English Translation of “Afroepistemology and Cimarron Pedagogy”

Jesus “Chucho” Garcia

Afroepistemology & Cimmaron Pedagogy

by Jesús Chucho García

from the book Afrodescendencias: Voces en Resistencia

EUROPEAN NEGATION OF THE AFROSUBSAHARIAN PHILOSOPHY AND KNOWLEDGE 

When Eurocentrism emerges it’s as a hegemonic political-ideological axis of domination, it does so on the basis of depreciation for the “others” peoples of the world, for totally economic purposes. And behind that, the disqualification of religious, intellectual and biological arguments. Institutions such as the Catholic Church, with blood and fire, impose on that “other world” the “Catholic” god, and for their part, the scientific communities of the time would see others – African beings – as the missing links among the monkeys or gorillas and the “humans.” Together, the religious and the scientific, become complicit in the emergence of a perspective of Eurocentric knowledge that would lead to a philosophy of contempt.

That philosophy of contempt became “Eurocentrism” and from there it developed into “universalism.” The “classic” Eurocentric arises as a result of geo-euro-narcissism. In short, the world began to revolve around Western Eurocentric hegemony.

In the 18th century with the most advanced intellectuals of Western Euro-geo-narcissism that philosophical essays appeared to justify thoughts that are unique, universal and vertical and to impose their Eurocentric knowledge and philosophy as an absolute truth that continues to endure to this day.

The time of the industrial revolution is the time of the consolidation of capitalism, the rise of the great European powers, where a discussion scenario will be created that will include the existence or not of God, the questioning of feudalism and its different modalities and the concept of the power of the reigns prolonged in the transfer of power to their descendants.

From that century, the prevailing vertical government models and their economic models for intensive exploitation purposes would arise not only for human beings but also for the sensitive planetary ecosystem. Reviewing the bibliography of that century is extremely important since it is from there that a form of thought would be built that will come to dominate the different European philosophical currents and its projection into conquered and colonized countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the so-called “Latin” America and the Caribbean which stripped them of the different ways of thinking and knowing the world.

In his extraordinary book Laurente Estéve (2002), criticizes these avant-garde thinkers of the 18th century. Estéve tells us that Montesquieu in his book “The spirit of the laws”, among other things, affirmed that: “most of the peoples of the Coast of Africa are wild or barbaric. They don’t have industries, they don’t have a point for art, they have precious metals in abundance that they get from the hands of nature. (Laurent, 2002: 162)

This vision about the “others” kind of the men would influenced the thinking of the independence heroes of the Americas, who spoke of the “lights”, failed to illuminate the Africans way of thinking and instead simplified it via obscurantism as “savagery”

This idea remained in Europe until the end of the 18th century, supported by Jean Jaques Rousseau, who believed in the improvement of human races through climate and education, believing that savages and orangutans could learn to speak and were able to reach the intelligence and science only with which they were granted. (Harris, 1982: 70-71)

The great philosophers like Kant (1982), Hegel, Hume and Voltaire would add to the construction of the philosophy of contempt. Immanuel Kant refers in his theoretical classics the following:

In the torrid countries man matures before in all aspects, but does not reach the perfection of temperate zones. The human race in its most perfect expression manifests itself in the white race. Indians and yellows have a meager talent. Blacks have an even lower level, and the lowest of all is that of a part of the American population. The inhabitants of the temperate zones are more beautiful physically, more workers, more cheerful, more moderate in their passions and more intelligent than any other human race in the world. (Kant, 1982: 78-79)

This expression by Kant about the cult of Western beauty is justification what I have called “euro/geonarcicism”. In his eagerness to disqualify aesthetics and the link with some scientific knowledge of Africans and their diaspora, Kant attacks, relying on another racist philosopher, the German David Hume (1711-1776), who argued that knowledge came from a high sensitivity, and according to him the Africans did not have enough sensitivity to achieve some kind of knowledge:

The blacks of Africa by nature lack a sensitivity that rises above the insignificant. Mr. Hume challenges to be presented with an example that a black man has shown talent, and states that among the hundreds of thousands transported to foreign lands, and although many of them have obtained freedom, not one has been found that has I have imagined something great art in art, in science or in any other honorable quality, while whites frequently present the case of those who, due to their superior conditions, rise from a humble state and conquer an advantageous reputation. (Kant, 1982)

Not content to denigrate the Afro-epistemological development that already existed in sub-Saharan Africa, they ignored that, for example, in what is now Mali, there were universities such as Sankore, a large Afro-epistemic training center located in Toumbuctu or commented on the journey of Abubaraki II to the lands of what is now called America.

Before the emergence of historical Eurocentrism there were already historians such as Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) who systematized not only the history of the Middle East, but also built bridges with Africa:

Its monumental history of the Berbers is the most complete socio-historical study ever written about the Maghreb, in one of the volumes of this history it dedicates famous pages to the Mali empire. We owe him the list of the sovereigns of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries until the year 1390. The prolegomena constitute the basis of sociology and highlight the principles of a scientific and objective history, based on the criticism of the sources. (Niane, 1985: 25)

Eurocentric executioners also kill with silence, silencing the great historical contributions that are not in their circles and that is an evil that remains in a strong Eurocentric academic trend and reproduced with the assimilated academics of the Americas, Europe and Africa.

Two other fourteenth-century Arab researchers “Ibn Battuta and Al-’UMari in essence, show how many fruitful observations belied the stereotyped ideas of bookish culture” (Devise, 1985: 689).

Following the philosophy of contempt, embodied in Mr. Hume, let’s read how he attacks the Afrosubsaharan spiritual concept:

So essential is the difference between these two human races; It seems as great in spiritual faculties as color. The religion of the Fetithes, among them extended, is perhaps a kind of idolatrous cult that falls into the insignificant as deep as it seems possible in human nature. A bird’s feather, a cow horn, a shell or any other vulgar thing, once consecrated with some words, becomes the object of reverence and invocation in oaths. (Kant, 1982)

Once again, ignorance is expressed in this quotation for the domination of Europeans about African spirituality. It was not a fetish, as the European slave traders disparagingly placed the orishas, ​​voodoo or nkisis. It was not about idolatrous cults but about the three-dimensional relationship of the world of the living, the dead and those who will come in the future. Spirituality was and is part of the power of knowledge in the African tradition. What for Africa was already great knowledge settled at the beginning of the 10th century, for these social scientists of the 18th century, it was not knowledge, nor spirituality.

Long before the French declaration of the French revolution in the 18th century, the Kurukan Fuga letter, the first letter on rights and respect for the human being, was written in the former Mandinga empire in 1236. That letter also reflects respect for nature as part of spirituality. The Europeans of the “Enlightenment” never understood that the basis of African spirituality has to do with nature, the cosmos, as well as the relationship between physical death and continuity of life in a spiritual dimension. That these Eurocentric philosophers could not understand. They never understood what we call today as an afroepistemology.

For his part, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) said: “What we understand as Africa is the segregated and lacking history, that is, what is still wrapped in extremely primitive forms, which we have analyzed as a previous step before of venturing into universal history ”(Hegel, 1976: 9).

In that sense, the Russian researcher Dmitri A Olderogge, before this Hegel trial, argues that this conception greatly influenced linguists and historians, since that division of historical and non-historical peoples placed the former as engines of history “while that the passivity of the seconds would have kept them out of the spiritual development of humanity. According to Hegel there is no real historical evolution in Africa itself (Olderoge, 1979: 24).

The three essential aspects of Afroepistemology: knowledge, spirituality and human rights – which already existed in subsaharan Africa – were despised by Westerners to impose the philosophy of exclusion, racism and violence, and ignorance of the knowledge of others.

As it is expressed to us by the sage of Burkina Fasso, Joseph Ki-Zerbo (1922-2006):

The history of Africa, as of all mankind, is, in effect, the story of an awareness. The history of Africa must be rewritten because until now it has been frequently masked, camouflaged, disfigured and mutilated. By “the force of things”, that is to say by ignorance and interest. This continent that traumatized centuries of oppression has seen as generations of travelers, blacksmiths, explorers, missionaries, proconsuls and scholars from all over the world petrified the image of misery, barbarism, irresponsibility and chaos in their image. (Ki-Zerbo 1979: 7)

This rosary of contempt was imposed over the centuries, and even managed to permeate many African and Afro-descendant assimilated intellectuals who now despised their own history, hence the need to reconstruct memory and rewrite history as Ki-Zerbo poses.

Most European chroniclers in contact with sub-Saharan Africa described with their conceptual arsenal what for them was diabolical, bestial and that did not correspond to their “civilizational” model. Like the chroniclers of “Indians” or America, they described, within their respective ignorances, the unknown as fantastic, abnormal and monstrous expressing this in their drawings by placing their heads on the belly of men and women from “those lands.” But another aspect to note is that this philosophy of Eurocentric contempt desperately racialized, for economic purposes, the relationship between human beings as expressed by the former general director of UNESCO, Senegalese Amadou Mbo:

There is also another phenomenon that has significantly impaired the objective study of the African past. I refer to the appearance, with the trafficking of blacks and colonization, of racial clichés that generate contempt and misunderstanding and so deeply rooted that they even corrupted the very concepts of historiography. From the moment in which the nations of “whites” and “blacks” were resorted to generically designate masters and subjugated peoples, Africans had to fight against a double economic and psychological servitude. Recognizable by the pigmentation of the skin, destined for work in mines and on plantations, turned into a commodity like any other, the African came to embody, in the conscience of his oppressors, a racial essence. Imaginary and illusory inferior, black. (Mbo, 1979: 5)

The long process of structuring the psychological inferiority of the African being and his descendants – with the objective of economic exploitation by Europe – definitely marked the history of the peoples of Africa and their diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean space. The dominant Catholic religion, both in Africa and in the Americas, contributed greatly to the psychological introjection of the inferiority of a white, superior God, before the Afro-sub-Saharan gods and turned into demons.

Westerners were sure that spirituality constituted a form of resistance, hence the dominant religion became a coercive instrument to erase the African worldview, since this was a danger to break these underestimation stereotypes.

Eliminating the languages ​​of the Africans to impose that of the communicationist, since language is a factor of unity and permanent struggle, was an instrument of cultural degradation fiercely used by the West to achieve its goal of psycholinguistic domination.

In Africa they imposed the colonial languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, today Portuguese, French and English are dominant in most Afro-Sub-Saharan countries. They tried to make the different ethnic groups feel ethnolinguistic shame in order to better assimilate, colonize and recolonize them.

