June 2021 newsletter

The pandemic has been challenging for us at RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab. But we’re glad to be able to share some upcoming events and some updates about what we’ve been up to.

Upcoming and Ongoing

Daily readings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report

June 25 to July 1 – Thunder Bay

Join us at noon every day from June 25 to July 1 at Thunder Bay’s Waverly Park for a collective reading of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, in the name of educating the community about residential schools, their legacy, and our collective responsibilities. Click here for more info.

Imagining community safety beyond colonial policing workshop

June 30 – Thunder Bay

Can we, as a community, imagine safety and thriving after we abolish the police? Join us from 6:30-9pm on June 30 for an online workshop. Preregistration is required.

Conspiracies and Countergames Online Summer Institute

July 19 to August 5 – Worldwide

Join us on Mondays and Thursdays from 1-3pm Eastern for a series of discussions with artists, activists, scholars, novelists, and game designers about the scourge of conspiracy fantasies in our anxious age and the ways we can confront them. Click here for more information.

Conspiracy Games and Countergames podcast

RiVAL is hosting a podcast about conspiracies in a gamified capitalist world, produced co-director Max Haiven along with Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and Adam Kingsmith. The first four episodes are live and new ones are released weekly. Listen here.

This podcast is the second season of The Order of Unmanageable Risks. The first season, launched in the pandemic, focused on capitalism and anxiety.
Updates from the past year

Updates from the pandemic…

In May of 2020 RiVAL co-director Max Haiven’s book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts was published by Pluto Press. As part of it’s launch we at RiVAL co-hosted a number of excellent online events which you can find archived here.

In July 2020 RiVAL released the first two volumes of VAGABONDS: a series of radical short books or pamphlets edited by Max and published by Pluto. These were Angela Mitropoulos’s Pandemonium: Proliferating Borders of Capitalism and the Pandemic Swerve and RiVAL co-director Cassie Thornton‘s The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future.

Speaking of which, Cassie’s project The Hologram has been a major success story of the pandemic. It offers anyone a lightweight, do-it-together way to support one another in the good times and the bad. Inspired by the radical grassroots solidarity clinics invented during Greece’s austerity crisis, The Hologram is one part art work, one part science fiction, one part ritual and one part collective care protocol.

Max has also been writing a lot of things, which you can find on his website: maxhaiven.com