Tonight’s the night, folks! Join the City as Commons group and Beyond Repair for the opening of What Can a City Be? A Municipalist Gathering. We will begin two days of conversations and workshops tonight at the Carlson School at UMN (info below) with a panel discussion considering “from below organizing” from international, national, and indigenous perspectives with our guests Carol Maziviero (São Paulo, Brazil), Daniele Tognozzi (Berlin, Germany), & William “Naawacekgize” Quackenbush (Ho-Chunk Nation / Wisconsin).

The conversations that we, as the City as Commons group, have been hosting over the last year have been invigorating. Opening up multiple avenues of thought regarding how we come together, building power across difference, and what it means to be “neighborly” in our present, deeply contentious moment. I’m extremely excited to bring more people into this conversation to see where it grows.

I hope to see you this evening, and if you can’t make it, please take a look at the schedule in full to see what other events you might attend.

(https://www.facebook.com/events/2050318378519995/)

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THURSDAY, MARCH 22

Panel Description

7-9pm
@ Carlson School 1-123
University of Minnesota (West Bank)

“Cities as Commons? Exploring Municipalist Movements in International and Rural Contexts”

Talks and panel discussion with Carol, Daniele, and Bill that will invite comparisons between international and rural perspectives on municipalism, including topics such as direct democracy, social power and reproduction, organizing bottom up movements, rural-urban divides, and the rise of democratic alternatives to the centralized state.

Carol Maziviero (São Paulo, Brazil) – Researcher on insurgent urbanism, and urbanism in the digital age from the Architecture School of the São Judas Tadeu University in São Paulo,

Daniele Tognozzi (Berlin, Germany) – Artist, activist and urban studies researcher from Spatial Strategies at KHB Weißensee (http://raumstrategien.com/) and Tesserae Urban Social Research (http://www.tesserae.eu/).

William “Naawacekgize” Quackenbush (Ho-Chunk Nation / Wisconsin) – Indigenous activist and scholar, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation (http://ho-chunk.com).

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Hey Folks… MPLS based writer, Safy Farah and collaborators are in the process of launching a new publication project, 1991, a zine about the past and present written and produced from the perspective of young Somali-Americans artists and authors. It looks like a fantastic project and deserves all the support it can muster to get off the ground. If you have the ability, here’s an opportunity to help with a current fundraiser for the publication.

Screen shot 2017-07-26 at 2.00.01 PM

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Many of us here in MPLS are a little shaken, but not at all surprised, after the verdict – not guilty on all counts – for Jeronimo Yanez, the St. Anthony, MN cop who murdered Philando Castile. How to move forward, how to act, how to relate and continue to coexist with one another here in a state that speaks so highly of itself, yet knows full well that it must come to terms with both its past and present and future wrong-doings. The first step, as always, is to begin to unpack the nature of it all: how we see it, how we feel it, how our attitudes become formed into our institutions.

Earlier today, frequent squatter at the shop (and dear friend and conversation partner), Marlon James wrote a piece about his experiences being the “big, black guy” here in Minneapolis.  Please take a moment to read it in full, and consider how, while this post-verdict moment may feel singular, that moment accumulated becomes the totality of public life for black American men and women.

You can change a system, an institution, a standard of measure, but until you work to change yourself, this shit’s gonna keep going down, and the experiences and daily dread Marlon describes will never go away. Our institutions our us, they do not change on their own.

“Smaller, smaller, and smaller” by Marlon James

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

“This is not to say that I deny membership in certain groups or communities. Not at all. But the ‘We’re here, too!’ agenda says nearly nothing to me about the real problems and conflicts in the world. The way those then-new orgs (especially in liberal Minnesota) attracted corporate ‘good works’-type funding–and pretty quickly professionalized their staffs–for me was a red flag. It was a good moment for Asian Americans looking for professional opportunities in the arts, but not for Asian American cultural workers whose political agendas overflowed the confines of identity assertion.” an excerpt from Anthony Romero and Dan S. Wang’s forthcoming conversation in print, The Social Practice That is Race

 

· Resident Weirdo· ∞