At Home and Abroad: The Study Room in Exile

Anderson, Gary (2018) At Home and Abroad: The Study Room in Exile. In: Performance and Civic Engagement. Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 69-88. ISBN 978-3-319-66516-0

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Abstract

The aim of this essay is to draw out practical ways for realising cultural agency within domestic and international neoliberalised contexts and in so doing pose a tentative answer to the question “what’s to be done - at home and abroad - given the overwhelming political consensus which actively and explicitly undermines our ability to generate cultural and political agency and play a part in progressive social movements?” The context is changing quickly. Our initial rationale for the Study Room in Exile was to think and behave beyond neoliberalist value structures, but since Brexit, the election of Trump in the US, the rise of the far right in France under the leadership of Front National and Marine Le Pen, and subsequent reported spikes in hate crime, our thinking and behaving becomes more ambitious. Cornel West opens his Guardian article on 17 November 2016: “The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang.”
In order to draw out what the Study Room in Exile has done to attempt to answer this crucial (if slightly over-inflated) question, the essay will be divided into two parts: the domestic and the international. In the section entitled ‘At Home’ Lena Šimić will provide the domestic perspective on the Study Room in Exile via a project titled The Women of Europe whilst Gary Anderson will take on ‘Abroad’ by reflecting on the digital audio project The Study Room in Exile at Green Park, Athens, Greece, a project organised in collaboration with Greek anarchist-activists and artists. The two events took place simultaneously in June 2016. The domestic and international perspectives are brought back together in the conclusion suggesting that, in the end, there’s much more in common between the domestic and the international than first appears.

Item Type:	Book Section
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Creative and Performing Arts
Depositing User:	Gary Anderson
Date Deposited:	30 Oct 2018 09:57
Last Modified:	30 Oct 2018 09:57
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/2465

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