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Università & Militarizzazione in Palermo and in Messina

This weekend, we continue to talk about the relationship between #university and #militarisation, about #war, the intermingling of research and the military sector, and the ethics of university practice. This time in #Sicily!

– #Messina, Friday 1/12/23, 6:30 pm at the University of Messina with the excellent Antonio Mazzeo of the Observatory against the militarisation of schools

– #Palermo, Saturday 2/12/23, 5:30 pm at the Casa della Cooperazione with the fantastic Gabriella Palermo and Silvia di Meo (Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/6867626453297921)

Both events will be in Italian.

Book: https://www.ibs.it/universita-militarizzazione-duplice-uso-della-libro-michele-lancione/e/9791280495372

 

Palermo
Messina
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Beautiful presentations and debates in Turin on the Academy and the defense sector

What a beautiful evening yesterday in Turin! Among the hundreds of books in the wonderful Libreria Comunardi , we took the time to discuss my short essay on #university and #militarisation

With Francesca Governa, Luca Rondi of Altreconomia and Ada of Cambiare Rotta Torino and a lot of people, from many different realities, who are fed up with the spread of the military in our individual and collective lives.

The next day, I was also invited into an autonomous student assembly at Palazzina Einaudi, where, in a space occupied by students, we discussed the same issues. Moving forward!

Book: https://www.amazon.it/Universit%C3%A0-militarizzazione-duplice-libert%C3%A0-ricerca/dp/B0C44VM66Y

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For a Liberatory Politics of Home | Out now with Duke University Press

After many years of work, For a Liberatory Politics of Home is now officially out at Duke University Press.

Can we imagine a ‘home’ that does not require the constitution & colonization of an alterity to stand?

In violent times, a text to question violent binaries, looking for a language of radical affirmations.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/for-a-liberatory-politics-of-home

Thanks to Ananya and Raquel for the generous endorsements.

“Michele Lancione has given us a tremendous gift with this pathbreaking and brilliant book. His arguments will be of immense meaning for social movements concerned with housing justice, many of which are grappling with regimes of property and the affective politics of home. The study of housing and homelessness will not be the same.” — Ananya Roy, author of Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development

“By mobilizing a new methodological, conceptual, and political grammar in which home and homelessness are not opposite but coherent expressions of a wider function of patriarchal and racialized processes of expulsions and extractions, this book offers a whole new perspective to imagine housing futures toward housing justice in which ‘housing precarity’ is not only a site for deprivation and relegation or a ‘problem to be fixed’ but can also perform a new politics of inhabitation.” — Raquel Rolnik, author of Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance

And thanks, among many, to Courtney Berger at Duke for helping, Katherine Brickell for the close reading, Kiera Chapman for the boost, the Urban Institute and the Beyond Inhabitation Lab for nurturing, ERC Research for supporting, Colin McFarlane for cheering and supporting, AbdouMaliq Simone & Eleonora Leo Mignoli for inhabiting it with me.

Avanti!

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Review of Università e Militarizzazione on il Manifesto

IT

Il Manifesto ha pubblicato una bella recensione del mio libro Università e Militarizzazione sul numero di oggi, 11 novembre. Gennaro Avallone, che ringrazio di cuore per averla scritta, dice:

È evidente l’utilità di questo libro, che riavvia, dopo troppo tempo, l’attenzione sul rapporto tra università e mondo militare, sollecitando un lavoro di inchiesta collettiva, con l’obiettivo di capire quanto l’industria militare sia attiva negli atenei e ne stia orientando ricerca e logiche di pensiero.

La recensione si può leggere, in Italiano, a questo link:

https://ilmanifesto.it/ce-chi-vuole-mettere-la-divisa-agli-atenei/r/eSsvFjR3Kcyk1a2Xu9Htk

 

ENG

Il Manifesto published a nice review of my book University and Militarisation in today’s issue, 11 November. Gennaro Avallone, whom I thank sincerely for writing it, says:

‘The usefulness of this book is evident, as it restarts, after too long, the attention on the relationship between the university and the military world, soliciting a collective enquiry work, with the aim of understanding how much the military industry is active in the universities and is orienting their research and thinking logics.

The review can be read, in Italian, at this link:

https://ilmanifesto.it/ce-chi-vuole-mettere-la-divisa-agli-atenei/r/eSsvFjR3Kcyk1a2Xu9Htk

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Keynote at ECRs Urban Studies Lisbon on the violence of the colonies of home

The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to housing is right: settler #housing practice in #Palestine amounts to #domicide.

Yet, the destruction of the Palestinian homely by the hand of Israel is not just an aberration, but it is a foundation. Violence is not the ‘other’ of ‘home’, but it becomes the prime vehicle through which the ‘other’ necessary for the constitution of the colonisers’ home is created, in total destruction. Violence here, as Kotef would have it, becomes the object of the homely: the intimate function grounding the colonial home.

Today, I will open ECRs #urbanstudies #Lisbon on the impossible possibility of such homes, and many others.

Thanks Simone Tulumello and colleagues, for having me – https://tinyurl.com/mr3vu94w

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Two public events in Bologna today 3 Nov: on housing (with PLAT & Lab) and on universities and the military

Today in Bologna, two moments for collective discussion on #housing, #domicile, #housingjustice & #war, #militarisation, #university.

– 2:30 pm, “Housing: a crossroads of struggles” an event co-organized by PLAT – Platform for Social Intervention and Beyond Inhabitation Lab (www.beyondinhabitation.org): https://www.facebook.com/events/1376025483313577/

– 7:00 pm, discussion based on my text #University and #Militarisation published by Eris Edizioni, at Libreria modo infoshop: https://www.facebook.com/events/2655636501260834

All welcome!

