“A Curious Moment” is part of the forthcoming AK Press collection Life During Wartime.  Additional Life During Wartime events with Team Colors participation will be announced shortly.

We couldn’t be more excited that activists out of Portland thought highly of the interview and put this together.  For those interested in getting a copy contact SlushPilePress at xerylemountain [at] gmail [dot] com; and $3 plus $1 for shipping will get you one of these.

Portland Event: Perspectives Release Party – 18 January @ the Red & Black Cafe

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory Launch Party

18 January 2013 @ 7pm

Red & Black Cafe — 400 SE 12th Ave. Portland, OR

Team Colors collective member Kevin Van Meter will be participating in the launch party for the new issue of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, the in-house journal of the Institute for Anarchist Studies.  Van Meter will be presenting on his “To Care is to Struggle” article, featured in the issue, and will be joined by the journals editors and other contributors. More on the event here.

Minneapolis Event: To Care is to Struggle – 17 February @ Minnehaha Free Space

To Care is to Struggle Talk & Discussion

17 February 2013 @ 5pm

Minnehaha Free Space – 3747 Minnehaha Ave. Minneapolis, MN

A talk by Kevin Van Meter of Team Colors.

How do radical movements respond to personal crises, trauma, care as well as issues that flow through our everyday lives?  Beyond seeing politics as a simply a set of issues and positions, how do we begin to construct new relationships, activities and projects that address issues such as mental health, care, trauma and grief, sexual assault, and interpersonal violence?

This discussion seeks to address some of these questions in two ways: in the specific sense of developing harm intervention systems, creating communities of care, addressing sexual assault and organizing around issues of mental health; and in the general sense of creating movements that don’t see such projects as appendages but rather as a core element in reconstructing our lives, creating movements that self-reproduce themselves, and to forge projects that challenge the social reproduction of capital and the state-apparatus by constructing new forms of life and new social relations.

About the Event:

The event will consist of a short talk followed by a facilitated discussion based on a recent article by Team Colors Collective member Kevin Van Meter called “To Care is to Struggle” published in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. Copies of Perspectives will be available at the event and can be obtained from AK Press here: http://www.akpress.org/perspectivesonanarchisttheorymagazine.html

Occupied Zuccotti, Social Struggle, and Planned Shrinkage is a recently released Team Colors Collective pamphlet and includes two articles: Panic! I See Poor People: Some Thoughts on Gentrification Efforts in Zuccotti Park and “The Civilian Version of Firebombing:” Planned Shrinkage and its Consequences in New York City – An interview with Deborah Wallace.

“The first piece is an essay written in November 2011 at the height of the Occupy struggle. The piece points to the frightening reality of social (dis)services and the decimated and punitive “safety net” programs in New York City, in context of service withdrawal discourse during the occupation of Zuccotti Park.

The second piece is an interview with Deborah Wallace, which Craig Hughes conducted in December 2011. Deborah Wallace and Rodrick Wallace have painstakingly researched and published on the development and impacts of planned shrinkage in New York City.  The interview draws out the historic process and meaning of planned shrinkage.”

Email panic [at] warmachines [dot] info to obtain a copy & we are requesting a small donation to cover printing and shipping costs.

Excerpt:

(from the introduction) “Often lost in the slogans, chants, and feverish excitement of a street action, or the ideological and sematic battles waged by radicals, is the richness of human relations. It is the ‘in between’ of these relations – expressed, in part, as care – that reproduces both the social order and revolutionary movements.  For our purposes here, we are interested in the acts and activity that care is associated with, as in care-work, which is imposed by capital, and care-giving, hence as an activity of the commons.

This question of care can never be answered in the abstract, but only in the context of our lives, our stories, and the challenges that such lives and stories bring to bear.  Different minds and bodies react differently to crisis, trauma, and the common shocks of life; they are acted upon, imposed upon and produced differently as they fit into different relations of power – as gendered, racialized, sexualized, et. al. bodies; particular minds and bodies have different productive desires, resist differently, and produce new worlds together differently.  Here the intent is to interpret care-work and care-giving broadly.  Then focus on creating movements that address these experiences and realities generally and the need for creating practical and political initiatives that struggle against current conditions and limitations and toward new, liberatory paradigms of care.”