We’re glad to finally present Issue 3 of Trespass Journal!
In this issue, which is online and freely distributed, you’ll find a translation from English to Dutch of a journal article about how a moral panic was generated to enforce the criminalisation of squatting in the Netherlands and a translation to French of a brief text about migration on Idomeni in Greece, near to Macedonia, which was previously published in Trespass 2 in Italian.
As interventions in five languages, we have an analysis of the lack of support to the ZAD in Brittany, plus short pieces about the opening of a new anarchist social centre in the Paris suburbs, community resistance to preserve a park in London, the demolition of a community gym in Athens, an (unsuccessful) eviction threat in Catania, and an eviction in Catalonia. And a report on the resquat of the watertower in Utrecht! There’s plenty more news and analysis on this website.
The language diversity contained in this issue mirrors the commitment we have been putting in towards overcoming the dominance of the English language and creating a journal that goes beyond borders. We’ve also been updating the blog in different languages. HOWEVER as you will no doubt have noticed, this introduction is only in English and we are sorry for that. We can only do so much, and this issue was already very overdue … to translate it into Catalan, Spanish, Dutch and French is too much work.
You’ll notice that this issue we have no peer-reviewed articles, something that leaves us wondering why the journal hasn’t been able to attract more deeper analysis. Of course these pieces take longer to write. Maybe this is something people are not interested in? Yet we hear the conversations around us every day and hope people are motivated to submit for issue 4. Feel free to join in! But then again, recent shitty experiences lead us to clarify that this journal won’t be publishing career-oriented academic texts.
To continue further, the activist / academic divide is an interesting one, since it is not uncommon to violently denounce those professors detached from reality up in their ivory towers parasiting on social movements for their own cultural capital gains, whilst everyone hates the activist who guards their own special shiny truth and tells everyone else they are wrong, normally because they are younger. Although academic debates might be easy to dismiss for those who are alien to it, its dire consequences can be observed in many places, might it be the ZAD of NDDL, the scene in Barcelona, etc. Dissent being silenced by middle class politics.
Academics play a crucial role in this, with progressive bureaucrats eager to write their latest book or phd candidates being paid 3,000 euros a month to study deprivation… What we are seeing is the standard colonial dynamic, which is pretty fucking ironic considering the current academic trend to talk about the commons. Meanwhile, most people actually exist somewhere in the middle of this bullshit dichotomy, engaged in the university as a way to make money but also going on demos, or having a heated discussion about Foucault’s relevance or not for the Arab Spring whilst sitting in a squatted social centre. Besides being involved in local and transnational struggles, we ourselves write academic articles sometimes and see it as part of the struggle (whilst constantly interrogating ourselves as to whether our work is actually useful to movements or not).
Last but not least, we’re still gloriously unconcerned about graphic design and will continue to place our energy on providing quality content. People have offered to make “nicer” issues, but then they flake. Nevertheless, we’ll be happy to get support to improve whatever could be enhanced, just let us know.
Enjoy the issue and submit something for issue 4!
