nettime Textile Activism: Srebrenica Memorial Quilt Unites Massacre Survivors in Bosnia and America
* AdvocacyNet News Bulletin 110 * Srebrenica Memorial Quilt Unites Massacre Survivors in Bosnia and America July 10, 2007, St. Louis, United States: Survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia and the United States have joined forces to launch a large, hand-woven quilt in memory of more than 8,000 men and boys who were killed in the massacre. The quilt was unveiled in public for the first time on Sunday at a religious ceremony in St. Louis, which is home to more than 45,000 Bosnian refugees, including around 5,000 former inhabitants of Srebrenica. Men, women and children paused in silence at the quilt, and many laid flowers. The quilt measures around two square meters and comprises 20 panels, each carrying the name of a massacre victim. The panels were hand-woven by five women weavers from Bosfam, a women's organization in Bosnia that brings together women who lost relatives in the massacre. One weaver, Nura Suljic, lost her brother, brother-in-law, father-in-law and cousin in the massacre. Her husband is also missing. The Bosfam weavers are using the quilt to reach out to the large, Bosnian diaspora in the US, in the hope of keeping the message of Srebrenica alive. They have also offered to make new panels for any Bosnian family that lost a relative in the massacre. This way, they hope that the quilt can move around diaspora communities outside Bosnia, growing in size and generating publicity. It's a great idea, said Rusmin Topalovic, Vice President of the Association for the Survivors of Genocide in Srebrenica, a community group in St. Louis. I'm sure plenty of relatives will want to commission panels. The quilt was brought to St. Louis on behalf of Bosfam by The Advocacy Project (AP), which has supported Bosfam's advocacy since 2002. Alison Morse, a graduate student at Tufts University is volunteering with Bosfam this summer as an AP Peace Fellow and is helping Bosfam to manage the quilt. Meanwhile, in Bosnia itself, thousands of Srebrenica relatives and survivors will gather tomorrow at the site of the massacre to mark the 12th anniversary and rebury around 460 massacre victims who have been identified during the past year. Among those attending will be the Bosfam weavers and several families from St. Louis who lost relatives. Srebrenica is the largest mass killing to have taken place on European soil since the end of World War II. The town was besieged by the Bosnian Serbs for three years before finally falling on July 11, 1995. All men and boys over the age of 15 were separated from the women, and taken off to be killed. The women and children were bussed to territory held by Bosnian Muslims. Memories of Srebrenica remain vivid for many of the survivors in St. Louis. Nihad Sinanovic was 11 when he escaped the town in 1993, at the height of the Bosnian siege. His father, Resid, was among thousands who set off through the woods in July 1995 in an attempt to reach safety, only to be captured and killed. Every year it's the same, said Mr Sinanovic, who today runs a successful business in St. Louis. We meet and ask the same questions. What actually happened? How come the killers are still free? It's impossible to put it to rest and move on. Also on Sunday, at a reception in St. Louis, 210 Bosnian refugees signed a new petition calling for the arrest of Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, the two former Bosnian Serb leaders held most responsible for the massacre. Both men have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, but remain at large. The arrest petition has been drawn up by the Center for Balkan Development, and co-signed by The Advocacy Project, Physicians for Human Rights, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, and the Congress of North American Bosniaks, which lobbies from Washington on behalf of grassroots advocates like the St. Louis survivors. Nihad Sinanovic was one of those who appealed for signatures on Sunday in St. Louis. Help us heal the wounds of the many relatives who lost their loved ones. Help us bring the perpetrators to justice and bring closure to the families, he said, to loud applause. * For media coverage of the quilt launch in St. Louis, visit http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/ story/3248D 74C6D4647DB862573130013FE59?OpenDocument * For background on the quilt project, including a map of those commemorated and profiles of the weavers, visit http://advocacynet.org/page/quilt * To sign the arrest petition, visit http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/arrest_mladic_karadzic/index.html or visit the CBD website http://www.balkandevelopment.org/timeforjustice/ * For Alison Morse's blogs, visit http://advocacynet.org/blogs/index.php?blog=88 AdvocacyNet is a service of The Advocacy Project (AP) that is offered to advocates working for human rights and social justice at the community level. AP is based in Washington, DC. Phone +1 202
Re: nettime Essay, minus poor translations of punctuation.
