Writing about this experience, the work of Jo Spence is my anchor. Jo Spence was doing social media before the internet existed. A deeply political and analytical kind of social media.
… Confinement Day 5 :: History and PracticeFeels like the emotional aspect of Covid19 and self-isolation is hitting home now. I think I was running on adrenalin for ages, getting everything ready for self-isolation. Now the tiredness and numbness is rising. Writing the first blog on this yesterday was helpful. Thank you. I realised that fear and tension were lurking in my being and I had to breathe them out, channel them, address them, rest… or this wasn’t going to be sustainable.
… Confinement Day 4
I was going to start blogging a research diary anyway but there is a whole extra urgency to that now under Covid19 confinement. I’m working at home with my little one, and my Dad will be joining us once we have all completed quarantine. Working as a single parent (and carer) regularly feels a like mission impossible. Now in self-isolation, the level of difficulty has now zoomed up again onto a radically higher level.
… Confinement Day 3In parallel with the storytelling themes, I’m asking Who are the Storytellers? as a way of proactively problem-solving some intersectional issues in the research project. For example, key literature regarding my fieldwork with Decidim Barcelona has a very limited range of authors in terms of gender. In contrast, during my fieldwork, I could see many women authoring and creating Decidim Barcelona. And of course if we are going to look at gender, we also have to look at the full range of intersectionality (race, class, dis/ability, caring responsibilities, etc.). In order to recognise a more accurate range of authors and creators, I am working with a broader idea of authorship in my research, and developing the profile of the Storytellers alongside the Storytelling themes. And I’m also trying to connect with my own lived experience (especially my caring responsibilities) and articulate how all those intersectionalities come together in the research process.
To be continued…
Boris Johnson’s new cabinet gives us our latest example of left-right political travel. From circles around the Revolutionary Communist Party to the inner circle of the Boris Johnson’s new libertarian Cabinet:
… Left-Right SlipperinessPowerful words from artist @Lowkey0nline
Link for Grenfell Silent Walk:
https://www.facebook.com/GrenfellSilentWalk/
Link for Grenfell Silent Walk Two Years On:
https://www.facebook.com/events/2408072305910220/
Link for Lowkey: https://twitter.com/lowkey0nline?lang=en
I have some relatively advanced work on a “universe” of concepts around Collective Intelligence. Many very different politics surface in a collective intelligence space, from a Brexity “Will of the People” to Zapatista inspired swarming strategies. Mapping out these concepts has many uses, and potentially it help us navigate the kind of “cognitive slippage” between left and right popular approaches. For any map to be accessible and actually usable for a wide range of people, it needs to be attractive, intuitive and easy to use. Data visualisation techniques seem key here, which leads us to Gephi, and also “Arc Diagram” code which I found through the brilliant Dictionary of the Revolution project.
… Learning Gephi from Zero #4: conceptual networks in Gephi and Arc diagramsThe many faces of Gaia, the Brexit Party’s bottom-up policy project and the connections in between. To be continued….
… Left-Right Political Slipperiness in green and Brexit lands
Friction Films 