In solidarity with all Occupy movements:

http://www.occupysfsu.org/wordpress/

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2011%2F12%2F01%2FBAGJ1M7A2Q.DTL

SFSU in 1968': "Occupation" lead to the Ethnic Studies Building

Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, as well as Dakota writer, teacher, and activist Waziyatawin will be at Occupy Oakland this Saturday, Nov. 12th from 2:00-3:00! Then again at 4:00 at Occupy SF. For those already reading Deep Green Resistance, here's your chance to ask the writers questions! For those not reading, here's your chance to hear amazing speakers!

Pancakes for Justice! Come out and support organic, just food brought to you by the Student Activism folx by munchin on some yum yum pancakes on Wednesday, October 26th starting at 9am!

September 20, last day to add for units!

hey hey hey!

if anyone needs units this semester, the last day to add is the 20th, a mere week away!

in order to add units for your course or reading group, you will need to fill out the following two forms:

1.add form (also available in the registrar office in the one-stop student center):

http://www.sfsu.edu/~admisrec/forms/regforms/addform.pdf

2.an independent study form:

http://www.sfsu.edu/~admisrec/forms/regforms/indstudy.pdf

If you need an advisor/chair, James Martel from poly sci is a super rad dude who will help ya out.

Student Activism Course

I hope you all had a great summer! The Student Activism class is set to begin the second week of school on Tuesday August 30th at 7:00 pm. Credit for the class is being offered (up to 3 units) through independent study by the Political Science department (or, by approval of your department chair, through your department). This class is being offered through the SFSU Experimental College.

THE CLASS:

1. We will discuss social movements, past and present, and the presence of nine key components necessary in building effect social movements.

2. We will analyze this information and apply what we learn to building our own actions (as projects for the class).

3. We will strive for a democratic environment.

4. As a group, we will facilitate our own learning experience.

5. There will be no teacher-student hierarchy.

6. Our goal is to heighten awareness and embody consciousness through research and experience.



Ob the first day, we will discuss credit, grades, curriculum, class structure and assignments, effectively creating the syllabus together. All you'll need is your curiosity, some input, and maybe a pen.

The room for the class is still pending. We are talking with James Martel about this.

To summarize:

Student Activism class
Tuesday, August 30th, 7:00 pm
Room: TBA

Facilitators: Kelly Corwin, Will Nelson

Marxism and Literary Criticism Class, Fall 2011

Marxism and Literary Criticism!!!!!

Time: Wednesdays, 10:30-noon (subject to change)
Location: TBA

This will be a discussion based course, focusing on Marxist theory in art and literature! This course is geared towards students with minimal to zero experience with Marxism, though open to everyone (that means you!); we will be focusing on basic concepts. The weekly readings will be around 15-30 pages. We will be reading such authors as Marx and Engels, Eagleton, Adorno, Zizek, Benjamin, etc. Besides the readings, each student will be expected to lead a discussion on an essay and to write a two to five page final paper. The goal of the course is to gain a strong foundation in Marxist literary criticism and hopefully see how it is relevant to today!
The class will examine 3 areas of Marxist Criticism:

1. Literature and history;
a. Base and superstructure / Materialist conception of history
b. Literature and Ideology
2. Form and content;
a. History and Form
b. Form and Ideology
a. Lukacs : Marxist Realism, Typicality, World-historical, totality.
b. Goldmann : Genetic Structuralism
c. Macherey : Decentered form
3. The author as producer;
a. Form and Production
b. Consciousness and Production

If time and interest permits we could delve into the idea of the writer and commitment, as well as go into more contemporary identity politics and Marxist issues.

I know that this may be a bit dense, so Julia is required to bake at least one pie a month to keep everyone in good spirits.

Come over red rover, Marx would!

Facilitator: Andrew Brooks

Planning for Summer/Fall 2011

Hey all, in anticipation of the fall semester, we thought it would be a good idea to begin planning for continuation of existing classes, creation of new classes, recruitment of facilitators and students, and just a general coming-together of all who are down for the ongoing badass-ness of the Experimental College. Next week, we'll be hosting a couple of orientation sessions to get people thinking about what they want to see in the fall, when we all come back from our wonderful summer vacations. Included below is the flyer, with info about times and place for the orientations. Check it out!

