Earlier reading lists & details!

2023 Reading List:

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1uO3I5Hd3BCOrwS8t7FW49z2vJaWL6KvP

2022 Reading List:

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1ZSgS_arIfm-8is4QMH-Keci9wk1EFCJ1

2021 Reading List: 

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1pl1h3RPj8PA47rYhM-TmJtR6F_zilOOZ

*****

March – July 2020

Solidarity & Complicity, Love & Liberation

What is solidarity? What does it mean to stand in solidarity with the struggles of others? Can we find common ground and shared values without erasing or flattening the differing material conditions of our lives? What does solidarity require of us? What does it mean to be “in solidarity” when we are not merely bystanders to other struggles, but complicit in maintaining and sustaining the very systems of oppression that they resist?

For the next 12 weeks, we bring together an ambitious selection of works that theorise solidarity in diverse forms: academic writing, essays, poetry, podcasts, art work, public lectures, and beyond. This year, on the 250th anniversary of the beginning of British colonialism and white supremacy in Australia, as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds around us, as the disastrous impacts of climate change intensify and neo-fascist governments deepen their roots across the globe: we are coming together from our varied and always shifting socio-political positions to think collectively about solidarity, complicity, love, and liberation.

To kick off, we have pulled together two weeks of material on power, discipline, control, and resistance from some of our favourite critical theorists, writers and scholars. The two readings for week one, Wednesday, 18 March, are intended to draw our attention to the fact that power is always present, even in its theorisation. Hence, an excerpt from an influential interview with one of the most renowned theorists of power, Michel Foucault is coupled with the work of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, who challenges Foucault’s now canonical theory of power. We will think through these broad theses on power—as well as those offered by Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Chelsea Bond, Natalie Harkin and Allison Whittaker—to get a sense for how they might animate or make possible particular imaginings of solidarity, complicity, liberation, and love.

From this first week onwards, we will be engaging with critical Indigenous theory and First Nations scholarship from Australia and around the world to ask what solidarity might mean in the context of continuing colonial occupation. Is it possible for settler colonists, refugees, and migrants living in so-called Australia (and other colonised contexts) to act in solidarity with Indigenous struggles? How have Indigenous theorists articulated this possible solidarity and what political responsibilities does in confer?

Keeping in mind our settler-colonial context, we then extend our inquiry to critical approaches to solidarity and complicity in work on race and racism, whiteness, borders and colonialism, particularly that produced by refugee and migrant settlers living in and reflecting on still-colonial nation-states. We bring our attention to this work to see how theorists of colour have described the power relations of settler colonialism; and the complex ways that complicity with colonial occupation overlaps with resistance to global imperialism. From these texts we ask, we ask: what does solidarity look like in a global context? How do transnational networks make particular relationships of solidarity possible, and to what end? On the other hand, how do the imperial origins of contemporary global networks limit the possibility of solidarity between the imagined “north” and “south,” “east” and “west”? How do we challenge and build on conceptions of international solidarity rooted in the 20th century, before the age of rapid global neoliberalisation and the advent of the internet?

Throughout these series of readings, we are interested in reflecting on how our political identities shape our relationships to solidarity. In thinking about how our bodies are constructed, maintained, and reproduced in structural and political terms, we hope to find ways to disrupt the existing bonds that our political identities render “normal” or “common-sense”, and instead cultivate new allegiances and solidarities.

In the final weeks of this session, we ground our conversations in the practical frameworks offered by prison abolitionists, thinking about how the tools of community accountability and abolition might help us to enact solidarities against systems of violence without denying our ongoing complicity in maintaining them. One of the central problems with which we will be contending over the coming months is: how can we acknowledge our ongoing enlistment in structural violence without treating complicity as though it is intractable or boundless? Is it possible to create possibilities for liberatory solidarity without reproducing binary notions of good/bad, innocent/guilty, perpetrator/victim, virtuous/oppressive, complicit/resistant? Rather than viewing the reading group’s task as to provide answers to these questions, we will remain open to the proliferation of more such difficult questions.

