[Occupyresearch] Research Justice 2012: Call for Proposals

Call for Proposals

Research Justice Track 2012
Allied Media Conference
June 28-July 1, 2012 in Detroit, Michigan

Submit a Proposal: talk.alliedmedia.org
Deadline: March 15, 2012

researchjustice.com
amc.alliedmedia.org

Research is an essential part of creating the knowledge required to enact change. Communities have first hand experience of oppressions, and research is a tool to package those experiences so that it can be used strategically to affect change. For example, domestic workers in New York documented working conditions in their industry and used the data to pass the first ever statewide Bill of Rights. Students in Oakland interviewed their peers to create recommendations that were included in the school district’s strategic plan that would better serve students’ needs. Profiles of restaurant owners informed the strategy to win back wages for workers.

Knowledge is power; it has the ability to legitimate, establish, and undermine authority and the 1%. What we consider as common sense is socially constructed by the power elite, who skew facts to their advantage. We as the 99% can create new regimes of information by shifting the production of knowledge to the periphery of political and economic power and to refocus the critical gaze onto the 1%, as the subjects of inquiry.

Hegemony is established, according to Antonio Gramsci, through coercion and consent. Abroad, the shadow of the U.S. empire is shrinking. Here, at home, municipal governments and police have violently cracked down on the insurgent Occupy movement, while Congress and White House continue to bail out banks and corporations, so they can continue to wreak their structural havoc, in pursuit of profit.

Help us build a new regime of knowledge, that can empower communities now and into the future, as we collectively face global economic contraction and devastating ecological crises. We are looking to foment a revolution in research and knowledge production, starting with our gathering in Detroit this summer 2012.

We have three goals with the Research Justice track:
1) To create a community of radical researchers and expand our capacity to create liberatory knowledge through skillshares and hands-on workshops;
2) To support participant action research by and for indigenous communities, youth, low-income people of color, etc.; and
3) To encourage research targeting the 1%.

To that end, we call for sessions that fall into the following categories:

How-to – Hands on, tools, methods, skillshares.
Theory: theory, strategy, history, postcolonial, decolonial, militant coresearch, movement based research, liberatory knowledge, revolutionary inquiry.
Examples: Existing research projects, such as Occupy Research, Excluded Workers, youth models. Case studies: challenges and lessons learned.
Participant Action Research at AMC: Deconstructing Detroit, visions of a city of hope, what is media-based organizing, definitions of a community media economy.
Future: National strategy/working meetings, ongoing research network.
To submit a proposal, go to talk.alliedmedia.org. The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2012. Contact info@??? for more information.

Track Coordinators

Kat A. Hartman, Data Driven Detroit
Joe Rodriguez-Tanner, Detroit Future
Saba Waheed, Data Center
Yvonne Yen Liu, Applied Research Center/Colorlines.com


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Yvonne Yen Liu (严怡帆)
Oakland, CA
646.321.5710
510.371.5710
yvonnegraphy.com