End of Year Reflections
A round up of podcasts, events & other bits!
Hello and welcome to Friends in Common.
It’s wild that we’ve had our book out in the world now for 6 months! Thanks to everyone who has been sending in their thoughts, questions and reflections, its been amazing to see people engage with it. You can currently buy paper copies via Pluto for the outrageous price of £4 (or £2.50 for the eBook), as part of their Xmas sale - and obviously we think its a perfect gift for all those friends (and enemies) you’ve yet to buy a present for.
Its been a while since our last post, but we’re not going to spend too long apologising or pontificating about the lack of activity. Suffice to say, a mixture of post-Book inertia, fatigue, work and life has been getting in the way. This, mixed with an underlying sense of ambivalence about Substack as a platform, sparked by calls to boycott through the year, but also by a general sense of wanting to not plunge back into another cycle of ‘useful platform enshittifies over time, revealing its core functions as profit-making (and Nazi hosting?) husk’ that any elder-millenial readers will be all too familiar with by now.
On this, Joel has been recently trying to extract himself from various social media platforms, whilst remembering the creativity and fun that can be found through html self-coding and old utopian notions of the internet. You can see the silly little personal website he’s started on this tip here, and read more about the crew in Glasgow that is inspiring this here. Hopefully we’ll get a Friends in Common neocities up and running at some point, and try this blog off-platform. For now though, no judgement for anyone who uses these sites (except Twitter maybe, judgement there surely?), embedded as they are in the freelance economy, not to mention many of our most intimate relationships.
Joel’s also been busy working on an amazing archival and film project looking at the history of Bradford Resource Centre, and the wider Network of Trade Union and Resource Centres around Britain. You can read a little Zine he wrote about this here, and explore the Friends of Bradford Resource Centre website here (film to uploaded in the future!). For those who are interested, our pal Rosie Hampton has a brilliant recent piece in the New Internationalist about a similar network of left-wing spaces and social centres, and will be talking about this in Glasgow on Wednesday 10th December. Joel was also involved in writing this report on the policing of Palestine Solidarity Protests in Scotland, with SCALP and Netpol, available here.
Laura has also had a hectic old time, with a new piece in the History Workshop Journal on history as a form of intergenerational friendship, available here. She’s also organising a conference with Marc Jaffré on Sociability & Political life, asking: can there be politics without sociability? How have friendship, intimacy, socialising & informal attachments been central to political projects & movements?
More info here, abstracts need sending by the (very romantic) date of Feb 14th.
We’ve also spoken on various podcasts and panels since the end of the summer, thanks to everyone who organised, facilitated and participated in those! You can listen back to us discuss the book with Chris Brown for Radicals In Conversation here, and with Marybeth Hamilton for the History Workshop Podcast here. Joel also spoke on a panel at the Edinburgh Radical Bookfair about ‘Solidarities from the Ground Up’, which you can watch back here.
We’ve got some nice things planned already for the new year, including some potential book talks in Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Leeds & Brighton - more info to come. If you’d like to book us for a talk or workshop just get in touch!
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