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Beyond Inhabitation @ICCG 2023 in Mexico City

The week of 23-28 October Beyond Inhabitation Lab’s members moved to Mexico City to attend the 9th International Congress of Critical Geography.

Lab members, Michele Lancione, Chiara Cacciotti, Daniela Morpurgo and Rodrigo Castriota, organized the panel Inhabiting Radical Housing: on the politics of inhabitation and intersectional struggles asking for contributions questioning the intersection between  ‘housing’ and ‘inhabitation’ to discuss the propositional politics of struggles tackling housing as a gateway for wider forms of liberation, power-geometries and longitudinal forms of dispossession. The two sessions proved extremely rich in content and debate, with scholars from a number of geographies offering nuanced analysis and theorisations of housing and its intersecting forms of injustice (and related struggles).

Other Lab members, Mara Ferreri and Ana Vilenica together with other members of Radical Housing Journal, organized the panel Lexicons of Housing Struggles challenging and questioning the dominance of English language in “internationally valued” academic practice around housing, and fomenting processes of linguistic decolonization, internationalism and counter-generalization.

Along with the organisation of the panels, each one presented individual papers in different panels. Michele Lancione presented a paper on the colonies of ‘home’. Chiara Cacciotti presented on the etymological politics of the lexicon of evictions. Daniela Morpurgo on the challenge of qualitative ethnographic research. While Chiara Iacovone and the former member Devra Waldman presented their work in the Lab’s panel respectively on the peripheral housing financialization in Eastern Europe and on housing-driven extended urbanization in Noida, India. Ana Vilenica presented as Radical Housing Journal collective a choral restitution of what the journal had achieved within emerging solution of radical resistance in the narrative of housing crisis, while Francesca Guarino presented her doctoral work on migrant people practices of repression and hospitality in the context of Palermo, Italy.

The conference was extremely productive and well organised: congratulations to the ICCG team for having provided an excellent moment of scholarly and activist encounter for us all!

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Free books from Verso to understand Israel’s military industrial complex and current violence in Gaza

The shameless, violent continuation of the Israeli colonial project in Palestine leads to feelings of anxiety, powerlessness, and fear punctuated by anger and a deep sense of historical injustice.

Many are standing against the current destruction of Gaza, by occupying public spaces and demostranting dissent through direct actions (both practices are increasingly difficult in the current Western doxa). At this juncture, I believe practicing resistance means also studying. Studying to understand why, as many have recalled, the history of this conflict did not start on October the 7th. Studying to have the tools to grasp how the Israeli settler colonial project is the root of all evils in this matter. Studying as a practice of radical care toward ourselves and our Palestinian brothers and sisters, but also toward the people dissenting from within Israel.

To this end, Verso Books has put together an excellent list of free resources, which I believe should be circulated wide and large.

“These resources challenge much of the zionist ideology concerning the origins and identity of the contemporary state of Israel, as well as offering a clear history of the occupation, Israel’s military industrial complex, and this latest explosion of violence in Gaza.”

You can find the whole package here: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/solidarity-with-palestine-free-resources-and-further-reading?_kx=wZvGXonOK0nuhkyiKHFjAvw7nEatlJ9K-eWPvSJEoIgIY4aPS3oz8fOZfrNDVb-E.SNgHad

In solidarity.

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PLAT + Beyond Inhabitation Lab together for a public event on radical housing in Bologna (3 Nov 2023)

“La casa: un incrocio di lotte” is a join initiative of PLAT (an autonomous Social Intervention Platform based in Bologna, Italy) and the Beyond Inhabitation Lab. With it, we want to discuss the political nature of the ‘house’ in its being a market good, with an exchange value, and in its being a fundamental component of human habitation, with its use value.

We are particularly interested in discussing how housing is, inevitably, a relational question, that is, a question of struggles that have to do with issues that run through, but are not reduced to, sheltering. How can we think about housing justice when it is inextricably linked to issues of gender, racialising processes, ecological and economic extractions? What struggle is needed to imagine a new emancipatory way of inhabiting the world, putting the home at the centre?

We propose here a reflection that interweaves the world of academia with that of social struggles, with a set of interventions that start from the question of housing on a global scale to focus on Italian struggles.

The meeting will take place from 2pm to 6pm on 3rd November, 2023, at PLAT in Bologna. All the logistics detail can be found on Facebook.

Program – In Italian

Prima sessione (14:30-16)
– Introduzione – PLAT
– La questione della casa nel mondo urbano globale – Michele Lancione (Beyond Inhabitation Lab)
– Questione abitativa e mobilitazioni sociali a Lisbona – Marco Allegra (ICS Lisbona – Sirigaita/Habita)
– Mercati e vissuti: la questione casa in Italia – Sarah Gainsforth (giornalista)

Seconda sessione (16:30-18)
– Introduzione – PLAT
– Dal conflitto urbano al cantiere sociale: percorsi di autorecupero, l’esperienza di Firenze – Dariuche – Dowlatchahi (architetto)
– Occupazioni e lotta abitativa a Roma – Margherita Grazioli (Gran Sasso Science Institute)
– Queering your home! Lavoro di cura e riproduzione sociale nelle s/famiglie queer – Lab. Smaschieramenti Bologna

Conclusioni
Apre la discussione: Maurizio Bergamaschi (UNIBO)