News archive

NEWS Whose future? Al the World’s Futures, the 56th Biennale di VeneziaThis year’s Venice Biennale, which opened to the public on 9 May, had been widely anticipated since its curator, Okwui Enwezor, announced his intention to turn the event into a forum for the study and reconsideration of the three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Such […]

In March the Philosophy Faculty at Cambridge removed a course on Marxism from its syllabus. This was in spite of significant opposition, including two student-led petitions. Along with another course on Power this constituted the entire coverage of non-liberal political philosophy, leaving coverage of questions about human society dominated by the liberal tradition. [1] At […]

NEWS autonomy for a ‘new world’? 4th New World Summit, Royal Flemish Theatre, Brussels, 19–21 September 2014Blooming in the shadow of an austerity-era EU cultural policy dominated by ‘measurable outcomes’ that has tasked the cultural field with a plethora of social work from civic engagement, care work and alleviating unemployment to any number of regeneration-based […]

The impact of the economic crisis on the cultural scene in Italy has laid bare the complex question of arts funding, as insufficient public and private models meet – and at points clash with – a third alternative for cultural management: the ‘commons’ or bene comune (‘common good’). The institutional inspiration for this last option […]

News An experiment in free, co-operative higher educationThe Social Science Centre (SSC) organizes free higher education in Lincoln and is run by its members. The SSC is a co-operative and was formally constituted in May 2011 with help from the local Co-operative Development Agency. There is no fee for learning or teaching, but most members […]

On 11 July, David Willetts, minister for universities and science, confirmed a new ‘operating framework’ for higher education in England. This pulled together the results of various consultations and the work done by the ‘Regulatory Partnership Group’ to set out regulatory arrangements through to 2015.1 A week earlier, Willetts had written to the Higher Education […]

News The right to protestAs Quebec erupts over plans to increase tuition fees by the equivalent of £200, and twelve people (including Professor Joshua Clover) who protested against a campus bank at University of California–Davis begin a trial that could see them imprisoned for eleven years and fined $1 million each, what of the scores […]

News occupations OaklandWe live in a time when tents have become the singular weapon of the people whom power cannot tolerate, and against whom it does not know how to defend itself. The bureaucrats are in shambles; the ‘city’ and its ‘police’ are at each other’s throats; middling reformists have no idea where to position […]

New YorkEvaluation of a movement is never an easy task. Emphatically not so, when it is ongoing and moving in confrontation with power, going through ups and downs, gains and losses. Historically there are many examples in which the loss of one achievement or a digression led to a gain or advancement elsewhere. Development is […]

You might have read this May that there were protests in Spain. This is hardly earth-shattering news. Social unrest in the countries so endearingly named the PIGS has been rife since the European Union (EU) departed from its early policy of public-spending its way out of the crisis, to offer them a grim choice between […]

NEWS Women in philosophy in Britain The good news and the bad T he Society for Women in Philosophy has now been in existence in Britain for over a decade. During this time a great deal has been achieved in terms both of the increased publication of feminist philosophy and the encouragement and support of […]

A popular computing magazine recently counterpoised two potential internet futures. The first suggested that unequal access would polarize society in the next century, as Marx predicted polarization as a result of the capitalist mode of production in the last. The second saw the internet as little more than the CB radio of the late twentieth […]

NEWS Population: myth and reality The Cairo International Conference on Population and Development The Cairo International Conference on Population and The polarization of wealth and poverty in India is further Development (lCPD), held in September 1994, gave us a compounded by the religiously sanctioned graded division of misconstructed equilibrium. Now that there has been a […]

NEWS Philosophy and the Information Superhighway The extraordinary capacity of computers to hold text is familiar to anyone who uses a word processor: an average book will fit comfortably onto a 3.5″ floppy disc. With the growth of easy means of communication between computers an immense quantity of information has become available on a world-wide […]

NEWS VICTORY AT SWANSEA Visitor’s Report Reinstates Rebel Lecturers The three lecturers at the centre of the long-running row over academic standards in the Philosophy Department at University College, Swansea are to be reinstated, following the publication of a 173-page report on the affair by retired High Court judge Sir Michael Davies. Two years after […]

Hell’s Angels Derrida and the Heidegger Controversy Richard Wolin’s anthology The Heidegger Controversy – reviewed in RP 63 under the heading’ Righteous Indignation’ – has run into trouble with its original publisher, Columbia University Press. This useful selection of texts dealing with Heidegger’s Nazism appeared in November 1991 and sold well. No doubt part of […]

NEWS God Bless You, Mr Rosewater Feminist Fortunes in the New Latvia Booking my ticket for Riga, I had not expected a discussion on the shifting geographical boundaries of Europe. Where were the Baltic States, I was asked, and, for insurance purposes, could they be said to be safely European? Qualification for membership was a […]

NEWS Massacre of the Innocents: Derrida and the Cambridge Dons On 21 March, at a lofty conclave of dons at Cambridge University, something happened. The matter for discussion was a list of academic aristos to be invited to receive an honorary doctoral degree from the Duke of Edinburgh. (Honorary degrees are solemn rewards for those […]

NEWS Golden Years? 25 Years of History Workshop Was there ever a golden age, in politics? Sooner or later, whichever may have seemed the golden years of our own personal involvement are likely to become tarnished as we are forced to see the faces then excluded, to hear the voices silenced then even as we […]

EDUCATION CHANGES: THE HIDDEN AGENDA The proposals for Modularisation, Credit Accumulation and Credit Transfer (MOCACT) currently under consideration at universities have profound implications for students. Yet there has been virtually no consultation with student bodies. Why? Proponents of MOCACT argue that it will increase student choice; enlarge the range of qualification levels; increase freedom of […]