Demanding the Impossible: A Strike Zine – the Geo-Zine Scene and Nottingham Geography Strike Zine

Geographies of dissent are of particular interest to us folks here at Geography Workshop. The material cultures of dissent created by necessity to facilitate discussions and ideas that are otherwise ignored by mainstream media or might not be given the space necessary for fuller critical discussions serve to make the world both more complex and more capacious of possibility.

DIY publishing across a range of artistic mediums (for example, magazines, books,  art, music, performance, comedy, banners), landscapes and intersectional geographical contexts in which they are produced give alternative accounts to those in positions of power. DIY cultures rupture and demand questions to be made about the mechanisms that maintain the landscapes, spaces and power geometries (Massey 2002). In addition to providing cultural rendering of  counter-versions of collective action such materials ask critical questions about ‘alternative’ ways of doing and being that might otherwise fail to be recorded, offering new ways to be forged, experimented and tried.

This first quarter of 2018 has been busy as UCU union members of over 60 Higher Education  institutions in the UK (Academics, professional student support staff, librarians, archivists, lab technicians and more) have been involved in a strike to protect staff pensions, work terms and in turn the future cultures of work in research and development, in critical and creative thinking in the future.

Demanding The Impossible: A Strike Zine is a record of how geographers in Nottingham have variously responded and thought about the geographies of the strike and its various personal, professional, socio-economic and ontological geographies after the first four weeks of strike action. It presents discussions and ideas as well as collective archive of activities from the strike that record and raise questions for further consideration.

Nottingham Geographers Strike Zine

 

Ref: Massey, D (2002) http://www.signsofthetimes.org.uk/massey[textonly].html

 

 

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