In the spirit of radical reading groups, we come together to think deeply about how we can act ethically in lives of great compromise. We do this together to push the boundaries of collective thinking in forging new possibilities for our understandings of resistance and complicity, and in taking seriously our diverse individual and collective responsibilities. Most importantly, we do so in order to think about how we might enact our political commitments in the face of systems of control that are antagonistic to them, and which render it difficult to imagine worlds beyond the ones we currently inhabit, maintain, and reproduce.

Our current historical moment amid a global pandemic presents a peculiar set of problems and questions for the discussion of complicity and solidarity. The choice to move the reading group online until further notice is part of an effort to implement social-distancing in order to flatten the curve, terms that have seemingly entered the public lexicon overnight. The reason for doing so is simple: to prevent the spread of the virus to the most vulnerable populations, namely the immunocompromised and the elderly. Ironically, this situation, as many commentators have quipped, solidarity at this time might consist not of coming together, as the word intuitively suggests, but of staying apart. Though this is in some sense true, our conversations around solidarity and complicity, must not be restricted. To the contrary, they must be more agile and adaptive than ever before. In the notion that to practice solidarity right now is to self-isolate is something of a materialization of the idea that solidarity has an end point—one that we believe to be misguided. Rather, in this reading group we hope to speak of solidarities that require us to be attentive to the new ways in which the power imbalances and structural violences foundational to Australian society manifest in current conditions. The COVID-19 crisis and its human costs are not a historical exception. While government responses the world over lay bare—in discourse and death toll—the ableism and ageism essential to the functioning of capitalism, we must add further complexity to this image.

Format:

We acknowledge the Yuggera and Turrbal peoples as the rightful owners of the lands on which we gather. we pay our respects to Elders past, present and future, and to all First Nations communities across the city. Sovereignty over these lands has never been ceded.

The reading group is open to anyone, whether you have done the readings or not.

Full texts and recommended readings are available via the Brisbane Free University google drive. They are organised by date, so they should be easy to find!

(You can also find readings from previous years in the google drive.)

The Radical Reading Group usually happens at The Book Merchant Jenkins, a cosy bookshop in an old church at 19 Dornoch Terrace, West End. From Wednesday, 18 March our favourite bookshop home made the generous and thoughtful call to close it’s doors for the foreseeable future to minimise the impact of COVID-19 in our community. You can check out their catalogue online, if you need some reading materials!

For now, the Radical Reading Group will happen online on Wednesdays at 6.30pm (check dates via the readings in the google drive) using Slack, a free collaboration app/website. You can join the BFU Radical Reading Group Slack group by creating an account with Slack. Our group has several different ‘channels’ (kinda like sub-folders or threads, each with their own #hashtag). Email us if you run into any troubles and we’ll try our best to support you.

Feel free to engage however suits you! Send us your thoughts, join the Slack group, jump on the calls, write some thoughts in your diary and send us all a selfie… it’s ever more important that we think seriously about solidarity, so come hang with us!

Reading list:

March

Wednesday, 11 March

Introductions and general discussion of solidarity, complicity, liberation, and love.

Wednesday, 18 March

• Michel Foucault, excerpt from “Power and Strategies,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 Ed. Colin Gordon (1980).
• Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Towards a New Research Agenda?: Foucault, Whiteness and Indigenous Sovereignty” (2006).

Wednesday, 25 March

Collated in drive:

• Chelsea Bond, “Fifty years on from the 1967 referendum, it’s time to tell the truth about race” (2017). 
• Audre Lorde, excerpt from “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1979).
• Audre Lorde, excerpt from “Power” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1978). CW: Graphic descriptions of racial violence and murder.
• bell hooks, excerpt from “Love as a Practice of Freedom,” from Outlaw Culture (1994).
• Natalie Harkin, Selected poems and 2014 interview, “Weaving Lessons (on genocide)” (2014), “White Picket Fence” (2007), & “We’re Here! (…a little something for Anthony Mundine) (2013).
• Alison Whittaker, “beneviolence” & “comparative” (Poems) in Blakwork (2018).

