The key terms that I’m interested in circle around the idea of porosity. Chiefly this is an attempt to find ways of addressing significant spatial conditions [and temporal too ­ wherever I’ve gone with this idea, time has kept appearing in widely different forms] that shape the activities of, and are shaped by para- and sub-state level agencies (transnational agencies, GONGOs and both international and local NGOs).

Towards a Politics of the Commons - The International ecology of media and nature: The constitution of contemporary international spaces can be described accordingly to (not only) two major historical processes: 1) the advent of the “global village” derived from informational-communication developments and 2) the practically simultaneous “environmentalization” of the planet – the coming into being of the “biosphere” as a cultural construction – which, firstly emerging from ecological grass-root movements of the late 60s, had now entered into the arena of institutional (both State-lead and NGO-lead) politics.

Continuing the discussions on the The International - , professor John Hutnyk and MAs and PhDs of the Centre for Cultural Studies will join us for an open Roundtable on The Communist Manifesto in preparation for David Harvey’s lecture at ICA.

Thursday, 20th November, 15hs at the Centre for Research Architecture Studio, Room 312 (main building).

Neither apolitical nor governmental, to be involved in politics without aspiring to govern… such are the constraint that delineate the condition common to all practitioners of nongovernmental politics [...] Nongovernmental politics can be envisioned as encompassing the political involvements of the governed, or better still, as the politics in which the governed as such are involved [...] what all these activists all have in common is that they are driven by a shared determination not to be governed thusly.

Any attempt to understand the rapid transformation of territories in the 21st century, reveals the inherent shifting of landscapes, the ‘movement’ of boundaries thus, a continuous struggle for their redefinition through conflicts and exclusions. Cyprus and its inherent division act as one of the frontiers to the EU. The aim of this workshop is to explore the construction and practice of such liminal spaces from an interdisciplinary perspective with particular
reference to Cyprus. What dictates the organization and management of
these liminal spaces?

NGS: Non Governmental Spaces

(Brief for MARA students 2008-2009)

The remaking of political spaces is not a technique confined to state agencies and within conventional national territories. This year MARA will consider The International as a field of operations that (simultaneously) inhabits spaces and conditions above and below the level of the state, across and through its boundaries, and in burrowed spaces within its porous surfaces.