Bunsis report

Bunsis report prt 1 from andrew c on Vimeo.

bunsis report prt 2 from andrew c on Vimeo.

Bunsis report prt 3 (Q&A) from andrew c on Vimeo.


For the presentation slides follow this link:

calfac.org/​sites/​main/​files/ ​file-attachments/​sfsu_bunsis_report_february_2011.pdf

Another class and a reminder

The deadline to "add class by exception" including independent study and therefor Experimental College classes is Friday the 18th.  Your 699 forms should be in the hands of your department chair person as soon as possible.  Here is another project of significant potential:

 

 

Workers Inquiry Seminar

 

A student-led militant research seminar looking into the conditions of life, labor, and exploitation of the SFSU student. Available for units. Dates and times to be determined by participants.

 

We understand our work as public university students to be crucial in sustaining capitalism. The labor of students—whether in classes at the university or at the jobs we work to pay for school—is being exploited at an ever-increasing rate. With our minimum-wage jobs and student loan debts, we try to pay the soaringtuition fees that buy entrance to a disappearing job market.

 

The social and economic environments that contain the university have changed significantly since the ‘70s. It follows that the university’s role in today’s socio-economic landscape is no longer the same. What then, are the conditions of our labor as university students today? What is our version of class struggle

If you would like to be a part of the seminar or be confidentially surveyed about your life as a student worker, please contact sfsuworkersinquiry@gmail.com

New Courses added for Spring 2011

Below are some more courses for this semester. See the previous blog for other courses also available. 

Conscious Communication

Classes will be held at:
1543 Mission st., on the third floor, from 8pm-9:30pm THIS TUESDAY. 2/8/2011 (also known as Urban Flow)

 In this course we will learn to effectively communicate through conscious speech and listening techniques. Using the work of Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph. D.,  we will fallow his Non-violent Communication book as a guide to understanding what it means and how to first, observe our situation, identify our feelings and needs, make requests of others, and actively listen for the feelings and needs of others so that we can create healthy relationships.

The class time will be split into seminar and group/partner exercise equally. Seminar topics will include: Introduction to conscious communication, compassionate communication skills, observation vs. interpretation, identifying and expressing our feelings and needs, connecting with ourselves, how to make conscious requests, empathetic listening techniques, steps to expressing anger, what to do when communication is not an option, expressing and accepting appreciation. Please feel free to request other topics for discussion in this course. 

Contact Jacquelyne S. Price for more info @   jacque.sharee@gmail.com

http://sfsuexperimentalcollege.blogspot.com/2009/09/proposed-principles-for-respectful.html

Land and Liberty Study Group – Tierra y libertad Study Group
Objective of Study Group:
Land and Liberty is the slogan that was derived of the struggle to emancipate the workers and campesinos during the Mexican revolution as part of an effort to create a social revolution from the masses below that would distinguish itself from the political revolution of aspiring politicians and bureaucrats (who only sought to change leadership). 
Given the origins of the different struggles for liberation, this study group is an effort to draw on a rich history of autonomous and horizontal resistance movements that can we can learn from today. This includes the liberation of all oppressed peoples and the various different ways in which we are oppressed: race, sex, class, and sexuality. A vital part of this struggle is to develop our analysis on the social conditions that face working people today and how to most effectively make change that doesn’t repeat the same oppressive relationships of the rich and powerful. Instead, we wish to see a world that abolishes these oppressive relationships and where wealth is redistributed according to need. 
We also wish to study such topics as intersectionality, which combines an analysis of the different ways that oppression intersects and helps us formulate an approach that encompasses consciousness around how these forms of oppression relate. We also wish to study historical examples of people coming together within their environments to build power that did not rely on state institutions or delegate their authority to higher powers because they realized the only people capable of making change are the affected peoples themselves. The only way to make change is to have an organized movement of resistance and the readings we have selected and hope to include are part of this conscious effort to explore material that will help this process and are relevant to today.  We would also like to include film screenings as part of this process and discussions that take place within the context of actual struggles being waged today. The best way to learn is to engage in praxis, and theory separated from struggle is not valuable towards understanding the complex problems we face today.

