¡Coyuntura!

The Counter Counterinsurgency Lab (CCL) will convene and open an urgent space to ask how we are reading the current conjuncture —in what ways can coyuntura, or conjunctural analysis, as a collective praxis offer a way to read how we, including as poor and working-class people, continue to resist, subvert, and build autonomous alternatives from the current racial patriarchal capitalist formation. We extend an invitation to continue to weave insights from across struggles. Dont Rhine from the sound art collective Ultra-red and Manolo Callahan & Annie Paradise from the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA) will be in conversation with you and with one another on histories and methodologies of militant sound inquiry, convivial research and insurgent learning as well as engaged practices of community safety, collective self-defense, fierce care, and insubordinate knowledge production from anti-eviction and housing struggles to militarized policing targeting spaces of social reproduction.

BIOS:

Manolo Callahan is co-research director and co-founder of the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy. He also participates in the Universidad de la Tierra, Califas. An experienced researcher, Callahan has been actively engaged in a range of public policy, social justice, and community-based co-research over several years of working with grassroots groups, non-profits, academic departments, and university research centers, covering a range of social justice issues. Callahan is also a skilled facilitator and long-time learner committed to the possibility of horizontal spaces of collaborative active-learning, co-investigation, and design. His work explores three interwoven areas: the U.S.-Mexico border and borderlands historically and in the present; Indigenous autonomy and related struggles across the Americas with a special focus on Zapatismo in and beyond Chiapas; and convivial research and insurgent learning, a community-based research approach that draws on oppositional epistemologies emerging from the Global South. His engagement with a “Zapatista civic pedagogy” attempts to engage new spaces of political possibility and the challenges for “reweaving the social fabric” across landscapes fractured by militarization, racial and gendered violence, and racial patriarchal capital discipline.

Annie Paradise is a researcher with the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA), a transterritorial research collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work engages struggles confronting militarization and intersecting violences engendered by racial patriarchal capital, with a focus on social reproduction and the crisis of care. Paradise is also a researcher with the Counter Counterinsurgency Lab, and participates in Universidad de la Tierra, Califas.

Dont Rhine is a sound artist and popular educator. He has been involved in harm reduction since 1992 when a group of AIDS activists in ACT UP Los Angeles organized Clean Needles Now. He has been a founding organizer with the L.A. Tenants Union since 2015, which now has fifteen neighborhood chapters across the city. In 2018 he helped establish the Autonomous Tenants Union Network, which has twenty-five member unions across the U.S. and Canada. As an artist, Dont is a co-founder of the international sound art collective, Ultra-red. Since 1994, the collective has released numerous recordings of electroacoustic sound art, toured extensively, exhibited in galleries and museums, and published dozens of articles about political sound art. For three decades the collective has experimented with “militant sound inquiry,” a form of popular education for building communism from the ground up. Last year, the collective launched its own Journal of Militant Sound Inquiry on Rab-Rab Press in Helsinki. Dont is the journal's chief editor.