Additional resources:

• Amy Allen, “Feminist Perspectives on Power,” at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (2016).
  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-power/ Extract in drive.

April

Wednesday, 8 April

• The Dig Podcast, “Our History is the Future with Nick Estes” (2019).
  Interview with Lower Brule Sioux Tribe scholar Nick Estes regarding his book Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, (Verso, 2019).
  https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/daniel-denvir-2/the-dig-2/e/62237447

Additional resources:

• Boe Spearim with Freda Huson, “Wet’suwet’en Strong,” episode of Let’s Talk 98.9FM. https://989fm.com.au/podcasts/lets-talk/letstalk-wetsuweten-strong/

Wednesday, 15 April

• Adam J. Barker & Jenny Pickerill, “Radicalizing Relationships To and Through Shared Geographies: Why Anarchists Need to Understand Indigenous Connections to Land and Place,” Antipode (2012).
  http://www.jennypickerill.info/wp-content/uploads/BarkerandPickerill2012.pdf

Additional resources:

• Soren C. Larsen & Jay T. Johnson, “Introduction,” p1-22 in Being Together in Place: Indigenous Coexistence in a More Than Human World (2017).
  PDF in drive.

Wednesday, 22 April

• Tasnim Mahmoud Sammak, “Indigenous There, Settlers Here: Palestinian in Australia,”  (2018).
  https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/nakba70/essay-tasnim-sammak/
• Anisha Sankar, “Errant Identities, the poetics of relation and the rising tide of fascism in India,” (2020).
  https://overland.org.au/2020/01/errant-identities-the-poetics-of-relation-and-the-rising-tide-of-fascism-in-india/
• Erica Violet Lee, “Our Revolution: First Nations women in solidarity with Palestine,” (2014).
  https://moontimewarrior.com/2014/08/19/our-revolution-first-nations-women-in-solidarity-with-palestine/ See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_hKJWXp368

Additional resources:

• Steven Salaita, “On Issues that are not Ours” p143-146 in Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (2016).
• Barbara Smith, interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, p46-106 in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Haymarket Books, 2017).
  Epub in drive.

May

Wednesday, 6 May

• Indigenous Action Media, Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex, (2014).
  PDF in drive.
• Harsha Walla with Jo-Ann Lee, “Harsha Walla in Conversation with MM&D Editor Jo-Ann Lee,” in Migration, Mobility, and Displacement (2015).
  PDF in drive.
  See also: https://vimeo.com/showcase/3419590

Additional resources:

• Priyamvada Gopal, “Introduction: Enemies of Empire,” p27-118 in Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso 2019).
  Epub in drive.

Wednesday, 13 May

• Jean Baudrillard, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” p61-87 in The Gulf War did not Take Place (1995). Translated by Paul Patton. Originally published as La guerre du golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991).
  PDF in drive.

Additional resources:

• Judith Butler, “Torture and the Ethics of Photography,” p63-100 in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (Verso, 2009).
  PDF in drive.
• John Berger, “Photographs of Agony,” p30-33 in Understanding a Photograph (2013). Originally published in About Looking (1980).
  Epub in drive.

Wednesday, 20 May

• Walter Rodney, “The Groundings with My Brothers,” 166-189 of The Groundings with My Brothers (1969). This edition (Verso, 2019).
  Epub in drive.

Additional resources:

• W.E.B Du Bois, “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” 15-32 in The Souls of Black Folk, (1903). This edition 2007.
  PDF in drive.

June

Wednesday, 3 June

• Nancy Fraser, The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born, (Verso, 2019).
  Epub file in drive.

Additional resources:

• Prison Research Education Action Project (1976) “Nine Perspectives for Prison Abolitionists,” & “Diminishing / Dismantling the Prison System,” from Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, (1976).

Wednesday, 10 June

• Angela Davis & Judith Butler, “On Inequality: Angela Davis and Judith Butler in Conversation, moderated by Ramona Naddaf” Recorded at Oakland Book Festival (2017). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MzmifPGk94
• Adrienne Maree Brown, “Emergent Strategy” 

Additional resources:

• Michele Wallace, “Anger in Isolation: A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood,” p25-32 in Invisibility Blues: from Pop to Theory (Verso 1990).
  PDF in drive.

