COUNTERFUTURES issue 1: Connections - call for papers

Essays, articles, polemics, interviews and reviews are now sought for issue one of Counterfutures: Left Thought and Practice Aotearoa, to be published in February 2016. Counterfutures hopes to provide a single meeting point for Left thinking and debate in Aotearoa New Zealand. It will combine perspectives from activists, intellectuals, researchers and writers situated both inside and outside university circles.

For issue one of Counterfutures we invite responses to the topic of ‘Connections’. While it is true that the globe is vastly interconnected, this state of interconnection coexists with profound barriers and disconnects between rich and poor, debtor and creditor, ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations, and distances between those of differing ethnic, class, gender, and sexual identities. The emblem of ‘connection’ remains a potent one for the reimagining and reoccupying of the Commons. In this cusp between new forms of connection and enduring patterns of disconnection, where does the Left stand? Are different Left fractions disconnected from one another to such a degree so as to render the act of recreating the Commons impossible? What now is the relationship between the Left and ‘the people’, or with other classes or constituencies that it might hope to engage? Where is the Left now positioned relative to the horizon of institutional politics, here in Aotearoa New Zealand and in the wider world?

We seek pieces that address the topic in one of (at least) four ways:

• How can we draw a map of the connections as they stand in society, either as facts or possibilities? These might be connections between the dominant forces and institutions, or between spheres that are normally considered in isolation: culture, economics, politics and ecology. What connections can be mapped within Aotearoa, and how is Aotearoa connected to the wider world? Can we trace the connections between state and capital, and between actors within those spaces? What connections exist between different oppositional groups?
• What new strategic connections and subjectivities might be forged between different groups, agents and sites of Left struggle and organisation? What alliances could be formed to enable greater impact, and what links are best severed? Do we seek to connect ‘old’ and ‘new’ Lefts, parliamentary and extra-parliamentary oppositions, ‘revolutionary’ and ‘reformist’ forces, Māori movements and movements based on ‘European’ theory, social movements and academic Leftists, class-based and (other) identity-based movements? If so, how?
• How can we connect our current activities to the struggles, successes and failures of past movements? What can we learn from the experiences of (for example) workers’, Māori, environmental or women’s movements in the past? Which of their issues and strategies have relevance for us still? Are we living in an entirely new moment?
• What connections might be imagined between our present moment and its possible counterfutures? What next steps do those connections imply? Do we embrace the technologies and challenges of the interconnected world, or do we hope instead to delink from it in an attempt at separation or self-determination?

Papers, essays, interviews and polemics should be sent by 18 September 2015 to counterfutures@gmail.com. Contributions may, but need not, follow the conventions of academic writing.