Aaron Hughes

“We’re bringing about these extreme situations, we’re bringing about that choice where people have to respond just like in Iraq. We’re making people respond to us. The whole idea was to share that, because there was no way in our minds that people in the United States could think that an occupation was moving into …

Actipedia Revisited: #occupysmallstreet

This week we’re giving a shout out to small-scale activism with the #occupysmallstreet movement. First inspired by a doll-sized action in Siberia, this example has been created by Arts X Activism  from Melbourne, Australia. Signs are made collectively, by regular Occupy Small Street-ers and members of the public (adults and children) who stop by and have …

The Sounds of the Spanish Revolution

After a demonstration, on May 15 2011, around forty people decided to sleep in Puerta del Sol, one of Madrid´s central squares. This was the origin of a complex protest camp, that would take a phenomenon which had its origins in the Arab Spring to the Western World. On that first night, Kamen Nedev was …

Pray the Devil Back to Hell

Pray the Devil Back to Hell chronicles the remarkable story of the courageous Liberian women who came together to end a bloody civil war and bring peace to their shattered country. Thousands of women — ordinary mothers, grandmothers, aunts and daughters, both Christian and Muslim — came together to pray for peace and then staged a …

200 years ago The Luddites used humor, spectacle, narrative, and myth

From The Right To Be Lazy. Ned Ludd was a fictitious leader. Costumes, jokes, and more. Here’s an excerpt: “The Luddites, as they soon became known, were dead serious about their protests. … But they were also making fun, dispatching officious-sounding letters that began, ‘Whereas by the Charter’…and ended ‘Ned Lud’s Office, Sherwood Forest.’ Invoking …

Creative militancy meets militant creativity

By Sarah Amsler Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University (Birmingham, UK) via the Huffington Post Under what might now need to be termed comparatively normal circumstances, I have often agonised over helping my students understand the practical significance of critical theory. They ask, but what can one actually do with Herbert Marcuse today? In a …