In the diaspora, colonialism did not accept ethnolinguistic communication, hence they mixed men and women of one ethnic origin with another so that they could only communicate with the language of the master. In the diaspora the essential aspects of languages ​​of African origin were only reduced in religious spaces, especially the Yoruba, Kikongo, Efik-Efok and Fon languages.

The person’s name, as it is known in Africasubsahariana, represents a story, a symbol, a tradition. That was very clear to the colonialists as a factor of domination, hence in Africa and in the diaspora they tried to erase the name of ethnic origin. In the Kongo Dia Ntotela (today Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Congo Brazzaville), the kings or Ntotelas assimilated to Catholicism assumed Catholic names like Joao I, whose original name was Nzinga Nkuwu.

In the diaspora, few names were preserved of African origin. However, many ethnonyms were preserved mainly in Afro-Colombian, Afro-Ecuadorian, Afro-Basel communities, such as Arara, Matamba, Luango, Mina, Lucumi, among others. The names of places (place-names) of African origin were also preserved to be preserved in memory, such as Birongo, Mandinga, Yanga, among other towns and places in the Americas.

African spirituality is the basis of his philosophy, it is what gives him understanding and perception of the world, hence the slave trade and slavery tried both in African territories and in the diaspora to combat symbols, oracles and worldview , which they did not achieve. As the Yoruba philosophy says “Bí Olórun oba mi idá mi nì mò nse”, that is to say “I am as my God has created me”.

APPROXIMATION TO AFROEPISTEMOLOGY

Afroepistemology is the knowledge and perception that we Africans and their descendants have of our own worlds, our worldview, our ways of being, gesturing, walking, loving, being, sharing. That vision is the basis of the social construction of knowledge without it being mediated by others. Our world is our world, which we can share with others on equal terms. Thus we have built our philosophy of African dignity, as opposed to the philosophy of contempt elaborated by the Eurocentric vision.

African and Afro-descendant philosophy, at a time being questioned by some African academic scholars “assimilated” to the European philosophical pattern, does not emerge or emerge as a response to Eurocentrism. It exists and period. As the Nigerian, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Wole Soyinka, said, “the tiger does not say his tigritud … jumps.”

The Encyclopedists and intellectuals of the Enlightenment never gave a thought to the idea that there could be an African philosophy, or at least an African worldview different from that of Europeans, made invisible, denied, ignored within their own ignorance the African philosophical and historical currents as result, first of their own developments as a result of the civilizations existing in that continent and secondly by the contact with Islam in an ebb and flow, exchanges, adaptation and retraining, taking as an example the dialogic relationship between the former Mali Empire structured by the leader Bambara (Mandinga) Sundjata Keita at the end of the 13th century and the visit Kanku Musa, Keita’s nephew, to Mecca and his stay in Cairo in 1336. Subsequently, “the successor of Sundjata, who was his son Mansa Uli, made a pilgrimage to Mecca during the time of Mamluk Sultan Baybars. The Islamic concept of the empire (Mali) took shape under the power of Mansa Musa and his brother Mansa Sulayman (1341-1360), who favored the construction of mosques and the development of Islamic knowledge” (Herbek, 1992: 99).

This connection between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, through Islam, came to strengthen Afro-epistemology, long before the arrival of the West.

Mali had become an important reference for the world at that time with the creation of Sankore University and became the most important reference in sub-Saharan Africa for the spread of Islam.

CONCEPTUALIZING AFROPHILOSOPHY

For a long time the West was defined by a monopoly of knowledge, arbitrarily defining what is and is not science, or what is and is not philosophy, of course they tried to castrate the diversity of thought. However, as some African authors say the Africanity of our philosophy resides, as Hountondji said, above all in the geographical belonging of those who produce it and in the intellectual relationship. As a consequence, to speak of African philosophy is to designate the authors of this philosophy and the recipients and affirm that they are all African natives or African cultural heirs of an African nature and descent (Kinyongo, 1983: 414).

If we believe AJ Smet’s claims that the problem of the existence of an African philosophy has been raised for the first time by P. Tempels in 1944, his predecessors had not used the term philosophy only in the sense psychology and wisdom (Kinongo, 1983).

That the Reverend Tempels was raised in the context of philosophical contempt on the part of Europe the existence of another way of thinking, especially in Africa, was undoubtedly a heresy.

But philosophy without historical knowledge has little foundation. That is why the binomial philosophy and historical knowledge go hand in hand, one justifies the other.

Hence this extraordinary reflection of Amadou Mbo, when, UNESCO, begins the process of writing the general history of Africa.

For a long time, myths and prejudices of all kinds have hidden the real history of Africa from the world. African societies were held by societies that could not have history. Despite the important work carried out, since the first decades of this century (20th century), by pioneers such as Leo Frobenius, Maurice Delafosse, Arturo Labriola, a good number of non-African specialists linked to certain postulates held that these societies did not they could be subject to scientific study, mainly due to lack of sources and written documents. (Mbo, 1985: 13)

These North African specialists had an approach to sub-Saharan Africa based on the works of the chroniclers, logbooks of the captains of the slave ships, report of the colonial administrators, colonizing Catholic priests and travelers. On the other hand, if some of them were physically in “those remote corners” of the planet or as the novelist Joseph Conrad said “in the heart of darkness”, the perception they had was prejudiced perception. Very few, such as the French ethnographer Marcel Grileau, took into account the “word of the elders” or the connoisseurs of African cultures, the case of the Dogon in Mali, as well as the segmented spiritualities in a story that gave and gives sense of town

Returning to Amathar Mbo, it reminds us:

Although The Iliad and the Odyssey could rightly be considered essential sources of ancient Greece, however, all value to the African oral tradition was denied, that memory of the peoples that provides the plot of so many events that have marked their lives. When writing the history of a part of Africa, they were limited to outside sources of this continent, to give a vision not of what the march of the African peoples could be, but of what was believed to be. Frequently, as the European average age, production systems and social relations, as well as political institutions, were taken as a point of reference, they were only understood by reference to Europe’s past. (Mbo, 1985)

Today we are facing an other reality. It is a long process of demystifying the epistemic contribution of sub-Saharan Africa to humanity. Already the works of intellectuals such as Cheikh Anta Diop made these contributions very clear. Subsequently, the successive meetings organized by UNESCO since 1966 between Africa and America have left an important mark to rebuild it. These Eurocentric approaches today are questioned both from the emergence of new academic practices and from the spiritual practices of Afro-Saharan and diaspora carriers.

THE CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC POLICIES IN EDUCATION

It is pedagogy, understanding how the daily practices of transmission of the substrate of the knowledge of civilizations, is one of the fundamental tools to resume our Afro-epistemology. The West tried to impose, and still continues to do, two types of pedagogy. The first was the pedagogy of submission, where the church played a fundamental role through forced religious practices. That pedagogy was expressed in a rosary of recommendations to cleanse the soul of sin to our ancestors and ancestors, erase spiritual practices, changing names, eliminating tongues until kneeling before the cross and before God on earth represented by the Catholic / Apostolic and Roman ecclesiastical power and formerly the master and today the power of wild capitalism. Evangelization was the masterpiece of the pedagogy of submission, then it became in the words of Pablo Freire, the pedagogy of the oppressed (1970). That is, the introjection of oppression as hopelessness. The other pedagogy was that of reproduction, understanding it as the process of assimilating the contemptuous knowledge of the other towards us, reproduced in the formal educational system with a well structured and castrating curriculum about our ancestral knowledge.

Preserving the cultural codes which originated in Africa, having gone through long traumatic processes of slavery, racism and discrimination, is not simply an act of heroism, it is an act of resilience, that is, having had a high coefficient of struggle against adversity. But to preserve those cultural codes expressed in the touches of the different rhythmic cells of the drums, in the codes of ethics (human values), cuisine, hair styles, among others, a technique, a methodical one was needed to transmit all those codes. That is what we call Maroon pedagogy, and we say Maroon for having traversed the times and obstacles that the dominant sectors placed on the road.

These pedagogical practices, recognized or not by the academy and the formal education system, have managed to overcome denigration and substation. Transmitting, conserving and resizing Cimarroan Pedagogy was, is and will continue to be a permanent fight against adversity. The pedagogical practices of the cimarronaje are in open and permanent struggle against the practices of the pedagogy of reproduction. Both coexist in the formal and non-formal education system, it is a totally antagonistic contradiction that is in us and ourselves.

The pedagogical practices of reproduction are all those vertical attitudes of the facilitator or teacher in the educational system in the transmission of Eurocentric knowledge. They express the centrality of power and knowledge. They are practical, castrating and totally contemptuous towards diversity, difference and rejection of possible complementarities between academically legitimated knowledge and socially and culturally produced knowledge.

Cimarron pedagogies have the purpose of fostering our knowledge of both Africa and the diaspora. It is a challenge that we, the Afro-descendant teachers in alliance with those who have conserved, recreated and innovated the original cultures of Africa in all their diversity, have to accept. It is pedagogy of the cimarronaje, the forms from the musical perspectives expressed in the development of more than one hundred and sixty rhythms of the Batas drums in the Ocha rule, as well as their different dances. The practices of maroon pedagogies in food patterns of Afrosubsaharan origin, as well as in the field of aesthetics and ethical contributions for the construction of fairer and more humane societies. Afroepistemology and Pedagogy of Cimarronaje is a proposal that should invite us to break the molds of folkloric or fetish reductionism to which we have been subjected by Western sciences denying all diversity. It is the search for our own paradigms in the framework of the Decade of Afro-descendant peoples that add to the incessant process of reconstruction and reconstruction of our history full of pain and hope.

It is urgent to implement in the educational systems of Latin America and the Caribbean the contributions of Africa and its descendants to our societies in two fundamental aspects: First modify the laws that govern our educational systems, for example in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela after a process In the struggle with Afro-descendant teachers and traditionalists, we achieved that in our new Education Law (2009), our African was recognized. Second, review the curricula and incorporate in them the historical, cultural, technological, spiritual aspects among others of the Africans and their descendants. 

Former president Lula did this in Brazil with the compulsory teaching of specific texts on the history of Africans and their descendants and the translation of the eight volumes of the General History of Africa into Portuguese. At the meeting of the creation of CELAC in Caracas in 2011, agreement No. 17 states, “the participation of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples in the independence struggles and recognizing their moral, political, economic, spiritual and cultural contributions in the conformation of our identities and in the construction of our nations and democratic processes ”(CELAC, 2011).