Spring 2011 Course Descriptions

 Marxist & Revolutionary Feminism

   As the crisis deepens, it is imperative that we mobilize the resources of the university to investigate the nature of the crisis and what we can do about it, especially to address the unanswered questions of how patriarchy relates to the accumulation, crisis, and overthrow of capital.

   Join this study group covering introductory Marxist texts, recent Feminist writings that use the Marxist method or come from a revolutionary perspective, and autobiographies by women who have devoted their lives to the empowerment and liberation of women, the working class, and all exploited people.

   Address questions like: What are the interrelations between patriarchy and capitalism? How is the exploitation and oppression of women related to the contradictions in how the rich and powerful incessantly accumulate wealth at the expense of working people? What is Sex and Gender? How is Gender formed? How are these relations built into the division of labor or the family? How does the gendered division of labor impact the revolutionary agency of female bodied people? Are things class struggle that don't have to do with wages? How should we use political economy to understand intra-class oppression?

   Often we are taught about the multitude of problems that result from the exploitation and oppression of women and working people. This study group seeks to investigate the solutions. Karl Marx was able to analyze capitalism as a totality, and expose its contradictions that revolutionaries can exploit to defeat it. But he largely failed to analyze how the exploitation of women, non-waged workers, and racism or patriarchy contribute to our increasing subjugation by the very wealth we produce at work, in the home, and from the land. Since then, many feminists have attempted to use the Marxist method to answer these burning questions. Join us to study this method, these recent works, and the lives of women who fought for a better world.

Class meets Tuesdays at 5pm in HUM 374, contact: Greg (hankydank@live.com)

Security Engineering

A democratic, hands-on, group research project focused on the material and philosophical aspects of electronic and physical security. If there is demand, we will study and practice the defeat and proper implementation of common and high security locks, security architecture, alarms, surveillance, cryptographic protocols, internet privacy, social engineering and any other topics of interest relating to security.

Class meets Thursdays at 5pm, location TBA, contact: Mike (mmorin5@gmail.com)

Campus Ecology

Course objective: to connect the campus community with the natural history, human history, and current ecology of the SFSU campus and nearby Lake Merced. This will be accomplished through individual research and presentations, conducted outdoors when possible and supplemented with historical maps, photos, and assigned reading. As a collective final project, the information will be compiled in a booklet that describes a walking tour of the campus.

1 unit pass/fail; enroll as independent study with Dr. Carlos Davidson, Environmental Studies Dept. (more info on how to do this at the first class). Class meets Thursdays 12-2 (tentative– this may change to better fit everyone’s schedule) in HH 748, outdoors weather permitting.

contact: Jacqueline (jacquelinesarratt@yahoo.com), or Daniel (danielvi@att.net)

EC Core

A primary goal of this class is to both refine and expand the functions of the Experimental College at SFSU. This class will facilitate a collaborative effort for students and other participants to research, observe, innovate, and apply alternative modes of education We plan to emphasize the importance of learning in an open, collaborative environment, as a reaction to the sense of isolation that many of us feel in our homes, schools, and places of work. As we begin to understand the components of relevant educational experience, we also plan for the ongoing development of the Experimental College. In this respect, our classroom will serve an administrative function in addition to its role as a research space.

Class meets Wednesdays 10-12, location TBA,

contact: Andrew (there35@gmail.com), Dominique (d.monee@gmail.com), or Henry (york.henry@gmail.com) 

Your Class Here

There is still time for classes to be formed.  All you need is a group of people who want to study the same topic(s), a place to meet (empty rooms can be found all over campus), and —if you want credit—a department chair’s approval. 

Article on experimental college in the 1960's

this article is an interview of Ian J. Grand, a former coordinator of the first experimental college that lasted from 1966 till it's demise during the1968 strike. described in this article is the inception, formation, ideals,and politics of the experimental college from Ian's point of view.

original pdf here

http://www.mediafire.com/?y20ptyh7dxj2ac2

and if you don't have time to read the whole thing here's a version with some important points underlined

http://www.mediafire.com/?34dl4msxq3brtwq

notations can be read with pdf-exchanger viewer right here

http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer/download