On Friday, January 15, 2:30pm, Alessandra Renzi (PhD Candidate, OISE, University of Toronto) will be speaking on "Repurposing Research: From Pirate Television to Connective Ethnography".
Abstract:
I heard it in the squatted television studios, and in the hospital room where one of the insulini works. I was reminded of it in the graphic design coop where we sometimes met: “we are not a collective, we are a connective.” How does Insu^tv compose, pose together, ‘conposition’? How do they/we connect, disconnect and reconnect? What are the ways to engender the new, once representation, filiation and hierarchies are no longer useful modes of organization? In a country gripped by the stronghold of a media monopoly and rising fascism, we also discover the creative momentum of the Italian pirate tv Insu^tv: repurposing. The development of this work and its conceptual articulation help materialize new connections between social research and activism. Our goal in repurposing is to enable the production of radical knowledge while playing an active part in social struggles.
Repurposing is not confined to the re-use of material resources for logistical purposes, for ecological reasons and for cutting down costs––or for the displacement of power dynamics. Repurposing functions on multiple levels (from the individual to the social) because it consciously facilitates encounters and exchange.
This talk will map out some key issues raised in my doctoral dissertation Pedagogies of Resistance: Telestreet and Other Rebel Practices. Specifically, the concept of repurposing will guide our discussion regarding: research methods; the social potential of DIY technology; activists’ struggles to open up (or maintain) spaces for experimentation; and, questions of social agency. These issues are not simply the elements that capture Insu^tv’s essence; instead, they are part of a broader experiment that sees the production of new connections as a fundamentally ethical mode of existing in the social field in general, and in academia in particular.