Bookmark: Reading Platform

A regular reading group focusing on texts and screenings ranging from art, culture, politics, philosophy, anthropology and sociology.

If you would like to suggest reading material and chair an informal discussion, or deliver a presentation, please make this known on the group page, or alternatively send an email to tomjamesholland@gmail.com.

You can also join the Bookmark: Reading Platform Facebook group page to keep up with events, share information, and join the debate.

Bookmark #35 will look at Training for Exploitation:

In conjunction with their Creative Lab Residency at CCA, P.O.O.L will host the June Bookmark discussion.

The text to read before the meeting is the Precarious Workers Brigade's recent short book of critical methods and teaching tools: 'Training for Exploitation: Politicising Employability and Reclaiming Education'

Link to text: http://www.joaap.org/press/pwb/PWB_Text_FINAL.pdf

From Silvia Federici's foreword:
"The Precarious Workers Bridgade's critique is especially relevant at a time in which the UK government makes student debt a financial condition for entrance into higher education and calls on ‘employability’ training to ensure that it and the banks are repaid. In the US, a country further along this trajectory, we have seen the disastrous consequences of this policy, as students are saddled with a burden of debt repayment that will affect their lives for decades. This book argues that instead of accepting employability as our goal, and consolidating the meritocracy that governments are promoting through education, we organise against the very system that produces student debt and the anxiety-ridden precarity we find ourselves in. Solidarity with other workers, mutual aid and commoning practices in the field of social reproduction are offered as plausible, and even necessary alternatives to years spent chasing the false promises of ‘employment’. The Precarious Workers Brigade calls for a shift from employment or employability to vocation – what do we think is our calling? How can education assist the project of radically amending a world deeply mired in social and ecologic crises?

At the same time, this guide does not shy away from the realities of students entering into a world of course placements, internships and other aspects of the employability paradigm. Instead – by including letters to employers, sample contracts, tools for self-analysis etc, it offers training exercises through which students, teachers and employability officers can think about work-based education as a context for critical consideration and intervention within the very structure of contemporary work."

P.O.O.L (Peer Organisation for Open Learning) is a pilot alternative creative education programme, initiated in response to the limitations encountered in institutional further education and life ‘post-education’. It is currently in its developmental stages - and will be structured as a peer-led, studio based course, run part time over the duration of 6 months to a year. The project takes inspiration from models of contemporary and historic anti-capitalist self education programmes and considers how these could work in the context of Glasgow. We will be looking to collectively generate the conditions for self-cultivation and critical thinking in the age of the neoliberal educational institution.

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