure) new affects, settings and processes of belonging and grassroots democracy. Secondly, by delving more on their transfigurative dimension, we approach the solidarity schools as emerging modes of educational infrastructure. We examine how the provision of education in a self-organised solidarity context affects the embedded sociality, structures, means, spaces, pedagogy and concept of education per se.
By focusing on a particular solidarity school and on the operation of the nation-wide Solidarity Schools’ Network, we approach them as infrastructural assemblages that function in multiple scales and societal fields, which:
a. reveal the socio-material fabric of the educational process – in all its complexity- and
b. open up the notion of education (and pedagogy) beyond the classroom and a teacher – student relationship; to include the agencies (needs, resources, knowledge, sociality, values and vision) of the wider community around them.
In this regard, we argue, the solidarity schools engage effectively in collective practices of infrastructuring (the means and processes of) a different mode of education. In other words, they emerge as a prototype by which urban communities assert their right to infrastructure, while they generate participatory forms of educational infrastructure and processes of commoning.
Paper short abstract:
This communication presents the relationship between two key concepts to understand city dynamics: infrastructure and citizenship. The communication addresses the technical nature of the citizenships and the importance of studying its relation with the "material" world of infrastructures.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation will discuss the policies of the Commons, a new political party that has come to lead the city of Barcelona in the last decade, in particular in relation to issues of urban mobility. The commons proposed solidarity government practices in response to neoliberalism. However, the political positions of the Commons did not necessarily represent a change in the forms of production, distribution, and planning. Some perspectives even point out that the rise of the Commons only represented a moral cleansing of the old forms of government and that it is from these moral discourses, that of good socially aware citizenship, that new technologies of government and processes of subjectivation have been established. This communication seeks to put these new technologies of government and the technical construction of citizenship into perspective. From the study of the implementation, planning and development of two urban mobility infrastructures, the Rec Comtal project, and the superblocks (Superilles in Catalan). We will suggest that the alteration in the forms of circulation, in its rhythms and speeds, requires a special form of habitability and, in turn, this requires the construction of a series of publics and users. The communication addresses the notion of publics to ask, what are the publics that inhabit the public spaces implemented by the Commons? And who are the good public that, following the spirit of the Commons, have the right to participate in the city dynamics and claim their right to it?
Paper short abstract:
This paper will present three empirical cases from Greece during the pandemic that show how the social media and digital infrastructures act as a "social panopticon", disclosing and disseminating wrongdoings of employers and the state, linking thus society to particular professional groups
Paper long abstract:
Amidst the general numbness of one the hardest covid-related lockdowns globally, Greece during the pandemic has seen some of the most massive and radical trade-union struggles and societal protests in the last decade. From the protests against police brutality to the struggle for labor rights of professional groups such as food platform riders and dockworkers, a steady pattern that link recent uprisings in Greece is the use of digital infrastructures and social media to communicate and disseminate at a break-neck speed wrong-doings on behalf of the state and the employers. The rise of this “social panopticon” as I call the impossibility of containing an illegality or the arbitrary exercise of power from employers in the narrow social space of the immediate affected social groups, invites us to rethink the relations between the social body and trade-unions and the possibility of “transfusing” solidarity and “resistance capital” to widely “invisible” workers and professional categories.
Paper short abstract:
Synergy explores an alternative paradigm of cooperative financing where entities with common ethical and societal values network and transform their common clientele into a supporters pool. The funding mechanism is redefined as a shared common, governed by the network of communities.
Paper long abstract:
Cooperative operation is not driven by traditional investment incentives and cannot be understood through the profit maximisation objective. As ownership and operational goals are not connected to stock value, cooperatives are facing limited access to private funding. This is considered to be one of the main growth barriers for this alternative economic model, especially in an environment of economic stagnation.
A cooperative ourselves we worked with other cooperatives in Athens, Greece on developing a socio-technical infrastructure to assist us on facing these pressing issues. Following a co-design process we created Synergy, a Financial DLT Open Source toolkit for networks of communities offering Loyalty, Microcredit and Equity services while materialising a veiled cryptocurrency concept.
Synergy reconfigures and combines existing practices with innovative technologies in order to generate a new paradigm for cooperative financing: entities with common ethical and societal values network and transform their common clientele into a supporters pool. Supporters become involved, enjoy the rewards of their loyalty and fund the development of the community by acquiring tokenized future products. The funding mechanism is redefined as a shared common, governed by the network of communities.
Such a socio-technical intervention can be perceived as an alternative paradigm for financial operations in a post-capitalist world where investment is not regarded as means for wealth accumulation but as an act of mutual aid aiming for common prosperity. Valuable insights have been produced from the co-design, the development and the ongoing implementation process of the toolkit regarding technical, economic, socio-cultural and legal aspects.