Welcome!

Designing Economic Cultures is a research project that sets out to investigate the relationship between socio-economic precarity and the production of socially and politically engaged design projects.

The fundamental question the project poses is:
how can designers, who through their work want to question and challenge the prevalent economic system, gain a satisfying degree of social and economic security without having to submit themselves to the commercial pressures of the market?  Read more ›

Construction site for non-affirmative practice

Constructive Dismantling

My Castle Is Your Castle

References

The following resources represent entrance points to the issues of this practice-based research.

BOOKS

Berardi, Franco. Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation. London: Minor Compositions, 2009.

Cleaver, Harry. Reading Capital Politically. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2000.

Boltanski, Luc, and Eva Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Verso, 2005.

De Angelis, Massimo. The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. London: Pluto Press, 2007.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books, 1991.

Gibson-Graham, JK: The end of capitalism (as we know it). Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Linebaugh, Peter. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Allen Lane, 1991.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.

Read, Jason. The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2011.

PAPERS

An Architektur. “On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides.” e-flux journal June-August, no. 17 (May 6 2010): 1-17.

Caffentzis, George. “The Future of “the Commons”: Neoliberalism’s “Plan B” or the Original Disaccumulation of Capital?”. New Formations, no. 69 (2010): 23-41.

Caffentzis, George, and Silvia Federici. “Notes on the Edu–Factory and Cognitive Capitalism.” transversal, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0809/caffentzisfederici/en/print.

Dalla Costa, Mariarosa, and Selma James. “Women and the Subversion of the Community.” http://libcom.org/library/power-women-subversion-community-della-costa-selma-james.

Federici, Silvia. “Precarious Labour: A Feminist Viewpoint.” Variant: cross currents in culture, no. 37 (2010): 23-25.

Federici, Silvia. “Wages against Housework.” 1-6. Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975.

Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 1-11. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” In Michel Foucault: Ethics – Subjectivity and Truth; the Essential Works of Michel Foucault, edited by Paul Rabinow, 223-51. London: Penguin Books, 1997.

Gill, Rosalind. “Technobohemians or the New Cybertariat? New Media Work in Amsterdam a Decade after the Web.” In Notebooks. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007.

Lorey, Isabell. “Governmentality and Self-Precarization.” transversal, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/lorey/en/print

McRobbie, Angela. “Re-Thinking Creative Economy as Radical Social Enterprise.” Variant: cross currents in culture, 2011, 32-33.

McRobbie, Angela. “Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds.” Cultural studies 16, no. 4 (2002): 516-31.

Revel, Judith. “Identity, Nature, Life: Three Biopolitical Deconstructions.” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 45-54.

RESEARCH APPROACH

Colectivo Situaciones. “On the Researcher-Militant.” transversal, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivosituaciones/en

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Harding, Sandra. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1991.

Malo de Molina, Marta. “Common Notions.” transversal, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en and http://eipcp.net/transversal/0707/malo/en.

ONLINE-LECTURES

Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey
Thirteen video lectures of a close reading of Karl Marx’s Capital (Volume I) by radical geographer David Harvey. These lectures help to understand the core functioning of capitalism and to figure out how the work and working conditions of designers fit into the bigger picture.

ONLINE JOURNALS

Affinities – A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action
eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies
Ephemera – theory and politics in organization
The Commoner – a web journal for other values
Variant – in-depth coverage in the context of broader social, political & cultural issues

MUSEUMS AND ARCHIVES

Armley Mills – Leeds Industrial Museum, Leeds, UK
National Co-operative Archive
, Manchester, UK
People’s History Museum
, Manchester, UK
Working Class Movement Library, Manchester, UK