Wednesday, 17 June

• Reina Gossett & Dean Spade, No One is Disposable (Video Series). Barnard Center for Research on Women (2014).
  http://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/no-one-is-disposable-everyday-practices-of-prison-abolition/#videos
  PDF of video Response question sheet in drive.
• bell hooks, “Loving Blackness as Political Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992).
  PDF in drive.

Wednesday, 24 June

• Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade, “Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got.” In Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (2011).
  PDF in drive.

Additional resources:

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “The Economy of Incarceration.” Interview on the Laura Flanders Show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39Axc3FIu9A

2019 Reading Group

Where? The Book Merchant Jenkins, 19 Dornoch Terrace, West End*

When? 6.30pm – 7.30pm, Thursday evenings (dates on poster above)

What? Radical reading group, political discussion, playful insurgent plotting, fantastic tea and biscuits, all-round cathartic chats.

We acknowledge that we meet on the stolen lands of the Jagera and Turrbal peoples. We acknowledge the owners and custodians of the lands on which we live and work, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities across the country. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and future, everywhere. Sovereignty was never ceded.

The idea is pretty simple: a bunch of folks getting together to think through some big ideas, drink tea, and shamelessly embrace our earnest enthusiasm for political reflection, critical theory and gooey philosophical chats.

The focus of this reading group has been (and continues to be) on critical and radical theory both within and beyond the academic canon. We read broadly, often from within Indigenous / queer / black / POC / critical race / postcolonial / anti-capitalist / feminist / critical disability theory, but also aesthetic theory, fiction, poetry and film. This year, we’re branching beyond reading and engaging with a variety of other textual forms: podcasts, films and public lectures.

Part of the goal of the reading group is to explore the possibilities of collective learning, and to think about how we learn through discussion and dialogue across and between diverse experiences and ideas. We are reading these writers in particular because we reckon it might help us to respond to the crises of the present, and to build robust and reflective political responses to questions of injustice. We hope that these are spaces in which our existing ideas might be challenged or unsettled, in which we might find ourselves wondering and questioning and rethinking, and in which we might have very nice times with good friends.

These discussion groups will be open to everyone, regardless of whether or not you want to read in advance. These kinds of projects should be fun, accessible, fumble-friendly. Please let us know if they’re not!

Accessibility:
The venue is wheelchair accessible, including the toilets.
Comfortable seating is available throughout the space.
We do not have access to AUSLAN interpreters at this stage, but if you would like an interpreter and this is a barrier to your attendance, please let us know and we can try to find a solution!
Very basic first aid will be available on site.

*Please note that the April 11 reading group will not happen in West End, as it is a free film screening hosted by the Institute of Modern Art in Fortitude Valley.

2018 Reading Group

WHEN? 
Thursday evenings, 6pm – 7pm (with possible/inevitable over-flow) 

WHERE?

2/63 Annerley Road, Woolloongabba

For the rest of this year, we will be meeting in the Community Room of the Gabba Ward council office (2/63 Annerley Road, Woolloongabba). Entry to the community room is via Crown Street, through the carpark at the back of the building. There is also an entry to the carpark on Gloucester St. The back door will be open, and you will most likely see some bicycles and a Brisbane Free University placard outside.

We acknowledge that we meet on the stolen lands of the Jagera and Turrbal peoples. We acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the lands on which we live and work. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and future, everywhere. Sovereignty was never ceded.

WHAT?
The idea is pretty simple: a bunch of folks getting together to think through some big ideas, drink tea, and shamelessly embrace our earnest enthusiasm for critical theory and gooey philosophical chats.