This recognition, together with the recognition that our governments must make to the Decade of Afro-descendant Peoples, serves as an anchor to support us as academics and activists to press the educational public policies of our countries.

BIBLIOGRAFÍA 

CELAC 2011 Declaración de la Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y del Caribe (Caracas: CELAC). 

Devisse, J. 1985 “África en las relaciones intercontinentales” en Historia General de África (Madrid: Unesco). 

Freire, P. 1970 Pedagogía del Oprimido (Montevideo: Tierra Nueva) 

Hegel, G. F. W. 1976 Filosofía de la Historia (Buenos Aires: Claridad). 

Herbek, I. 1992 “La expansión del islam en África hacia el sur del Sahara” en Historia General de África. (Madrid: Unesco). 

Hernández, A. et. al. s/f Las ideas Racista y búsqueda de la identidad 

Mexicana. (Zaragoza: Facultad de Estudios Superiores, UNAM). Kant, I. 1982 Lo bello y lo sublime (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe) séptima edición.

Kinyongo, J. 1982 La philosophie africaine et son histoire en Les etudes philosophiques (París: Presses Universitaires de France). Ki-Zerbo, J. 1979 Un continente en busca de su pasado (París: El correo de la Unesco) agosto-septiembre.

Laurente, E. 2002 Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot: du genre humaine au bois d’ébéne (París: Unesco).

Mbo, A. 1979 La historia general de África (París: El Correo de la Unesco).

Niane, D. T. 1985 Historia General de África (Madrid; París: Tecnos; Unesco).

Olderogge, D. A. 1979 Los homínidos africanos contra una teoría errónea (París: Correo de la Unesco) agosto-septiembre. 

Why CastroChavismo is not Antisemitic, But Those who Deny It Are

Chavez and Soros – United in Hate against the Republican Party

CastroChavismo is not “Cultural Marxism”

Use of the term CastroChavismo is descriptive of the Socialist-Affiliated Transnational Advocacy Networks in the U.S. receiving support and funding for theactivitiesfrom socialist governments in Latin America (PSUV, PCC, PT); socialist parties in the EU (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung); and transnational NGOs (Open Society Initiative).

The term explicitly alludes to descriptions of activities historically engaged in by the Cuban Communist Party categorized as subversion, while simultaneously differentiating it from narratives about “Cultural Marxism” that may or may not have antisemitic overtones.

People who say I’m being Deleuzional by defining it as a repetition that is also different would be correct.

CastroChavismo is a set of activities with goals that can be organized according to principles of  Knowledge Management.

Individuals participating in the events and activities associated with CastroChavismo can be classified as antisemitic for two reasons.

(1) Functional support of the goals and organizations connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as others that have avowed their desire to destroy the state of Israel – the lone Jewish-majority state in the world, which is located in the historic Jewish Homeland – which has been documented by Timothy Pearce, by Tariq Ali, and can be shown at in the alliances of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.

The claim that someone’s ethnic Jewish background, George Soros, who does not even practice Judaism and who Israel also seeks to expose, within the analytical framework of CastroChavismo does not make it antisemitic.

In fact, if we were to extend that same logic – given my own ethnic Jewish background – one could just as similarly claim that all those who deny the historical correctness of CastroChavismo are themselves, anti-Semites.

In fact, people who try and disqualify interlocutors because of this are using a long-established anti-semitic trope.

In fact, given the aforementioned political orientation of those involved with CastroChavismo networks and their use of antisemitic tropes – it’s appropriate to say that people who deny CastroChavismo are themselves antisemitic as their attempt to police speech acts supports those that seek the elimination of Israel.

 

 

 

Layla Brown-Vincent: Portrait of a Venezuelan Academic Propagandist

Abstract:
This article first provides an overview of Layla Brown-Vincent’s public record relations with Black Liberation Movements and Revolutionary Socialist Parties that have avowed active committments of political solidarity with the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

It then defines cimmarron pedagogy, a concept introduced to Brown-Vincent via Jesus “Chucho” Garcia. Following this it examines two academic works in the historic ethnographic vein written by Layla Brown-Vincent in light of her avowed committment to pan-Africanist revolutionary struggles.

Based on these examples of her writing, a clearer definition of cimmaron pedagogy is made: Academic publications within this rubric of scholarship is characterized by the use of loaded language, the making of claims that are unsupported by evidence, the provision of explanations that have relevant facts omitted and the use of unreliable sources all in the service of furthering personal political committments.

Keywords:
Disinformation, Political Manipulation, Subversive Academic Networks, São Paulo Forum

The Revolutionary Black Academic and Cuba/Venezuela Axis

Layla Brown-Vincent currently teaches at the University of Massachussetts Boston as an assistant professor of Africana Studies in the college of Liberal Arts. She recieved an M.A. and Ph.D from Duke University in Cultural Anthropology and according to her biographic description her areas of expertise are “Pan-Africanism, Black feminism, Blacks in Latin America, radical social movements in the African diaspora, autoethnography.”

Her undergraduate degree came from North Carolina Central University – where black liberation and Hands Off Venezuela activist Ajamu Baraka hosts national assemblies and the same university that graduated Tamika Thompson, a member of the Workers World Party – an organization that has for over ten years allied itself to political action networks allied to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’s vision of a covert Fifth Socialist International modeled on network principles.

As is evident by the text and photo connecting her with Lamont Lilly in this article about the National Moment of Silence, Layla Brown-Vincent was also one of the co-organizers for this Workers World Party cultural front organization that sought to unite potential activists via appreciation of performance poetry and social justice following the justified shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

According to the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party and her PhD thesis (more on this below) she and her uncle Bob Brown have travelled together multiple times to Venezuela as All-African People’s Revolutionary Party delegates. As you’d expect given their name, they are “a revolutionary Pan-Africanist socialist party“. According to the Boston-Cuba Solidarity Coalition Layla’s also travelled to Cuba with the assistance of the African Awareness Association.

In her doctoral thesis, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela, she identifies herself as a trans-generational revolutionary and describes her attendance at the Network of Afro-Venezuelans organized Fourth Encounter of Afrodescendants in the Americas and the Caribbean for Revolutionary Transformations in the Framework of the International Year of Afrodescendants in Solidarity with Haiti as being a major production with a seemingly large budget” and described multiple encuentros with Jesus “Chucho” Garcia.

In her article Seeing It for Wearing It: Autoethnography as Black Feminist Methodology she describes her engagement with activists connected to the Bolivarian Revolution: “Not long after I completed coursework and began to conduct fieldwork, my interlocutors in Venezuela would often ask me about what kind of political work I was engaged in at home.” She openly avows that these Bolivarian activists had a directive force on her political engagement, stating that her “attention was drawn back to my place of birth, the United States of America, largely as a result of the chiding of my Venezuelan comrades.”

Defining Cimarron Pedagogy

Layla Brown-Vincent came to my attention over a year ago during my investigation into academics that had engaged with Jesus “Chucho” Garcia – an ambassador to the U.S. from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and member of the communist-oriented Venezuelan Revolutionary Party, that was ejected from the United States. While no specific reason was ever publicized, charting his public activities one finds a significant number of him interacting with various socialist and black ethno-nationalist organizations such as the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the Southern Human Rights Organizers Conference.

The above images come from this interview with Chucho and in it one learns of his and his academic comrades strategy of promoting revolutionary educational activities via educational institutions sponsored by Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil when Lula was President and UNESCO.

Before starting the research for this article I knew nothing about UNESCO but I can now understand why it was that President Donald Trump recently withdrew the United States from it. Bivol, a multiple-award winning investigative journalism outlet from Bulgaria who focuses on corrupt practices have highlighted a number of UNESCO scandals.

By reading Bivol’s coverage of UNESCO I’ve learned that the director of the organization during the period that Jesus “Chuco” Garcia refers to above was Irina Bokova, and that she was the daughter of “one of the ideologists of the communist regime of Bulgarian dictator Todor Zhivkov and editor-in-chief of the official print newspaper of the Communist party Rabotnichesko delo (Workers Actions), where he published his own glorifications of Stalin” and that before her role in UNESCO she was a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party. This fact is interesting in light of Layla Brown-Vincent’s avowal of an multiple-generational socialist lineage by iteself. But it is all the more so given that Audrey Azoulay, a member of the French Socialist Party, was elected to Bokova’s former position and provided her with diplomatic immunity via a $1 (yes, one dollar) consultancy contract seemingly intended to halt ongoing criminal investigations into corruption.

One of the concepts transmitted via her encounters with Chucho’s intellectual ouevre and activism – one that clearly has become influential given UNESCO’s support of it –  is cimarron pedagogy. 

Given that Brown-Vincent describes cimarron pedagogy in her doctoral thesis as “a weapon of history, a method of bearing witness to methods of resistance, struggle, freedom and dignity passed down from enslaved ancestors to present communities of African descended peoples struggling for freedom” and that she descibes “auto-ethnography” as an area specialization she clearly identifies strongly with this. But what all does this description entail? In his article Afroepistemology and Cimarron Pedagogy Jesus “Chucho” Garcia exapands on this and describes the idea as follows:

“to preserve those cultural codes expressed in the touches of the different rhythmic cells of the drums, in the codes of ethics (human values), cuisine, hair styles, among others, a technique, a methogy was needed to transmit all those codes. That is what we call Maroon pedagogy, and we say Maroon for having traversed the times and obstacles that the dominant sectors placed on the road.”

While this succint quote may give the appearance that Chucho’s intellectual project, and thus Layla Brown-Vincent’s is just about preserving cultural norms and values, which is not problematic, but it is not. It is the promotion of a categorical negation of all “non-Afro” modes of thought, i.e. civic laws and the institutions which enforce them, and it’s replacement with an unarticulated vision of “racial memory”.

The book On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis by Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh provides the best summation of the concept I’ve read thus far, this time from Afro-Ecuadorian scholar Juan García Salazar. There we learn that:

“in his conception of cimarronaje, or marronage, as a pedagogy for the new urban generations, García underscores the ways that marronage can be used as a sort of theoretical and memory-based anchor, conceptual analytic, and decolonial code and tool to reread official history and to contribute to it with a new and “other” reading. “This is a cimarrón attitude: to always distrust the word written by the dominant other, . . . to closely go over this word and history and compare it with our own, . . . to recuperate elements of the memory of resistance that is born in the cimarrón being . . . and to reconstruct a new memory,” that is, a history otherwise. Entailed here as well is a learning to unlearn in order to relearn, a central component of decoloniality in/as praxis.”

