As of 1 September 2012, under Section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (“LASPOA”), it became illegal in England and Wales to squat a residential building. Despite the fact that displacing someone from a building that had obvious signs of being their home without the permission of the legal owner has been illegal since the Criminal Law Act 1977, the necessity for a duplicate law just goes to demonstrate the accelerated deification and reification of individual property rights, over the social utility and sharing of resources held within the philosophy and practice of squatting. This recent shift in media-aggravated legislative change is a definitive move further in favour of the landowner as opposed to those who have no land, and those who support the redistribution of land.

It has been a long fortnight for South Africa, which has unmistakably shown all the flaws and fallacies of its post-apartheid ‘rainbow nation’, along with the weaknesses of a non-racialist society deeply riddled with economic and social asymmetries. More importantly,...

Article the first:  Public space is intended for the exchange and circulation of commodities. Like all other commodities, people may move about freely within it. Article 2:  Public space is space that belongs to no one. What belongs to no one belongs to the State. The...

The taxi took an alternate route to the airport that day, the day before the Queen’s Jubilee parade, to avoid the very early morning rehearsals of military personnel, horses, and others involved in orchestrating the impending celebrations. Arriving at my destination...

Five days in Athens. Five very varied days. I used to frequent Athens as a teenager with my parents. We were always transit visitors, en route to Kano, Nigeria where my late father used to work. Those visits where quick, two days in Athens, visiting ancient monuments,...

This trial is illustratory and illuminating. Not once will the authorities blush over it and be ashamed of it. Every stage of it is quintesential of iniquity. How has this happened that our performance being initially a small and somewhat awkward act has grown into a...

I've been a little taken aback this week at the level of racism against China in the British and US media, and on longer-than-usual comment threads on various friends’ facebook walls.  I mean, I know that racism in sport and in the media is nothing new, and I know...

According to the title that identifies this panel, we are here to enter into a discussion around the productive powers of something called “critical theory”. At first sight, critique and productivity might strike anyone as being opposite terms. Isn’t critique related to a certain form of negativity? To saying “no” to power? And isn’t the demands for capitalistic “productivity” what some of us criticise, or at least attempt to do so?

The title of this panel, however, seems to put such a taken-for-granted relationship at risk. “The Productive power of critical theory”– can we think of a productive criticality? or a critical productivity? What might it mean to engage in a form of critical-productive thought and how might such engagements contribute to challenging and transforming our knowledge-practices within the social sciences and the humanities? These are some of the questions with which I will attempt to experiment in what follows.

To be sure, these questions are not new, and many researchers and thinkers in the social sciences and the humanities are becoming increasingly interested in them, to the extent that arguably none of the latest so-called turns within these fields, be it the “ontological turn”, the “practice turn”, the “affective turn” and so on, leave the question of the relation between critique and productivity untouched.

[Drawn from Netpol's own release] A detailed new report launched today by the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) highlights how promises made by the police to ‘adapt to protest’ after 2009′s G20 demonstrations in London have been forgotten in a remarkably short...