I’ve posted about the classes at Trade School before. It’s a barter-based, pop-up educational initiative that started in New York City and how has versions all over the world. It is open to anyone, and students “pay” their instructor based on what needs the instructor has listed: baked goods, editorial help, rolling pins, and help fixing hub caps, for example. Take a look at their list of classes, all of which are being hosted for free at the New School. You can also propose to teach a class.
On October 2, from 7 to 9pm, CUNY Graduate Center PhD student Jesse Goldstein will teach a class on Surveying Waste and Capital:
“There’s a lot of waste out there. Trash, pollution, people treated like trash (or like pollution). Meanwhile, our economy is supposedly predicated on maximizing efficiency – or in other words – eliminating waste. How does that work? In this workshop we will try to make sense of how waste operates in a capitalist economy – both theoretically and through looking at some key moments in the history of waste and capital: agricultural enclosures and New World genocide, urban pigs feeding on the garbage commons, planned obsolescence and the undoing of Henry Ford, mass incarceration and mass unemployment, nuclear crisis, climate crisis. All is not grim – throughout these explorations we’ll try to pick up on ways in which waste can be reclaimed as a powerful repository of non-capital life and liveliness… and even resistance.”
Hope to see you there!
This looks great. I’ve been trying to write about this. I wish I could go, but I am in Europe and the air company doesn’t barter… Thanks for posting.
Posted by Francisco Calafate Faria | September 24, 2012, 8:02 amIf you want, you can contact Jess Goldstein, the teacher (and a PhD student at the City University of New York), for a bibliography or a chat. His info is here: http://macaulay.cuny.edu/about/itf-people.php (scroll down).
Posted by Max Liboiron | September 24, 2012, 8:14 am