Putting aside the fact that Chuco and Salazar are engaged in their own form of African Orientalism based on poor historiography – according to Ethnologue Africa is a country of 2,143 languages, making claims that it is “a people” and not a continent worthy of derision, especially in light of the fact that the transatlantic slave trade would not have ever been as large as it was if it not for the fact that various tribes profitted from it – it’s here that it’s practical applications comes to light: Afro-epistemology and cimarron pedagogy are justifcations solely on the basis of social or economic positionality for the belief that every claim made by “the dominant other” is worthy of distrust and resistance. 

For someone that works in an institution invested with authority based on adherence to sundry traditions of intellectual labors – I found it strange that Layla Brown-Vincent would avow such committments. So having depicted Layla Brown-Vincent’s network connections to members of pan-Africanist Revolutionary organizations and Venezuelan political actors that promote this mode of thinking I’ve now defined, I’ll examine two example of her academic productions to see if those that meet the standards of cimarron pedagogy match the standards of “Western” professional academic standard.

Why Cimarron Pedagogy is Academically-Styled Propaganda Part I

The United Socialist Party of Venezuelan – thinks so highly of Layla Brown-Vincent’s academic productions that she was invited  to attend a conference on pan-Africanism in Caracas, Venezuela hosted by Nicolas Maduro.

The African-American Intellectual History Society has a section for contributors called Black Perspectives and one of Layla Brown-Vincent’s articles, titled (Anti)Blackness, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, and Guaidó’s Attempted Coup, is hosted there. Because the format of it’s publication makes it easy to include my comments side by side with the article I’ve posted an Ariel Sheen annotated edition of Layla Brown-Vincent’s article (Anti)Blackness, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, and Guaidó’s Attempted Coup, to show all of the instances which confirms my hypothesis that “cimarron pedagogy” is not compatible with the code of ethics outlined in various professional academic organization standards – in this case the American Anthropological Associations Code of Ethics. This is evident in that fact that this academic work in the cimarron pedagogy tradition is characterized by:

  1. Extensive use of loaded language.
  2. Extensive use of government sources (i.e. Venezuela Analysis).
  3. Extensive use of unreliable sources (i.e. GreyZone Project).
  4. Multiple claims unsupported by evidence.
  5. Multiple claims to have facts important to the context ommitted
  6. Multiple claims fail to examine or even consider counterfactuals.
  7. Several claims could be construed as racist.

The specific violations of the Anthropological Association’s Code of Ethics in this case are Layla Brown-Vincent’s not “mak(ing) good-faith efforts to identify potential ethical claims and conflicts in advance” and not doing “mak(ing) clear the empirical bases upon which their reports stand, be(ing) candid about their qualifications and philosophical or political biases, and recogniz(ing) and mak(ing) clear the limits of anthropological expertise.” [quote altered to make the verbs infinitive]

What would an ethical iteration of her article look like?

First it would include the fact that she is – in her own words – not qualified as an expert on Venezuela. The below exerpt where Layla Brown-Vincent admits this comes from her article Seeing it For Wearing It:

“Even now, after having completed my dissertation, I am still hesitant to claim expertise about Venezuela as a country. My work is the product over just over a year of research in a particular urban area of Venezuela, among a particular subset of Venezuelans who self-identified as “Afro.” To claim, or even the desire to claim any level of expertise over a people whose identities, politics, and ways of being are constantly in flux is a product of the hubris of the colonial institutionality of Euro-American Ivory towers that I vehemently reject”

Secondly it would include the fact that she has recieved goods and services from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Lastly, it would include the fact that she has avowed a political committment to pan-African revolutionary activity.

What would this “good faith effort” to inform readers of conflicts thus look like? Layla Brown-Vincent should have opened her post with something to these effects:

“I write this article as someone that is not an expert on the country that I here write about, I have previously recieved goods or services from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and my personal political committment to pan-African revolution leads me to believe everything their intelligence services tells me.”

This would be an honest statement of fact, and it would also allow potential readers of Layla Brown-Vincent’s to see that she has – in essence – an uninformed opinion that can be ignored as propaganda that probably ought not have been published in the first place.

Why Cimarron Pedagogy is Academically-Styled Propaganda Part II

Screenshots of Layla Brown-Vincent’s Twitter account showing (top to bottom) her support for the Workers World Party, the Ferguson Uprising Spectacle, Bree Newsome (who was brought to national attention by Venezuela via Fitzgibbon Media), and Nicholas Maduro.

Layla Brown-Vincent’s article in The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence entitled This Ain’t Nothing New: Contextualizing Black Responses to Trump’s America is available for free to view via’s Google Books. I’ve posted screenshots of it at the end of this article, but haven’t made an annoted copy as I did with the above due to formatting reasons.

The purportedly historical essay is unusual given the extensive irony which punctuates it that Layla Brown-Vincent, seemingly, is unaware of.

Having read it I’d claim it’s inclusion in this collection of essays titled “anti-racist scholarship” is the most humorous as there’s little in Layla Brown-Vincent’s article that qualifies as scholarship.

She claims that President Donald Trump has passed “a number of draconian, racist, sexist, and classist policies” and not only does she not name a single one of these policies, she justifies the claim by referencing Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Talents as Andrew Jarrett, a presidential candidate in the book, uses “Make America Great Again” as his slogan.

She uses phrases such as the “school-to-prison” to demonstrate her familiarity with Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow” – despite the fact that this particular historical account was proven false by a Barry Latzer, an emeritus professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, by John F. Pfaff, a professor of law at Fordham. Even those on the left have pointed out it’s many flaws. In an article on LibCom – short for Libertarian Communist – Greg Thomas, a Professor of Global Black Studies and hip-hop scholar, has written that there is “literally next to nothing to be learned from The New Jim Crow”.

She claims that Trump is a racist when Andrew J. Stein, the former president of the New York City Council and a former president of Manhattan Borough that has known President Trump since 1973, has provided a character reference that he is not a racist and  data analysis shows that those who voted for him weren’t either. And yet despite these facts and that President Donald Trump’s family arrived in the United States 22 years after the Emancipation Proclimation, Layla Brown-Vinent describes as “the product of insitutionalized racism” that has “waxed and waned” since the arrival of the first slave to the U.S.

She then follows this up with the claim, sans any explanation or citation of an expert opinion proving this is so, that his election was due to a “backlash” against the Blackness of Barack Obama and is evidence of “white supremacist logics”. The phrasing and sentiment is notable as it matches that of Van Jones, an avowed communist who has travelled with Deborah James – who used to be the director for the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’s public relations organ the Venezuela Information Office. In the context of the criticisms of the academic/activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a former member of the Internationalist Socialist Organization who clams that President Barack Obama categorically failed black people, this is another example of irony. All the more so given that polls show that black people have ever increasing approval rates of President Donald Trump.

Later in the article Layla Brown-Vincent describes her participation in a South Carolina protest wherein Bree Newsome took down a flag, and omits the fact that this obtained national media coverage because of promotional services providedby FitzGibbon Media, a public relations firm that has been contracted by the Venezuelan government and the Ecuadorian government under President Rafael Correa.

In light of all this – the most evocative irony in Layla Brown-Vincent’s essay is her claim that the FBI’s monitoring of Black Identity Extremists “signals a revitalization of anti-Black genocide in the form of state-sanctioned espionage”.

Even if we could rationalize such an absurd claim as a rhetorical flourish, which I don’t think is appropriate as it is a patently false and polarizing proposition, there’s a shocking lack of self-awareness in this statement from someone who openly identifies with foreign state powers and is the member of a revolutionary party that works in coordination with foreign activists claiming that U.S. national security services shouldn’t engage in vigilance practice on those whose advocate for secession and revolution. Given that it is this political class of people that have, historically, been most likely to engage in subversion, espionage and collusion on behalf of foreign powers it is an entirely sensible proposition that such people be monitored and why the law allows for it.

Closing Summary on Cimarron Pedagogy and Professional Academic Standards

Having brought together all these public documents regarding Layla Brown-Vincent’s engagement with foreign revolutionary movements – both in the political and epistemological sense – and reviewed her academic work it becomes clear that  cimarron pedagogy is wholly incompatible with codes of ethics described in professional academic associations.

What is most fascinating about reading Layla Brown-Vincent’s academic work is that this is, seemingly, completely lost on her. I found this particularly strange given that describes her colleagues expressing criticism for her particular line of research. Rather than viewing their words as expression of care and concern about her not being able to meet what academic tradition dictates are the prerequisites for becoming a doctor in a subject area, she stated the belief in Seeing it for Wearing It that these subject area specialists  just wanted her to become “good colonial anthropologist” and claims that “the liberal individualism of the American academy rendered my intellectual preoccupations illegible to many of my so-called colleagues and professors.” As laudable as research is that is “in part a utilitarian search for liberatory alternatives for myself and my people” – based on the above analysis it should be clear that cimarron pedagogy leads to the wrong answers and ought to be excluded from practice in the academy as it is – at base – not an appropriate method for discerning the truth.

This Ain’t Nothing New by Layla Brown-Vincent

 

Lax Ethica: Philip N. Howard, Disinformation and Socialist Academic Networks

Lax Ethica

 
A Historical Account, Data Analysis, Network Ethnography & Theoretic Exegesis
that
Demonstrates
Dr. Philip N. Howard  
– Director of the Oxford Internet Institute –
Disseminates Disinformation
to Further the Ambitions of the Bolivarian Socialist Movement
and
Demonstrates his Participation in
The Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity (REDH),
a Counter-Intelligence Operation
Developed and Managed by the Venezuelan and Cuban Intelligence Services


Abstract:

This article presents the case that Dr. Philip N. Howard has a history of fundamentally fraudulent research designed to politically polarize, misinform and misdirect his audience.

After providing an account of how the Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Philip N. Howard, violated the spirit and letter of the American Sociological Associations code of professional ethics by: (1) refusing to update self-published research (2) by publishing and promoting articles from multiple investigations whose research design was without merit (3) providing testimony to government bodies whose effect was to misdirect or misinform.

Content analysis based on the messaging effects of these publications leads to a hypothesis that Philip N. Howard is a Socialist – a close reading of Philip N. Howard’s academic work and network ethnography proves that this is true and, furthermore, that he is likely a member of a trans-national network of alter-globalization academics promoted by the Hugo Chavez founded, Cuban and Venezuelan Intelligence Services’ managed “Networks of Intellectuals”. 

