Events calendar
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Reading Group: Mikhail Bakhtin’s book Rabelais. Session 4.
This is our long-awaited reading group on David Graeber’s favorite Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. We will discuss Chapter Two: The Language of the Marketplace in Rabelais. These meetings are limited in number. The group is meeting 12 times during 2024/25, on the last Thursday of each month. Please follow these steps to subscribe to […]
Reading Group: Mikhail Bakhtin’s book Rabelais. Session 3.
This is our long-awaited reading group on David Graeber’s favorite Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. We will discuss chapter One: Rabelais in the History of Laughter:on mediaeval humour: pp. 96-103; on obscenity: pp.109-110; Rabelais and revolution: p. 119; on seriousness: pp. 122-124; on the belly: pp. 126-127; on the historicity of jokes: pp. 134-136; Rabelais’s […]
BOOK LAUNCH: ‘Cities Made Differently’ by DAVID GRAEBER & NIKA DUBROVSKY
Nika Dubrovsky will be at Housmans on December 6th to celebrate the publication of a marvelous new text, co-written with the late David Graeber, called Cities Made Differently. Joining Nika in conversation will the inimitable organiser and writer James Schneider. Full of playful graphics, provocative questions, and curious facts, this book asks what makes a city and how we […]
"There Was Never a West": Greg Yudin in conversation with Mirko Canevaro
The third discussion of Graeber’s essay “There Never Was a West”: A conversation between Greg Yudin and Mirko Canevaro, in the frame of “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…”. The third meeting of “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…” reading group, the last one of 2024, will be a conversation between sociologist Greg Yudin and […]
Reading Group: Mikhail Bakhtin’s book Rabelais. Session 2.
This is our long-awaited reading group on David Graeber’s favorite Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. We will discuss chapter One: Rabelais in the History of Laughter:on Rabelais: pp. 59-61; on laughter: pp. 66-73; on the ‘feast of fools’: pp. 74-75; pp. 78-82; on parody: pp. 87-95. These meetings are limited in number. The group is […]
Pedagogies of Care: The Swamp School
The next encounter of ‘Pedagogies of Care’ series’ be on 14th of November, we will host Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas from MIT. In conversation with Andris Brinkmanis, they will present their interdisciplinary artistic practice, focusing in particular on their ongoing project The Swamp School. To register for the event, please click here. Nomeda & Gediminas […]
Cities Made Differently Visual Assembly
Come out to the Archive for a hands-on workshop, facilitated by Nika Dubrovsky, inspired by the release of Nika and late anthropologist and activist David Graeber’s new book Cities Made Differently. The workshop will be held at Interference Archive in New York, Friday, November 8, 6 – 9pm EST. It offers a space for people of […]
"There Was Never a West": dicsussion with Marcus Rediker
The second discussion of David Graeber’s essay “There Never Was a West”, led and moderated by Marcus Rediker, in the frame of “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…” reading group. In this session, we will be joined by Marcus Rediker, a historian, writer, teacher, and activist. Register here. View the full program of “The Ultimate Hidden […]
Events list
Roy Bhaskar’s ‘Enlightened Common Sense’ and ‘From Science to Emancipation’ / How to Take Over the “David and his Philosophers”
In the first part of this session we’ll discuss the relationship between Roy Bhaskar’s dialectics (outlined in chapter 6 of Enlightened Common Sense) and David Graeber’s discussion and use of Marx in Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value (page 100, page 69, and other mentions of Bhaskar in the text). In the second part, building […]
THE ORIGINS OF MODERN DEBT POLITICS IN GREECE AND ROME – READING MICHAEL HUDSON’S “THE COLLAPSE OF ANTIQUITY” PART 4
In the fourth session we look at how public finance was taken over by oligarchs and how Sparta’s last kings tried and failed at reform. This closes our discussion of Greece as the spotlight turns on a much bigger predator – Rome. Again we try to apply David Graeber’s framework from Debt – The first […]
MATERIAL PHOTOGRAPHIES READING GROUP
The Material Photographies Reading Group meets regularly online to explore critical thinking/making around the photograph in its multiple forms and dynamic manifestations—to welcome new ways of thinking and celebrate the increasingly complex photosphere we inhabit. All are warmly invited to attend! Please find all the details below. As always, do get in touch for the Meeting link and […]
Why Do We Play? The Origins of Self-Consciousness, Freedom, and Morality
‘Play as a principle of nature does not necessarily mean adopting any sort of milky utopian view. The play principle can help explain why sex is fun, but it can also explain why cruelty is fun. As anyone who has watched a cat play with a mouse can attest, a lot of animal play is […]
Housekeeping Committee / Mastodon Assembly
This is a group of people who assist room curators in taking care of their rooms.If you have the time and interest to help someone realize their vision, their educational efforts, please join us. We will also be discussing the development of a critical project: the Mastadon server, aimed towards creating a publicly run social […]
Another art world: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity
On November 28 2023 Nika Dubrovsky gave a lecture at the Staedelschule. The lecture was based on a text that Nika wrote with her late husband, David Graeber, which analyzed the current state of the Art World, where the promise of liberation is immediately replaced by a structure of exclusion. But much more importantly, this text analyzed […]
The State We’re In (Part 2): Social Progress in Chile With or Without the State?
Across the world people often try to use the powers they have been granted by the state to bring about social change. And sometimes they strive to go beyond the state to create autonomous enclaves. In this session, facilitated by Fiona Harrington, Fernando Quintana will discuss recent attempts to replace the Chilean constitution, originally imposed during the 1973 military […]
Seminars of Care
In 2020, David Graeber and several LSE students set up a reading group devoted to the themes of care and caring. The aim of this group was to create a space for discussion and reflection on work that was then (and still is) little integrated into the classic corpus of anthropological teaching. Between February and […]
Bullshit Jobs, Part 1
Is your job killing you? Do you feel the crush of spiritual violence when at work? Are you a duct-taper, box-ticker, taskmaster, flunky, or goon? We’ve got the place for you. Join us. Bullshit Jobs: A Reading Group, where your humanity will be restored. Facilitated by Steven Bachelor, This will be a monthly series, every […]
Bullshit Jobs
“It once came into my head that if it were desired to reduce a man to nothing, to punish him atrociously, to crush him in such a manner that the most hardened murdered would tremble at such a punishment and take fright beforehand, it would only be necessary to give to his work such a […]