<nettime> :: UniCommon. The rebellion of living knowledge :: beyond UniRiot.org

[claudia bernardi <clod.zeta@gmail.com>]

*UniCommon *

*The rebellion of living knowledge*

* *

*An extraordinary season of struggle, beyond Uniriot.*

Uniriot has been several things: the will to compose different political
cultures, the desire of conflict and the innovation inside and against the
university reformed by Bologna Process. The attempt of building up a new
experimentation outside of any reassuring identity, but creating a new
network able to change and being changed by the richness of discussions and
the unquestionable reality of the struggle that cross us.

Uniriot.org has been a great platform, a useful tool for the challenge we
issued five years ago: not only a showcase of our ideas, but a crossroads of
different experiences and projects, new narrations of struggle,
communication about the transformations of the university and our research.
We have been trying to carry this challenge forward since the movement of
2005, when we created Uniriot, through our experience inside the European
struggles during the AntiCPE movement in France, Bologna Burns in Wien and
Madrid, until the anomalous wave of 2008 and the incredible autumn we lived
in 2010.

We have been profoundly changed during these extraordinary months, together
with students, precarious and researchers that have passionately animated
and continuously organized the struggles of the last year. As we cannot be
the same, we close the experience of Uniriot and launch a new political
constituent process to live up to our time and the transformations required
by the struggles. A new challenge!

* *

*The rebellion of living knowledge: UniCommon*

UniCommon moves its first step in an era of crisis and austerity: the
education reforms enacted without any public funding inside the framework of
the failure of Bologna Process and, at the same time, its extension outside
Europe as a tool of exploitation of transnational living knowledge; the
dismissal of public university and the dequalification of high schools
education, the massive young unemployment, precarity and the absence of any
future for a whole generation inside and outside the academy.

In this landscape, movements shouted firmly the shelter of public university
against cuts, rising tuition fees, free research labor and debt loan, not as
mere defense of the extant, but as a strategic field to claim quality of
knowledge and free education against any rhetorical meritocracy.
Self-education has been our political dispositive focused on the struggle
for a qualified and critical knowledge, a device of organization that we are
going to practice; our aim is to focus on the transformations of researchers
status in the era of delegitimization of research work and peer-review
system. Militant research is our collective tool to understand and to map
the transformations of the present; self-education is our device beyond the
public/private dichotomy to make our university!

UniCommon wants to switch the nexus between education and precarity,
creating a new social constituent deal within the new composition of labor,
a democratic reappropriation of welfare against the private plunders and the
feudal academic power. We have learnt that where there is a capital
relation, there is exploitation of toil, passions, words and knowledge;
where there is globalized cognitive capitalism so there is a parasitic power
that robs our body, our life.

The European and north-African movements of the last autumn have taught us
that the claim for welfare against poverty and rights against exploitation
are strictly connected to the claim for democracy and freedom against the
power and its corruption. Students who have animated the revolts of last
years, thousands of precarious and young unemployed took up the book shields
to defend their lives: a rioting generation reclaiming knowledge, free
access and circulation, income and new welfare, democracy and freedom of
choice above our body.

UniCommon is born within the practice of Book Bloc, a common tool of
defense, a production of imaginary to express our desire. We have created
those book shields as an attempt of combining radicalism and people?s
support; the challenge of our time is to build up a wild experimentation,
widespread and radical at the same time, to step over the crisis and the
failed utopia of cognitive capitalism. The Book bloc is a transnational
practice, against any fixed identity and outside any representation of
conflict, it is our defense within the democracy of turmoil!

The failure of Bologna Process does not mean the end of exploitation of our
knowledge, on the contrary the crisis deepens the capitalistc command over
our body; at the same time, the struggles have showed us their powerful
capacity of creating connections despite borders, sharing common projects
and practices, shaping a different future where free knowledge, income,
rights and citizenship are not just a privilege. UniCommon is a new compass
oriented by self-education, created by the wild demos that blocked the
circulation of commodities; it is a device defended by the transnational
Book Bloc inside a European space definitely twisted by the Mediterranean
revolts, the margins that break into the center to overturn it.

Moreover Unicommon is a network of communication and political organization,
a web platform that will work as a place of information and communication of
struggles from high school to the academy, a space of connection among
experiences of self-education and autonomous collectives of research.
UniCommon.org is a new website inside the 2.0 web time: video as a tool of
enquiring and mapping transformations, photos as the continuous effort of
imaging the fuzzy movement of our demos and discussions, audios as a precise
opinion of different voices, augmented reality to shape and multiply our
world.**

*UniCommon starts from La Sapienza University within a day of large
discussions to make a public analysis of the past autumn and to imagine the
spring that lies ahead.*

* *

*Meet you in the struggles, to create the future and subvert the present,*

*to make the university of the common!*



?????

*Program 24.03.2011*

*Create the future, subvert the present*



*10:30 a.m. College of Philosophy, Villa Mirafiori, La Sapienza - Roma*
Public assembly of students and precarious collectives and networks

*Against the dismissal of public university, creating the university of the
common*

???
2:00 p.m. Lunch break

???


*4:00 p.m. College of Political Science, LaSapienza - Roma*
Round table

*After the revolt of the autumn toward the general strike of 6th May 2011*

speakers: Ilenia Caleo (Zeropuntotre); Roberto Ciccarelli (Il manifesto),
Claudio Riccio (Link), Eva Pinna (Surf), Luca Tomassini (CPU), Giorgio
Sestili (Atenei in rivolta), Simone Famularo (Assemblea di Medicina - La
Sapienza)  Francesco Sinopoli (Flc-Cgil), Corrado Zunino (la Repubblica)

???

7:30 p.m. aperitif break and videos
???

info: www.uniriot.org /  from 24th  March  >>> www.unicommon.org >>>


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