Keywords: Disinformation, Political Manipulation, Fraud, Subversive Academic Networks, Sao Paulo Forum 

***

After Dr. Philip N. Howard and I were both quoted in the New York Times about Facebook’s participation in the Social Science One investigation into Social Media and Democracy, I decided to visit the website of the Oxford’s Internet Institute (OII) and review their publications. Upon reading The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulationwhich Howard co-authored with Samantha Bradshaw I noticed four significant errors in their findings – described below – based on my investigation of Venezuela’s social media behavior over the past two years in partnership with Universidad Pontifica Bolivariana (UPB).

As this report was self-published, correctable in under five minutes with Adobe Acrobat Pro and as according to the American Sociological Association’s Code of Ethics Section 12.4 Subsection E it is considered best practice to update research in light of new data I sent OII an email with notification of their errors along with appropriate documentation on September 29th– three days after the Inventory’s publication.

My initial contact was ignored, but after repeated follow ups I received a response, briefly corresponded with Dr. Howard and was then informed that he would not update the document, not answer questions I had casting doubt on his research methodology, and was informed that he would not solicit UPB’s expert opinion for their 2020 Inventory and that he was instructing his subordinates at the OII to ignore all future requests from me. I was shocked by such behavior.

At first I graciously believed this was a result of mere narcissistic negligence – which is random in its effect. But given that this was verbatim the same behavior I’d witnessed when asking certain questions of American media producers that were currently or previously had worked for Venezuela’s state media company I was suspicions.

After investigating Dr. Philip N. Howard’s academic work, press mentions, and professional associations I now understand the reason he wanted to foreclose the inclusion of counterfactual data to his claims is likely a result of his Socialist political convictions manifesting in a desire to misdirect attention from Venezuela’s online and in-real-life political propaganda activities and – most especially – the Leon Trotsky-inspired “network of networks” founded by Hugo Chavez in 2005 to help develop a new Socialist Internationale by providing assistance, amongst other means, to subversive professors – a policy which Venezuela’s ally Cuba has engaged in since 1963.

First I’ll illustrate Dr. Howard’s public history of correcting trivial research errors.

After this I document several significant errors found in his research whose baseless findings have made their way into the press. After this trend is established, I examine Dr. Howard’s testimony to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Service to show his engagement in misdirection and that the submission of his expert opinion the U.K. Parliament was  disinformation.

Content analysis is then used to illustrate that the general thrust of Dr. Howard’s research project has been to mirror the political positions of Socialist and Communist Parties associated with the Alter-Globalization/International Socialism Project mentioned above.

Following this I document the evidence showing Dr. Philip Howard’s engagement with Communist and Communist-sympathizing actors and his use of Marxian theoretical frameworks within his published research. In close, I demonstrate what appears to be the effects of participation in the Cuban and Venezuelan Government sponsored Network of Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity and summarize the results of this exercise in ethnographic and process mapping.

 Philip N. Howard’s History of Correcting and Ignoring Research Errors

To err is human, to correct mistakes is divine – so when Philip N. Howard amends his article Zuckerberg Goes to Russia as the Global Network Initiative Turns 4 on the blog for Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policyhe is aligning himself with best academic practices. The same is true for the three articles (123) of Philip N. Howard has posted on the Pacific Standard website, and the error he describes in a Tweet on December 9th, 2018. And yet there exists several other research articles and testaments of his which remain unexpiated and that, when placed together indicate his research project’s alignment with the Bolivarian goals.

Case Study: Fake Research Contra Donald Trump 

Mother Jones published an article entitled Trump Supporters Spread the Majority of Phony News on Social Media based on Philip Howard’s research, as did several other news outlets.

In an Opinion article by Erik Wemple for The Washington Post titled Study bashes Trumpites for promoting ‘junk’ news. But what’s that?, Erik Wemple also points out an issue related to categorization which invalidated Philip N. Howard’s research findings.

Elizabeth Harrington at The Washington Free Beacon in an article titled The Oxford Study Saying Trump Supporters Share More Fake News Is Fake Newspoints out a second categorization error that complicates, if not nullifies, the findings of Philip N. Howard’s study.

Both of these journalists, however, overlooked two even larger issues that categorically invalidates the study that this Mother Jones article was based on.

(1) During the period under Oxford’s investigation SparkToro estimated at least 61% of Donald Trump’s Twitter followers were false accounts – which nowhere within the methodology is it stated that this was even accounted for.

(2) According to research from the University of Cambridge, bots retweet much more content than do real humans. Again – nowhere within the methodology is it stated that this was accounted for.

(3) According the findings section of the report a variant of the k-core reduction was used to reduce the data-set to 13,477 users, yet on page 6 of the online supplement it states that the k-core consisted of 12,413 users. Questions about this discrepancy sent to the Oxford Internet Institute went unanswered.

In other words, ironically enough, the researcher who claims to be the authority on “exposing the role of bots and trolls” doesn’t even account for the fact that bots were producing the majority of the content analyzed in his own dataset.

That such an research was published at all ought to surprise anyone familiar with the Twitter ecosystem. Indeed Philip N. Howard seems to admit that this line of research was fundamentally erroneous in a Tweet on February 1st– four days before Mother Jones and several other outlets announced to the world that Donald Trump fake-news sharing fools.

And yet despite these public criticisms and the larger research design flaws – the article remain published and the outlets which cover it remain uncorrected.

Case Study: Fake Research Contra Jair Bolsonaro

WhatsApp fake news during Brazil election ‘favoured Bolsonaro’ was published in The Guardian and features original research by Daniel Avelarwhich features a quote by former Oxford Internet Institute researcher Caio Machado.

Machado’s own research was covered in the New York Time article Disinformation Spreads on WhatsApp Ahead of Brazilian Election and was based on one of two research articles in which he is listed as the coauthor of with Philip N. Howard:  A Study of Misinformation in WhatsApp groups with a focus on the Brazilian Presidential Electionsand News and Political Information Consumption in Brazil: Mapping the First Round of the 2018 Brazilian Presidential Election on Twitter.

After reading the two articles published by OII, I sent a request for more information about the WhatsApp investigation on November 25th, as I has no interest in the Twitter study as I population studies on that platform are essentially invalid, in contrast to what OII claims – which will be discussed later.

The questions that I asked OII were as follows:

  • Are the privatized data-set available for researchers to review?
  • Is there a publicly available data repository for review by researchers that contains JUST the 99,988 media files, the 50,795 Original URLS, the 38,800 coded links or even just 200 coded images/videos?
  • Since URLs were coded on a domain and sub domain level, is there a codebook available to review that shows the classification of domains?
  • In the sampling and methods section, it’s stated that 200 images/videos were randomly chosen for coding but there the method for randomization is not described.

All these questions stem from a desire to see if their findings could be duplicated. This is important as replicability is a key component of Science, and the inability to do this in the materials science, data science and social sciences has caused some to describe the current capacity of research teams not to repeat experiments and get the same findings of others as a replicability crisis.

That I received no response from OII is suspicious enough in itself, however after doing cursory research into Caio Machado it’s all the more so. Sao Paulo, Brazil – where Machado went to law school – has long been a center of socialist activity. Indeed it hosted the first iteration of a pan-Latin American conference of social movements, Communist and Socialist parties conceived of by Fidel Castro and Lula Brazil to help steer pan-Latin American integration called the Sao Paulo Forum. By itself Caio Machado having gone to law school in Sao Paulo, Brazil means nothing – but in light of the fact that he retweeted content from an account claiming to be the embodiment of the spirit of Communist Cultural Critic Mark Fisher and that he has – it appears – attended a lecture featuring Liberation Theologist Enrique Dussel it appears that there could be a possibility for unreported bias. I emailed Caio Machado, who responded to my introduction, but then decided not to respond to my question about the nature of his relationship to Liberation Theologist Enrique Dussel – pictured above receiving an award from Hugo Chavez from the magazine Humanidad en Red no 0– the magazine of the Red de Intelectuals y Artistas en Defensa de la Humanidad (REDH).

It’s possible that I’m incorrect in my assessment that the WhatsApp research that Oxford Internet Institute published is indeed valid – however given the omissions from their methodological description, their unwillingness to answer basic research design questions, to share data and that one of their researchers to answer a question related to a potential conflict of interest I’m highly suspicions of its legitimacy in light of all of the other issues related to Philip N Howard’s research. 

Case Study: Fake Research Pro Venezuela

Philip N. Howard’s research falsely claims that Venezuela’s propaganda activities are far less active and complex then they actually are. Here are, in short, the sections that they get wrong.

Organizational Form and Preference:

The number of citizens and influencers listed on OII’s report is listed as blank – as if no one was engaged in propaganda on behalf of the Venezuelan government. However ABC International has published reports about citizens receiving money for citizen engagements on social media and it’s well known that Danny Glover, Oliver Stone and Roger Waters – and others – have received all gifts and payment for engaging in propaganda on Venezuela’s behalf.

Messaging and Valence:

TeleSUR’s official page shares memes which encourage violence against fascists (a substitute for American politicians, law enforcement, and those whose policies don’t align with Venezuela’s goals). A variety of Jewish groups have published about TeleSUR’s antisemitism and that of their contractors while Venezuela’s other government’s other pages share content meant to appeal to anti-Semites, or that present false, politically polarizing quotes from politicians, and deepfake nudes and images meant to drive hatred towards police.

Communication Strategies:

The OII reports that Venezuela isn’t using mass reporting to take down undesirable content. I provided them with a case study wherein that happened to me for my publications on these topics.

The OII report states that Venezuela isn’t using data driven strategies, however even if one hasn’t engaged in the research or collected data from interviews as UPB has – it’s an on its face absurd proposition that a media network with, which OII admits, multiple centers of activity and its own news network wouldn’t use data to monitor and manage their efforts.

Harassment and Threats of Violence:

While this is a category not included in Oxford’s report, thus something that I did not submit evidence of, had it been included I would have provided examples of digital harassment and threats of violence against me.

Philip N. Howard’s Political Testimony & Lax Ethica

Besides research with design flaws that renders its conclusions invalid, Philip N. Howard has also provided testimony to the British Crown and the United States Senate Intelligence Committee that had the effect of misdirecting politicians from multi-generational irregular, information warfare campaigns to focus exclusively on online activity equivalent with, more or less, to targeted spam campaigns.

Philip N. Howard’s False Research Attempts to Discredit the Brexit Results

In the article Brexit: Leave ‘very likely’ won EU referendum due to illegal overspending, says Oxford professor’s evidence to High Court Philip N. Howard is quoted therein saying:

“Given the scale of the online advertising achieved with the excess spending, combined with conservative estimates on voter modelling, I estimate that Vote Leave converted the voting intentions of over 800,000 voters in the final days of the campaign as a result of the overspend.”