The focus of this reading group has been (and continues to be) on critical and radical theory both within and beyond the academic canon. We read broadly, often from within Indigenous / queer / black / POC / critical race / postcolonial / anti-capitalist / feminist / critical disability theory, but also aesthetic theory, fiction, poetry and film. We set up a reading group in part to explore the possibilities of collective learning, and to think about how we learn through discussion and dialogue across and between diverse experiences and ideas. We are reading these writers in particular because we reckon it might help us to respond to the crises of the present…and also because it’s brain-crunchy, beautiful, compelling and interesting. We hope that these are spaces in which our existing ideas might be challenged or unsettled, in which we might find ourselves wondering and questioning and rethinking, and in which we might have very nice times with good friends.

These discussion groups will be open to everyone, regardless of whether or not you want to read in advance. These kinds of projects should be fun, accessible, fumble-friendly. Please let us know if they’re not!

The reading list for the next few months is here:

MORE DETAILS…

All of the readings for the next few months are uploaded to a google drive. If you don’t have access to the facebook group, email brisbane free university at gmail dot com for access to the drive.

The readings are labelled with the reading week.  They should be in reading order in the drive, and they should each be dated with the correct reading date. If you’re printing copies, be careful: some of the files might be full texts from which we are only reading a chapter. Any additional readings can be accessed as links in the reading list in the google drive.

We’re trying to be a bit more organised this year, so if you want to read physical copies of the readings, you can find a copy of each paper in a Brisbane Free University folder at the Gabba Ward office (Councillor Jonathan Sri) at 2/63 Annerley Rd, Woolloongabba. You’re welcome to photocopy the text in the office before or after the reading group each week, or to come in and copy all of them during office hours from 9.30am – 4.30pm Monday – Friday. Chat to one of the folks on the desk and they’ll help you get organised!

The readings are all labelled with the appropriate dates. There are also copies of the poster/zine with the dates and details that you’re welcome to grab/copy/distribute.

If you have suggestions for future readings, or want to get more involved, or just want to have a chat about the project before coming along, you can get in touch with us at brisbanefreeuniversity (at) gmail (dot) com.

ACCESSIBILITY: 
The venue is a community room in a ground floor office space. The space is wheelchair accessible, though you will need to access through the front of the office, not through the carpark.  The bathrooms are not fully accessible. The nearest full-access bathroom is a block away from the office. (This is obviously very bad; hopefully they’re upgrading the facilities soon!)
The event is child-friendly, and we welcome families with children to attend. There are play things (including art materials and some toys).
Comfortable seating is provided.
An Auslan interpreter will not be present.
Limited First Aid will be available on site.

SOME HISTORY…

In January 2017, we decided to try and test out the possibility of running an autonomous radical reading group with weekly texts and a tutorial-like discussion group structure.  On the 19th January we held a panel discussion and community meeting with a bunch of academics and activists interested in talking about neoliberalism and the university, and the radical history and potential of reading groups. The following week, on the 25th January 2017, we hosted out first official reading group. A lot of people joined. We ran out of seats. We had some good and complex and juicy chats.

We read an impressive bunch of work that week: two chapters of Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ up to the white woman, a beautiful piece by Professor Irene Watson, ‘Power of the Muldarbi, the road to its demise,’ two short opinion pieces by Amy McQuire and Celeste Liddle, three poems by Oodgeroo Noonuccal, and a chapter of Alexis Wright’s extraordinary Carpentaria. Yep. It was extremely ambitious. We split into a bunch of groups, sweltered in the January heat, tried to think ethically and deeply about colonisation, decolonisation and Indigenous sovereignty, and afterward, headed to Musgrave Park to help make sandwiches for the Invasion Day action the following day. 

We planned to run the reading group until June. When June came around, we decided to run the reading group until the end of the year. When the end of the year arrived, we decided that really it made much more sense to continue the reading group in the new year, because there’s just so much left to read. 

The idea is pretty simple: a bunch of folks getting together to think through some big ideas, drink tea, and shamelessly embrace our earnest enthusiasm for critical theory and gooey philosophical chats.

You can find a copy of the zine with readings from February – June 2018 here: BFU Radical Reading Group – Summer and Autumn Readings Zine

You can find some of the materials from the 2017 reading group in the Google Drive.