As part of work I am doing on the work of Citizens Advice, I was asked to respond to the paper “States of Imagination” by John Clarke and Janet Newman, part of the Kilburn Manifesto. It is a paper that asks questions of the state and community that we have also looked at as part of our research group, and gave an opportunity to expand from advice work to governance and the contemporary logic of neoliberalism. Yet what it led me to think about most was the nature of democratic authority, and so set out below are my current thoughts on what the paper, and our work, can tell us about this concept.
By Sam Kirwan As part of work I am doing on the work of Citizens Advice, I was asked to respond to the paper “States of Imagination” by John Clarke and Janet Newman, part of the Kilburn Manifesto. It is a paper that asks questions of the state and community that we have also looked at as part of our research group, and gave an opportunity to expand from advice work to governance and the contemporary logic of neoliberalism. Yet what it led me to think about most was the nature of democratic authority, and so set out below are my current thoughts on what the paper, and our work, can tell us about this concept. What I found interesting about Clarke & Newman's paper is the proposition that to...
0 Comments
The Authority Research Network spent seven days in Alfriston from November 1st-9th revisiting issues we tackled in the early days of the network, around power, authority, alienation and transcendence. The readings we discussed included: Monday - Alienation
From The Provisional University: The Openhere conference/festival starts tomorrow in the Science Gallery, Dublin. The three-day program all looks really interesting – a great line-up of speakers – but perhaps most interesting for us are the talks by Brett Scott on open-source financing and the interview with the Robin Hood Collective who ask: “Could we bend the financialization of the economy to the advantage of precarious workers? Could we challenge the debt mechanism of control, the command to submit to any work and the limited options we have for financing our living? Could we think of sharing the means of creating money that financial capital has in its use, of putting them to work for us also? Could we think of a relation to money, not as binding us with debt and to capital relations, but as a means of freedom, escape, and increased independence? Could we appropriate the power of money, not only as a means of payment and exchange, but as a power to command the future?” The Robin Hood Collective are also going to have an ‘office’ on Foster Place from Monday to Thursday next week. Openhere 14.11-16.11 2014 "In the literature on power there has been a tendency to interpret power as domination, thus the opposite of authority. In this important collection of articles the authors challenge this viewpoint, arguing that power and authority structure everyday life in a mutually constitutive manner ... this collection makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates in social theory" Mark Haugaard, National University of Ireland. |
Subscribe to the ARN blog
Archives
September 2019
|