This statement was extracted from a report that he presented to the High Court of Justice, Queens’s Bench Division titled: Impact of Unlawful Overspending on Digital Advertising by Vote Leave and BeLeave campaigns in the 2016 EU Referendum, which can be viewed by clicking the title.

A website called Order-Order published critical commentary on Philip N. Howard’s findings linked to two Twitter accounts of professionals in the field of statistics and data-journalism that debunked Howard’s testimony.

John Burn-Murdoch, a data-visualization journalist for The Financial Times has a Twitter thread on Philip N. Howard’s poor research methodology.

Anthony B. Masters of the Royal Statistical Society also has a Twitter thread on Philip N. Howard’s poor research methodology.

Their arguments against Philip N. Howard’s research findings are as follows:

  • The base is too high: the entire electorate was 46.5m.His basic argument is: 80m Facebook users saw the ads
  • 10% click-through rate is much higher than is typically found for Facebook display advertising. Wordstream (US)says less than 1% — that may be based on impressions, not users. Average conversion is 9.2%, but politics is not a standard industry.
  • Howard’s section on conversion says that 10% click through, 10% believe and “a further 10% of that number can then be expected to do something.” This step is merged or omitted in the calculation.
  • Finally, the citation given is Howard’s own bookNew Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen says: “Banner ads on political topics generally had a 1 percent click-through rate”. This means that the citation contradicts the statement given in the Court submission.

In other words what Philip N. Howard submitted fundamentally flawed and invalid data to the politicians deciding legal issues related to Brexit.

Philip N. Howard Misleads and Misdirects the Senate Intelligence Committee

On August 1stof 2018, Philip N. Howard presented testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In his comments to the panel Philip N. Howard states that “The time for industry self-regulation has passed.” a position which echoes his 2014 editorials for the nationalization of Facebook.

At 1 hour, 19 minutes and 15 seconds into the hearing Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri asks Philip N. Howard “Of the other countries you’ve looked at who should we [the political body in charge of making decisions related to politics] be looking at after Russia that are likely impacting our [American] daily conversation.

Philip N. Howard responds: “Well in our research we look at Turkey, China, Hungary and Iran.”

This is a noteworthy in that it is a non-answer to the question – the way it’s framed Philip N. Howard is merely stating countries that the Oxford Internet Institute has investigated.

Senator Blunt, picking up on this, moves on to another interlocutor.

At 1 hour, 34 minutes and 28 seconds, Senator Joe Manchin again brings up the question asks Philip N Howard directly:

  • Which country poses the greatest threat to our democracy using social media platforms?
  • Which countries are making strides to do the same?

Philip N. Howard, again, does not answer the question. Instead he engages in another meandering digression before being Senator Joe Manchin gets him back on topic – at which point Philip N. Howard says – China has the greatest capacity. This, again, is not the question asked of him and, tellingly, despite having done all of this research at no point does he provide any explanation as to what makes one country more of a threat then another.

There are many potential reasons why Howard could have had such difficulty in answering a direct question, however the real reason was he wanted to waste the time of the Senators present and misdirect attention from the greater threat to American democracy – the 17 year long quantitative political programto develop a trans-national, socialist-oriented political party in the United States by Venezuela and Cuba in coordination with the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity (REDH) that help steer it’s development by acting as promoters, authorities and gatekeepers – the Network which Philip N. Howard is himself a part of – as well as their witting or unwitting assistants and financiers.

I’ll now explain first how the above-analyzed social science research findings are in fact anti-Truth, pro-Socialist propaganda and then demonstrate how Philip N. Howard’s career trajectory and academic writing demonstrates his communist political commitments and connections to REDH.

Oxford Internet Institute Research Mirrors Socialist Party Positions

The above graphic organizer shows a side-by-side comparison of research published by the Oxford Internet Institute with Philip N. Howard as the Primary Investigator and the political positions promoted by the Socialist Worker Party (U.K), the Democratic Socialists of America, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA) and the Brazilian Workers Party (Brazil). Content analysis shows that both the Oxford Internet Institute under Philip N. Howard’s direction and the Socialist parties networked with Venezuela are promoting electoral invalidation of Brexit as well as the elections of Trump and Bolsonaro. I’ve already covered the latter two investigations, and will cover the issue of Brexit after the following two oversvations.

While in these particular articles here neither Oxford or the socialist parties explicitly reference each the other – it is interesting to note is that in the article Bot Use in the Presidential Election that the U.S. Marxist – Leninist Organization quotes Howard and the Oxford Internet Institute extensively.

Also worthy of note is that in the top right image which has the “Another Europe is Possible” banner that this has been a Socialist Worker organizing slogan since at least 2004, as evident from these Indymedia protest photos.

Given all this, and what will subsequentially be depicted, we can correct President Rodrigo Duterte’s claim that Oxford is for “stupid people”– with Oxford is for Cunning Crypto-Communist Professors.

Who Funds Philip N. Howard at Oxford?

Philip N. Howard’s funding comes from pro-Bolivarian Revolution sources.

The four institutional supporters for Oxford Internet Institute’s 2019 Inventory are the European Research Council, Hewlette Foundation, Luminate and the Adessium Foundation. Ascribing broad intentions to large funding councils can be highly problematic so I’ll focus on two facts that relate to the factual constellation developed herein.

Luminate is a subsection of the Pierre Omidyar Foundation, which also funds the strongly left-biased news-outlet The Intercept.  The founder of The Intercept, Glen Greenwald, has documented connections to Trevor Fitzgibbon – who Venezuela has used for Public Relations – since at least 2009 when both participated in developing the second edition of the Voices of a People’s History of the United States Project. Notably Zinn is listed as one of the strategy developers for the REDH project. Fitzgibbon – who did PR for Julian Assange before and after he was granted Ecuadorian citizenship by President Rafael Correa, one a reliable ally of the Bolivarian project – also helped Greenwald get his big break by doing PR for Edward Snowden and arranging his safe travels to Russia.

 Another project that the European Research Council funded is titled A Global Movement for Environmental Justice: The EJAtlas.

The ETJAtlas is large, searchable data base of environmental conflict. According to the authors, it is:

“informed, based on and co-designed together with global environmental justice organizations; many of which had been building their own repositories of knowledge on such ecological conflicts over the past 30 years in some cases. These include the Observatory of mining conflicts of Latin America (OCMAL), Oilwatch, World Rainforest Movement, FIOCRUZ and the Brazilian network of Environmental Justice; GAIA; and the Centro di Documentazione sui Conflitti Ambientali (CDCA), as well as other sourcewe can say that a further aim of the EJAtlas is to support and contribute to the cohesiveness and self-awareness of an emerging globalizing movement for environmental justice (Martinez-Alier et al. 2016). An exercise that falls under what the historian Vijay Prashad describes as a socialist writing project — one intended to produce a confident community of struggle and to empower opposition to the status quo through the sharing of narratives that highlight the agency of those struggling to create better worlds.”

The project itself is fascinating en toto, but in relation to discussion I want to focus solely on three things.

First is the project’s avowedly socialist orientation.

Second is the use of Manuel Castells as an orienting figure – the introductory sentence invokes his scholarship with the statement: “The environmental movement may be “the most comprehensive and influential movement of our time” (Castells 1997: 67), representing for the ‘post-industrial’ age what the workers’ movement was for the industrial period.”

And third that of the authors is Joan Martinez-Alier – a political ecologist who’s given many speeches for the Latin American Council of Social Sciences, blogged for Venezuela’s Chavista website Apporea, and wrote in his report The Environmentalism of the Poor submitted for readership by U.N. that “Eco-Zapatism was overdue in Mexico”. In an article featured on the website of Venezuelan state media outlet TeleSUR, Joan Martinez-Alier’s work forms the basis for numerous ecological movements and the claims made by Delcy Rodriguez, Vice President of Venezuela, that the United States must abide by the Paris Climate Agreement.

Given that Philip N. Howard has written a book on Manuel Castells, this is appropriate theme on which to begin development.

Philip N Howard’s Intellectual and Professional Trajectory
Engagement with The Zapatista Uprising

In Pax Technica Philip N. Howard describes in brief his journey to the heart of a Marxist insurgency.

“In 1995 I traveled to Chiapas, Mexico, to meet with the Zapatista insurgents. I wanted to learn about their motivations and their struggle, and to understand why they were having such an unusual impact on international politics.”

Why did he go there?

“My first investigations took me to Chiapas to meet with the Zapatistas and learn about their internet strategies in 1994.”

While he describes little about his Mexico experiences in Pax Technica, he later wrote an article with Thomas Homer-Dixon that is, in short, a justification of the Marxist revolutionary movement. He also gives an interpretation of the events there that are quite at odds with the wider literature on the Zapatistas. He says, again in Pax Technica, that:

“The stories of the Zapatistas and the Arab Spring are not about nationalist fervor inspiring political revolution. They are not about religious fundamentalism. These movements were not particularly Marxist, Maoist, or populist. They had leaders, but employed comparatively flat organizations of informal teams…”

This is an unusual claims as it is so at odds with the specialist literature on the subject. Reading The Communist Roots of Zapatismo and the Zapatista Uprisingby Christopher Gunderson ,The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexicoby Rand, Zapatista: Reinventing Revolution in MexicobyLuis Lorenzano or Todd Wolfson’s From the Zapatistas to Indymediayou’d learn that“Zapatismo emerged dialectically, through a series of confrontations, and was/is a fluid response to material conditions of struggle in Mexico” which originated from a group of six urban openly Marxist revolutionaries, including the now famous spokesperson for the organization Subcomandante Marcos, whose real name is Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicenteand who was a professor in the Sciences and Art for Design Department at UAM that praises Fidel Castroand that assigned his students a reading list that included Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and Mao Tse-tung. You’d learn that in the 1980s he and his fellow cadre-members moved into the mountains of Chiapas to organize the local Mayan community with the goal of leading an armed uprising that would cause the country to rally to their side so they capture state power.

So why does Howard say that the Zapatistas are not Communists given all this and that the 23 de Enero community in Caracas – the neighborhood that George Ciccariello-Maher claims is the “most radical” –includes an EZLN flag in their movement of movements? Why does Howard make this claim when, as you can see on the bottom right, that Subcomandante Marcos uses Communist icons on flags when he gives public speeches?

