The editors of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory are seeking essays, photo-essays, project documentation, interviews, and book reviews for an issue of theoretical, practical, and activist engagements with architecture and urbanism.

Theory & History: ANARCHITECTURE
We are seeking anarchist reflections on the relationship between social change and the built environment, the peculiar relationship of modern construction to capitalism, and aphorisms that fumble toward an anarchist theory of the city.

Practice: BUILDING
We are seeking documentation of alternative practices in the built environment, detailed discussions of alternative models of property or the architecture of anarchist communes, discussion of vernacular architectures, and practical examples of autonomous construction.

Struggle: POWER
Domination unfolds in space: How have people challenged domination in space? We are interested in everything here from professionals engaged in combating Eminent Domain / displacement and grassroots organizations challenging the spatial agenda of the War on Drugs/Terror to collective efforts to reimagine the city and private spatial experiments in freedom.

We welcome finished essays as well as proposals for new work. If you are interested in writing for this issue, but do not have a specific topic, please send us a statement of interest, and we may provide you with a project to respond to. We also welcome suggestion of projects / actions that we should consider.

anarchitecture@nadalex.net

This issue will be published in spring 2009. Statements of interest, suggestions, and proposals for new essays should be submitted by July 15, 2008. A statement of interest is not required for submissions of completed works. Completed works may be submitted before September 15, 2008. (Please inform us if any submissions have been published previously.) Final drafts of all submissions will be due in December 2008.

This issue is guest edited by Alexis Bhagat, Francesca Manning and Etienne Turpin.

The IAS would like to remind everyone that our Summer 2008 grant deadline is rapidly approaching: June 15, 2008. Twice yearly, the IAS funds radical writers and translators around the world. We want to see YOUR ideas in this round of proposals, so get to it! Apply on this same Web site (see "Grants" section), where you can also find more information including past grant recipients and other IAS projects.

The IAS received 32 applications for the winter grant-giving round, making it one of the most competitive in IAS history. With so many good project proposals, it was truly difficult to choose, but you all made it a little bit easier. Thanks to your donations this year, we were able to increase our grant amount from $2,000 to $4,000 annually in order to fund more writers and translators worldwide. We hope to be able to continue to boost this amount in the future.

The IAS is pleased to award the following grant awards for winter 2008:

Amy Seidenverg, "Apex: Locating Cascadia Forest Defense in Feminism, Anarchism, and Queer Theory," $500

Anna Elena Torres, "Fraye Arbeter Shtime/Free Voice of Labor: An Anthology of 87 Years of Yiddish Anarchist Writing," $500

Andy Cornell, "The Movement for a New Society: Consensus, Prefiguration, and Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s," $500

Daniel Cairns, "Chinese Anarchist Periodicals," $500

For more details, see
http://www.anarchiststudies.org/grantrecipients

The next grant deadline is June 15, 2008.

The IAS is again curating the Radical Theory Track at the National Conference on Organized Resistance, American University, Washington, DC. The full line-up of ten talks is now available at http://www.anarchiststudies.org/node/54.

Saturday, February 9 at 7:30 pm

at the New Community Church
614 S Street NW
Washington, DC
(directly across from Shaw/Howard Metro, green line;
use Howard University exit)

How might we think about politics and political action in this period of political despair? One way is to consider political action--at least democratic political action--as collective action out of the presupposition of equality. We'll discuss what this means, how it works, and where we find it in our world.

For those unfamiliar with him, Todd is probably best known (in our circles) for his text "The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism," but is also widely known for works on the philosophy of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and more recently Jaques Ranciere. This weekend's discussion will be focused on what Ranciere offers in the way of reclaiming equality from the liberal tradition, in favor of a more radical application in collective political action, and what that might look like on the ground, in ongoing social movements.

Co-sponsored by the IAS and
the National Conference on Organized Resistance (NCOR)

Free! Donations appreciated!

Sunday, February 10, 2008 / 5:00 p.m.
at the Brian MacKenzie Infoshop
1426 9th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001
(202) 986.0681 / http://www.dcinfoshop.org/

Nearly as early as Hillary or Obama, anarchists were hot on the campaign trail. Plans to resist the 2008 U.S. presidential elections were afoot in 2006. As German Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer once observed in relation to "anarchist assassination politics" that they "proceed from the intentions of a small group... following the example of the big political parties. ...What they are trying to say is: 'We are also political.' ...[Yet] these anarchists are not anarchic enough." His comments apply to electoralism too: being political is the right impulse, but the tactic(s) and indeed the focus are wrong. Certainly, in the United States, presidential elections represent rare moments when many people "participate." But why the anarchist fascination with something that's far from anything we'd recognize as politics? And why, if we choose to engage, do anarchists frequently use strategies that mirror statist and/or liberal forms, or are simply unimaginative? Perhaps, in zeroing in on presidential elections, we aren't anarchic enough either.

Cindy is an anarchist activist and educator from Vermont. She has been involved with the Institute for Social Ecology, and is currently a board member with the Institute for Anarchist Studies and a co-organizer of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference. She is also a collective member of the all-volunteer Black Sheep Books in Montpelier, Vermont.

A FREE EVENT. Donations encouraged to benefit the IAS.

Saturday, January 26, 2008
OPIRG Windsor's Conscious Change conference
For more details, see http://opirg.uwindsor.ca/

The IAS would like to remind everyone that our Winter 2008 grant deadline is rapidly approaching: January 15, 2008. Twice yearly, the IAS funds radical writers and translators around the world. We want to see YOUR ideas in this round of proposals, so get to it! Apply on this same Web site (see "Grants" section), where you can also find more information including past grant recipients and other IAS projects.

The full schedule of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition Conference, as well as panel and presentation descriptions and presenters' bios, is now online. Check it out here.

Registration for RAT is full. However, we will be audiotaping the conference sessions, so you should be able to listen online in a couple of months.

Stay tuned for a listing of RAT presentations and panels for the fall 2007 conference. We hope to audiotape some of the talks and then post them online later, for those who can't attend RAT.