infra-demos is presented on Nov 9th in the international workshop on infrastructures and mobility organised by the Catalan Institute of Anthropology and the University of Barcelona in Barcelona.

For more information follow the link

A new article by Dimitris Dalakoglou and Yannis Kallianos of infra-demos team was published in the journal Political Geography. The article titled: 'Eating mountains' and 'eating each other'' and it  talks about the relationship between political imaginary and infrastructures in Greece since the 1990s. 

The article is available to be downloaded for free for 50 days following this link 

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Professor Dimitris Dalakoglou, infra-demos' PI,  just got published an op-ed in the Dutch daily newspaper het Parool on the commercialization of urban real estate and its impact infrastructures and public interest.

The full article is available here

The Solidarity Schools in Greece were create in the context of the crisis to counter the acute increase of inequalities in education. At the same time, they have been laboratories of self-organised educational structures and practices integrated in the broader solidarity networks as autonomous learning communities. By putting democracy and mutualism at the core of their organizational function and educational practices they renegotiate the ways in which communities of education and knowledge production and sharing liaise with their communities.
This weekend they convene for first time in a two-day meeting in order to “further our democratic way of operating… to deconstruct the teacher-centered way of understanding education and learning and to construct the visionary frame of decentralized, autonomous and non-hierarchical educational communities”, as they state. In that way they aim “to cultivate a cohesive visionary frame for our role, to better describe our goals, to highlight and empower «good» practices on the educational spectrum… to defend education as a common good, to continue to reclaim by creating!
The program of the meeting includes sessions and workshops on solidarity schools as communities of participatory action and democracy, on their relation with the social and solidarity economy and the commons, on social pedagogy and communities of learning, on interculturalism and the education of immigrants and refugees, on gender identity in/and education. It must also be noted that the meeting aspires to connect with analogous experiences from outside Greece. To this aim collectives, educationalists and researchers from Italy, Switzerland, France, UK, Turkey and Germany will also take part in the meetings.

Infra-demos, has been part of the organizing group of the two-day meeting and facilitates the session on the relation between the solidarity schools the solidarity economies and the commons. The session will develop in two axes. Firstly, drawing by the experience of the solidarity schools will attempt to show the different perception that they cultivate for economic relations and transactions, which are based on use value through practices of mutualism and free exchange. The second focus will be on the relationship of the solidarity school with their local communities and the existing municipal framework, in order to work out institutional formats and changes that need to be achieved in order autonomous educational communities to be feasible.

For those interested you can find more in the following address: http://meeting.solidarityschools.gr/en/

The Principal Investigator of infra-demos, Dimitris Dalakoglou is involved also as the PI (together with Dimitris Pavlopoulos of VU Sociology) in the project PRECARIAT that studies the deregulation of labour market in Europe, focusing empirically in Greece. PRECARIAT just launched its website, whilst its publications are expected soon. PRECARIAT is funded from the Institute of Societal Resilience and the departments of Sociology and Social & Cultural Anthropology of Vrije University Amsterdam (VU).

On Tuesday November 21st infra-demos  project went public for the first time in the squatted social centre De Verrekijker in the Vrije University Amsterdam. The research team, comprised by prof. Dimitris Dalakoglou, post-doc Yannis Kalianos and the PhD researcher Christos Giovanopoulos, presented the basic outline and objectives of the project. The analysis was based on the transition from infrastructural Gap to new participatory forms of infrastructures.

Dalakoglou introduced the notions of infrastructural gap and infrastructural citizenship as the two central pillars that will be employed in the research. He also pointed out the techno-social conceptualization of infrastructures, as means for maintaining or challenging social consensus and political order. By analysing the crisis of the dominant infrastructural model in recent years and by focusing on the potential of emerging infrastructures based on social participation, the project aims to bring to light alternative models of infrastructural democracy beyond the state and the market frameworks and to examine also their viability to evolve and upscale. As the primary research field would be in crisis ridden Greece, he also addressed the relevance – and not exclusivity – of the Greek case for the rest of Europe regarding shifting patterns and re-modeling of the dominant infrastructural model and policies.

Kallianos focused on “large” (scale) or “hard” infrastructures as a site of socio-political contestation during times of crisis. He referred to a series of “infrastructural conflicts” occurred in Greece since 2010, which while challenging the dominant political imaginaries opened also a space for social participation and antagonistic models and concepts of infrastructures to emerge.

Giovanopoulos presented the plethora of grassroots social solidarity structures created by popular initiative to respond to a severe crisis of social reproduction in Greece. Such examples have nurtured “soft” infrastructures and a practice of infrastructural consolidation mingled with practices of grassroots democracy. As such they suggest a rather integrated and organic process through which local communities renegotiate (and reclaim) their techno-social relationship with the infrastructural domain.  He also briefly referred to his intended engaged and participatory methodology and its relation with the co-design and testing of upgrading and networking of the observed citizen-run infrastructural raw material.

The presentations were followed by a lively discussion regarding the relationship of the crisis as a trigger for such bottom-up social inventiveness, the (vi)ability, or not, of upscaling of such community based examples, the relevance or peculiarity of the Greek case for other economic and socio-political contexts, ro mention but a few. Regarding especially that latter question, two days after our event an artilce in Financial Times appeared confirming the argument of infra-demos about the crisis in the current infrastructural model in the case of entire Europe (Jones 2017).
 
As infra-demos research team we would like to thank everyone who honored us with their presence, their remarks, questions and contributions in the launch event of infra-demos.


References

Europe’s spending on infrastructure at ‘chronic’ low level FT, 23 Nov. 2017, Claire Jones in Frankfurt,