I couldn’t say for sure, but all things considered I’d speculate it’s to create the perception of distance from these Marxist revolutionaries. Being an openly communist professor can lead one to increased vigilance being conferred upon their academic work in light of ethical Professional Codes of Ethics and Standards. After all – those who want to overturn all existent rules and laws to suit their whims and those of their comrades are likely to do so in their intellectual work as well. Because of this much of the organizing occurs through email lists – a la the Zapatistas, Social Forum, and IndyMedia – and partnership within the “network of networks” isn’t openly avowed but understood through reference to common symbols, ideas, and connection to other comrade professors.

Indymedia Centers

Emerging in part from the intermingling of myriad NGO activists and academics via encounters curated by the Zapatistas, the Independent Media Centers were born just before the Battle in Seattle. Conceived of as a combination between Alternative Press and vector of cyber-subversion antagonistic to the capitalist paradigm – police record attest to its success toward those ends.

Josh Wolf, a contributor to Indymedia, was jailed for 11 monthsfor refusing to turn over unedited video footage connected to an arson case. An Indymedia user was arrested for leaving a comment implying he was going harass a judge who’d just sent animal rights activists to jail after his personal information was posted on Indymedia. The German government shut down the Indymedia website and banned it as an extremist organization. Police in Bristol raided Indymedia and forced it to close down, as did the police in Greece for the Athens Indymedia.

According to Joshua D. Atkinson in Alternative Media and Politics of Resistance: A Communication Perspective this is not to be considered exceptional but the rule as:

“Past research has demonstrated that Indymedia.org, The Nation and a variety of zines sere as primary sources for information about resistance and social justice for Radical Participatory activities (e.g., Armstrong, 1982; Atkinson & Dougherty, 2006; Atton 2002a; 20040 Downing 2003a; 2003b). These are not the only alternative media titles used by Radical Participatory activists as other titles, like the anarchist news website Inforshop.org, have emerged from additional research projects (e.g., Atton, 2003).”

In New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen Philip N. Howard describes his visiting the headquarters of these organizations more than once:

“Near the convention, Francie is getting ready at the Independent Media Center (IMC). She is twenty-three, petite, and dressed in black and green army fatigues bought at a secondhand store. Francie is angry at her country, disgusted by its blind faith in an environmentally unsustainable economy. Francie believes in a carbon tax that would discourage polluters and create a revenue stream for research into green technologies. She doesn’t believe that the mainstream media do justice to environmental issues, so she has volunteered with the IMC…”

While there is nothing wrong with this by itself, put into the evidentiary constellation that this article is develops this becomes another indicator – weak by itself but more significant in light of everything else – of Philip N. Howard’s in-group membership with a covert, coordinated, subversive network.

The Thought of the Marxist Manuel Castells

In the book Castells and the Media: Theory and Media Philip N. Howard claims that the person in the title, Manuel Castells is “one of the most important contemporary social scientists.” More than that, per Howard’s opening dedication, he is “inspiring”.

As a public intellectual with almost 50 years of teaching and publishing behind him so there is a lot one could say about his work.

For our purposes, I only have two issues to focus on:

  • The general orientation of Castells’ research
  • The networks in which Castells operates

The first point is quickly answered: Castells’ is a Marxist. In “Networks in Manuel Castells’ Theory of the Network SocietyAri-Veikko Anttiroiko argues that “‘network’ in Castells’ social theory is not an analytical concept but rather a powerful metaphor that served to capture his idea of the new social morphology of late capitalism.” His career began as a Marxist analyst of the city and as technology developed, he incorporated these new forms of discourse into his work to give the appearance of novelty to his analysis.

As for the networks in which Manuel Castells engages with, he is a political theorist associated with the Sao Paulo Forum, the Association for Progressive Communications and CLACSO– a social sciences organization whose conferences have previously been promoted and covered by Venezuela’s state media. He’s also published open letters via Cuba’s Network in Defense of Humanity.

Taking online graduate level courses with Manuel Castells and a number of other leftist activists and intellectuals such as Juan Carlos Monedero and Pablo Iglesias – two of the founders of Spain’s PODEMOS Party that received over 8.8 million Euros in funding from the governments of Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro Moros for consulting and production work – is possible via CLACSO’s online platform.

Their co-appearances at CLACSO events isn’t the only time that the Director of TeleSUR, Patricia Villegas, and Manuel Castells have had the opportunity to network. They both also gave presentations at the X Encuentro Internacional de Investigadores y Estudiosos de la Información y la Comunicación (ICOM) in Havana, Cuba 2019.

Castells has also been featured in El Telegrafo, an Ecuadorian newspaper, and cited by its director Orlando Perez, who transitioned to becoming an executive at TeleSUR English following the discovery of irregularities during his tenure at El Telegrafo and the departure of his patron, ex-President Rafael Correa due to anti-corruption legal proceedings.

The Orinoco Tribute, a media outlet managed by the former consul general of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in Chicago, Jesus Rodriguez-Espinoza, – the same Jesus Rodriguez-Espinoza who accepted pledges from members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization to support the Bolivarian Revolution– also publishes calls to study the work of Manuel Castells.

Given all this and Manuel Castells long and intimate association with Uruguay’s FrenteAmplista network, it helps explain why this country was not included within Oxford Internet Institute’s 2019 Global Disinformation Inventory.

The Center for Communication and Civic Engagement & Lance Bennett

According to Philip N. Howard’s CV, when he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication doing research on electoral issuesat the University of Washington the directorof the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, Lance Bennet, was also on the planning committee for the Northwest Social Forum. The video promoting it, from which the above screenshot comes, is quaint given its low production quality and deceptive given the fact that shorty before the launch of this Movement of Movements in Caracas Hugo Chavez announced at the World Forum of Intellectuals and Artiststhat he would be using the billions of dollars of the oil revenues the governments received to fund a “network of networks”.

Reading the book that Philip N. Howard edited with Andrew Chadwick, Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics,you would learn that had the event not been cancelled it would have been the second Social Forum in the U.S. following the Boston Social Forum– an event extensively promoted by the Venezuela Information Officeand attended, like the aforementioned Caracas event, by Danny Glover.

While it’s interesting to note that when Lance Bennett arrived at Yalefor graduate school it was at a time when Black Panther Party activism was high and talk of general strike was in the air – this says nothing per se about the nature of Bennet’s academics. It is, however, noteworthy to point out that Omar González, Cuba’s former Vice-Minister of Culture, is someone that thinks Lance Bennet’s works is important and a useful theoretical basis for Communist Party praxis.

George Soros’s Central European University

From 2013-2015 Philip N. Howard was the founding Professor for the School of Public Policy and the Director of the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University – which was founded and funded by George Soros. George Soros though that this particular department was so worthy that he even recorded a minute long promotional video for the Public Policy Department. My evocation of Soros here is meant to highlight only three points:

The importance of the first one will become apparent in the section below titled “Philip N. Howard’s Covert Support of Arab and US Communist Insurrections”. The importance of the second point will be made apparent by referencing the header images – many of which include the raised fist symbols used by those associated with the Bolivarian Socialist Movement. The third point will come into play in light of the section “Philip N. Howard supports Black Lives Matter-related Intellectuals”.

Discourse with Rebecca MacKinnon

One of the “campaigners for internet freedom” that Philip N. Howard highlights and praises in Pax Technica is Rebecca MacKinnon.

A member and director of a number of advocacy groups that educate, agitate and organize under the banner of human rights not codified in U.S. or international law. The U.S. State Department recently formed an Unalienable Rights Commission to act as a counterbalance to the explosive growth of such organizations, and a cursory review of Rebecca MacKinnon’s presentations demonstrate that she is exemplary of those activists that mobilizes misunderstandings of law and human rights discourse for dubious or malignant purposes.

As is evidenced from the above, Rebecca MacKinnon’s book Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedomuses classic socialist iconography. Lest I be deemed guilty of merely judging a book by its cover, it is also worth pointing out that part five of the book is titled “What is to be Done?” – an allusion to the Vladimir Illich Lenin book with the same title.

That Rebecca MacKinnon makes this obvious reference to Lenin is interesting for a number of  reasons. For the purposes of brevity I’ll limit my comments to calling attention to the fact that in What is to be Done? Lenin diverges from the classical Marxian conception of seizure of state power and describes the need for a covert, professional revolutionary cadre – a Vanguard Party.

In his article Lenin and the Concept of the Professional Revolutionary, published in the History of Political Thought, Robert Mayer explicates that while this vanguard party – what Gramsci referred to as the Modern Prince – is Lenin’s main concerns there is another intermediary social group between the Party and the Masses. These are the activists, artists, and intellectuals that are covertly connected to or loosely associated with the party and are either consciously subservient or are generally deferential to it – a Network.

In short, to put Lenin’s dual-power conception of politics in general terms – the Vanguard Party is the Revolutionary-Government-In-Waiting, and the Network is their steering committee.

Within this context, this makes a several facts pulled from Rebecca MacKinnon’s academic/activist biography take on an interesting light – and thus Philip N. Howard’s citation of her.

(1) The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) summit that Philip N. Howard describes Rebecca MacKinnon as speaking refers to in the above quote was targeted for institutional capture by the European Social Forum, the European partner of the Sao Paulo Forum – an organization founded by Cuba’s Communist Party and Brazil’s Workers party and now supported by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

While there is no online list of members or supporters of the now defunct European Social Forum, content analysis of Rebecca MacKinnon’s messaging, her being on the Advisory Board of organizations whose members include those associated with the Sao Paulo Forums and coverage of her book in journals about leftist social movements – provides provisional proof that she was a part of this cadre.

(2) Rebecca MacKinnon worked at CNN at the same time as Andres Izarra – Venezuela’s former Minister of Communication and Information and the ex-president of TeleSUR. Shortly after Izarra left, so too did she. I don’t know if the two of them ever did interact

(3) Rebecca MacKinnon gave a presentation at RightsCon in Manila in 2015 and FitzGibbon Media, Venezuela’s public relations firm, was also present there. 

(4) Rebecca MacKinnon’s partner in the founding of Global Voices– a journalistic organization that would later play a minor role, along with Julian Assange of Wikileaks, in the Arab Spring – was Ethan Zuckerman and he too had a run in with Andres Izarra. In a blog post entitled Opening Sessions at the Aljazeera Forum, Ethan Zuckerman describes attending an Al Jazeera conference where Izarra was on a panel.

