With the economy tanking, the pound plummeting to an all-time low and a fresh round of austerity coming down the tracks many of us are asking “what the hell is going on with the economy?” Join Bristol Transformed, two speakers from Reteaching Economics, and other concerned Bristolians to talk it through and figure out what comes next.
Bristol Transformed are very pleased to have the wonderful Owen Hatherley back in Bristol for a chat and Q+A to launch his new book, Artificial Islands: Adventures in the Dominions. Great Britain has just left one Union. But might the island’s future lie in another Union altogether, with its former colonial “kith and kin” in a trans-oceanic super-state with Canada, Australia and New Zealand? Welcome to the strange world of the “CANZUK Union”, the name for a quixotic but apparently serious plan to reunify the white-majority “Dominions” of the British Empire under the flag of low taxes, strong borders and climate change denialism.
This book explores the combination of capital’s changing composition and labour’s subjective agency to examine whether the waning days of the ‘sweatshop’ have indeed begun.
Join us for the Bristol book launch of Maya Goodfellow’s ‘Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats’. As refugees drowned in the Mediterranean, the UK Government proudly announced that the aim of its immigration policy was to create a ‘hostile environment’ for undocumented immigrants. Despite study after study confirming that immigration is not damaging the economy or putting a strain on public services, migrants continue to be blamed for all the UK’s ills. How did we get here?
In surrealist artist Paul Klee’s The Twittering Machine, the bird-song of a diabolical machine acts as bait to lure humankind into a pit of damnation. Leading political writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour argues that this is a chilling metaphor for our relationship with social media. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into.
Bristol Transformed and Open Rights Group Bristol present an evening of thought provoking talks on data rights, workers rights and the gig economy. After individual contributions from James Farrar, Lina Dencik and Alex Wood, we will have a panel discussion with opportunity for questions from the audience.