Patrick Lichty schrieb: as opposed to Manovich, Csuri, Kluver, Ascott, Davies, Verostko, Cosic, Schwartz, et al. That IS a neat list, but I guess, you know that. :) Anyway, thanks for that insightful piece. Yet, one questions remains: how many square meters of valuable MOMA space does this show actually take? For someone who can only look at the website it seems a bit like a show that you can fit into a room, with all those videos etc... -- Dr. Tilman Baumgärtel Film Institute, College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines www.tilmanbaumgaertel.net # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Organic Intellectual Work: Interview with Andrew Ross [REVISED]
http://www.networkcultures.org/geert/interview-with-andrew-ross/ Organic Intellectual Work Interview with Andrew Ross By Geert Lovink Does cultural studies scholar and labour activist Andrew Ross need to be introduced? I became familiar with the work of U.S. American researcher of Scottish decent in the early nineties when his co-edited anthology Techno-Cultureand books No Respectand Strange Weatherreached wide audiences. His highly readable books deal with a range of topics from sweatshop labour, the creative office culture of the dotcoms, middle class utopias of the Disney town Celebration to China's economic culture as a global player. For outsiders, Andrew Ross might embody the 'celebrity' persona of academia, but he is someone I experienced as modest and open, a prolific writer who is very much on top of the issues. To me Andrew Ross has been a role model of how to reconcile the world of High Theory with the down-to-earth work within social movements, a tension that I have been struggling with since the late seventies. Reading Andrew Ross makes you wonder why it is so hard to be an organic intellectual after all, as Antonio Gramsci once described it, a figure which is light-years away from the abstract universes of the Italian autonomous theorists such as Negri, Virno and Lazzarato. No esoteric knowledge of Spinoza, Tarde or Deleuze is necessary to enjoy Ross. We do not read about exploitation in a moralistic manner but instead obtain a deeper understanding of the complex contradictions that the global work force has to deal with. Australian post-doc researcher Melissa Gregg, whose book Affective Voicesdeals with the history of (Anglo-Saxon) cultural studies, includes a chapter about Andrew Ross. Gregg describes Ross as an intellectual arbiter between the academic politics of cultural studies and the activist imperatives of the progressive Left. His academic activism describes the human cost of economic growth, thereby counterbalancing the neglect of material labour conditions. Instead of fiddling around with concepts and terminologies, Ross describes the human face of economics much like Barbara Ehrenreich's investigative journalism, reaching into the category of airport non-fiction. The suspicious attitude towards appropriate payment is the key obstacle to an effective labourist politics among Leftist intellectuals. In the case of the no collar culture not only did the culture of willing overwork severely haemorrhage any chance of a sustainable industry, but investment in the cult of creativity disassociated no collar work from the manual labour involved in producing the tools of their craft. In the following email exchange with Andrew we focused on the topics of research methodology and style of writing, the role of ethnography, the question of creative labour and strategies of activism. GL: Suppose you were to write one of those booklets and we would entitle it Letter to a Young Researcher. How would you approach this? Could you tell us something about your method? Is it fair enough to say that you moved on from General Theory to case studies? Clearly, students need to know about both, but I have the feeling that theory is a dead end street these days and that your research methodology offers an alternative. AR: Since I came of age, intellectually and politically, in the 1970s, I was a paid-up member of the Theory Generation, dutifully participating in Lacan and Althusser reading groups, and the like. But even then, I was rarely comfortable with the hothouse climate around what you call General Theory. Even then, I was learning that theory should be approached as simply a way of getting from A to B. It wasn't the only way to get from A to B, nor was it always the best way, and it was easy to get stuck en route with all your mental wheels spinning in the air. Indeed, I saw some of the best minds of my generation--to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg--vanish down that path. I'm glad I survived, I've been in recovery for two decades now. When it comes to method--and this is what I tell my graduate students--it's more important to know what A and B are. Once you have a good sense of your object and the questions you want to answer, then you are in a position to choose your methods--i.e. how to get from A to B. In most disciplines, the method comes first, and is then applied to an object. For us, it's the other way around. The questions and the goals determine the methods. So, how will I answer those questions? Do I need to do interviews, or conduct surveys? Do I need to visit sites, or consult archives? What kind of reading do I need to do, and what is the likely audience? In the program where I teach, our students are trained in more than one method--ethnography, historical inquiry, textual analysis, data analysis--and are encouraged to be flexible in their application. They are much more likely to think of themselves as