(5) Ethan Zuckerman – who is known to Granma, the newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party – has written a number of quantitative media analysis articles about the Ferguson, Missouri political unrest that was promoted by George Soros, Venezuela’s media contractorsRebel Diaz, Venezuela’s public relations firm FitzGibbon Media, Venezuela’s political allies Code Pink – as evidenced via the documentary Whose Streets?and Danny Glover. In addition to writings on his blog, in a chapter of the book Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice Ethan Zuckerman also describes how Global Voices helped promote the activity there in the media.

 Marek Toszynski

Another internet activist/organization that Philip N. Howard believes deserving of praise is Marek Toszynski, one of the founders of Tactical Tech.

In addition to being a member of this democracy advocacy NGO, Marek is also a writer for the New Internationalist– a “new left” periodical that describes advocating for Venezuela in their 2019 annual reportand, as is evident from the above magazine cover, uses variations of the Sao Paulo Forum slogan “Another World is Possible” as an orientation point for their editorial vision.

I’ll forego similar analysis as I did to the above, but as I believe it’s noteworthy I will say that it’s deserving of being pointed out that the second co-founder of Tactical Tech is an artist whose recent exhibition could perhaps be described as AgitProp art against Facebook, Stephanie Hankey, and that she is also an academic working at Oxford’s Internet Institute.

What Does Philip N. Howard Promote?

Philip N. Howard supports the de-platforming of Steve Bannon.

While looking through Philip N. Howard’s Twitter account I noticed that he expressed disdain at Steve Bannon addressing the Oxford Union.

More than expressing some kind of rationale with his positions, he breaks form from the polite Canadian stereotype and says that it’s a mistake to allow him on the “platform” as he “chokes public discourse” – and is a “poison.”

This is noteworthy for two reasons.

Rather than saying that Steve Bannon “shouldn’t be allowed an audience” or “a soap box to stand on” or some other variation of the phrases – Philip N. Howard chooses a term that has been widely adopted by Socialist parties and Antifa activists: platform.

While Philip N. Howard doesn’t out and out call Steve Bannon a fascist – his message is the same as that worded by the Communist Party of Canada and the Hugo Chavez Front of Toronto – the city and country where Philip N. Howard received his Bachelor of Arts degree.

Avowed socialist Owen Jones tweeted a similar stance against Bannon and the Canary, a recently founded “social justice” oriented UK news outlet that has published an article about how sad it is that propaganda funded by Venezuela was banned from YouTube and that also promotes Philip N. Howard’s research, also published an article claiming that Bannon is a fascist and thus does not deserve the right to speak at Oxford.

None of this reflects directly upon Philip N. Howard’s scholarship – but the affinities are worthy of being pointed out. 

Philip N. Howard’s Covert Support of Arab and US Communist Insurrections

In the article A State Department 2.0 Response to the Arab Spring Philip N. Howard capitalized on the media’s general interest and specialist ignorance to advocate for State Department policy positions that sought to create sympathies for those engaged in the effort to overthrow the Egyptian government. In his own words he writes:

“We need the State Department to do some 21st century thinking.  Egypt’s elites are defecting, and taking their networks of support away from Mubarak. The protests in Egypt are about social networks that are beyond Mubarak’s reach.  Don’t worry about who is next, worry about which networks need recognition, support, and encouragement. The State Department 2.0 strategy needs to bet on networks of civil society participants in Tunis, Cairo, and the other regional capitals now in crisis. Think in terms of networks, not individual power brokers and traditional political actors. Even the Muslim Brotherhood may be best thought of as a network organization…”

Putting aside the issues of the demands and their legitimacy given by the aggrieved it’s worth point out that nowhere within this article does Howard identify any of the actual actors involved. “The network” as an ideal is all that’s referred to and only by reading other sources, such as the article The Revolutionary Socialists in Post-‘Arab Spring’ Egypt does one learn that many of those initial calls put out to engage in protest were those of Socialists. Ahmed Salah, the “mastermind of the revolution” and the son of a Socialist Labor Party activist is not mentioned at all.

There is, similarly no mention of the role of Julian Assange. Considering groups such as Amnesty International hailed as the catalyst for the Arab Spring, that there is no mention of the fact that it was the World Social Forum that helped propel Assange from lone hacker to networked political actor and that Howard praises Assange’s work in Pax Technica this seems curious.

There’s another compelling omission in Philip N. Howard’s book Democracy’s Fourth Wave?: Digital Media and the Arab Spring – the lack of relationship between poets and revolutionaries.

In Chapter 7 of Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Soul of Tahirwe learn that performance poets played a significant role in promoting the initial events in Egypt. A cursory look into Egypt’s history shows that this is not the first time such artists played a would be significant political role. In The Artist as ProphetChris Hedges open his article on the importance of emotions as a guiding force in politics with a quote from an Egyptian general on how they managed to surprised the Israelis in the 1973 war he states: “Instead of reading the intelligence reports, you should have read our poets.” Were such a connection unique to Egypt then this might be plausibly explained plausibly as a mere oversight – but it’s less so when one considers the actors that have inspired and the activities promoted by Bolivarian Revolutionary Actors.

José Martí is Cuban poet long praised by Castro and other leftists as a guiding light for their cause. Olga Luzardo was a poet and militant that helped found the Communist Party in Venezuela. Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the EZLN who now goes by the name Subcomandante Galeano – someone that Howard would presumably be familiar with having engaged in field research in Chiapas, is a poetas well. Eduardo Galeano, one of the main inspirations and co-conspirators of Bolivarian Movement, is also a poet. So too is Jesus Santrich, one of the current leaders of the FARC. Alice Lovelace, the National Lead Organizer for the United States Social Forum in Atlanta – an event which was, as I go into more detail below, promoted by Venezuelan intelligence – was a poet. Public poetry readings, rap performances and artistic workshop demonstrations and marches all have been hallmarks of the carnivalesque atmosphere encouraged by the Social Forums and all of which are connected to an inter-generational effort at achieving fundamental political change. With this focus on granular details and a comparative context in mind a concrete political strategy comes into view – activities to mobilize emotionally charged, highly expressive individuals into what Manuel Castells calls Networks of Outrage and Hope and what Gustav LeBon calls The Crowd. Strange, then, that this is elided from Howard’s account.

The limited network ethnographic fields which Philip N. Howard’s selects isn’t limited to this singular article. In Pax Technica he similarly described Occupy Wall Street as a “spontaneous” network movement. There Howard states the following:

“People sometimes say that the internet doesn’t “cause” democracy. Or “it’s the people, not the mobile phones.” But people and their technology are often impossible to separate. Try to imagine your life without your mobile phone or your internet connection. Or try to tell the story of the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, or any recent international social movement without mentioning digital media. You’ll find yourself with an incomplete story. Many of the people involved with these movements are eager to talk about the devices and media that are their tools of resistance. Their technology and their story go together.”

despite the fact the extensive documentary evidence shows that this was not some “spontaneous” uprising but a political spectacle that was long planned by groups connected to Venezuela such as the Workers World Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and Crimethinc. (documented here and here) as well as poets and performance artists.

His lack of apparent awareness on the matter is all the more unusual considering that Natalia Buier and Tamara Steger were engaged in research about Occupy Wall Street at Central European University at the same time that Philip N. Howard was there.

Had Philip N. Howard spoken to professor Béla Greskovits during his time at Central European University about Janina Alexandra Mangold’s Master’s thesis The Transnational Diffusion of the Occupy Movement to Germanyor to someone that remembered when two of the people claiming to be co-founders of Occupy Wall Street, Noah Fischer and Maria Byckgave a presentation at Central European University he would have realized this. Had he reached out to Zoltán Glück

who’s a Central European University graduate now working on a PhD in Anthropology with a focus on Critical Theory that’s published a number of articles on Occupy Wall Street it would be in his network ethnography. Were Philip N. Howard have taken the time to talk to Daniel Bochsler, a Central European University professor and attendee of a three day workshop entitled The Transnational Dimension of Protest: From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street organized by World Social Forum scholar and organizer Donatella della Porta could have disabused Howard of this notion. Anil Duman, a Central European University Econmics professor and supporter of Occupy the Economy could have done the same. Julia Buxton, a Central European University professor in the Political Sciences department that is an longtime expert on Venezuela – as evidenced by her giving presentations at Socialist Worker events over a decade ago and being published in the New Left Review, which is now based in Quito, Ecuador a few short blocks from the English language offices of Venezuela’s state media outlet TeleSUR – would have told Philip N. Howard the same. Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, a founding member of the Action Network– a digital tool for organizing people online that’s published research on the processes involved in World Social Forum and that worked under Philip N Howard at the Central European University could have told him that “It’s not just about the technology, it’s about the IRL human networks”.

Philip N. Howard and Black Lives Matter Supporters

That Philip N. Howard would retweet Charlton McIlwain’s new book Black Software – which covers the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement means nothing by itself. Investigation of aspects of the BLM project is entirely valid, and yet in the greater context of the theoretical underpinnings of Howard’s research projects and the networks he is connected to this is highly significant.

The connections between Cuban-Venezuelan intelligence and the founding of Black Lives Matters is under-reported in the academic and popular press, but begins in earnest following Hurricane Katrina. Sekou M. Franklin provides an account of Venezuela’s financial assistance via the Common Grounds Collective and People’s Hurricane Relief Fund in the chapter African Americans, Transnational Contention, and Cross National Politics in the United States and Venezuela. The condensed version of the story is that oil money started to flow to current and former Black Panther Party members such as Malcolm Suber and Malik Rahim to engage in community assistance projects and so too did black-transnational political agitators from Venezueula such as Jesus “Chucho” Garcia– who has since had his diplomatic credentials revoked. The rationale why was never publicized, but it’s likely because of his advocacy on behalf of the Pan-Africanist movement.

Alicia Garza and Opal Tometti, two of the founders of Black Lives Matter, attended the United States Social Forum in 2007 – the U.S. iteration of Sao Paulo Forum. In the ChapterFrankfurt versus Atlantain Political Translation: How Social Movement Democracies Survivethe author Nicole Doerr describes the United States Social Forum as follows: The Coalition now included job centers as well as student organizations, labor, immigrant organizations, North American indigenous people and black and Latino church-based organizations, many of them lead by women and female or queer-identified leaders.” A few years after this, in 2011 Garza, became the Chairperson of the Right to the City Steering Committee – another Social Forum front and a few years after this Tometti would personally receive an award from Nicholas Maduro. Also worth noting is that recently Philip N. Howard’s director at the CCCE, Lance Bennet, gave a talk with Opal Tometion using technology to mobilize people for protests.

Philip N. Howard: Academic Socialist Steganographist

Steganography is the practice of concealing messages or other content within another message or image in order to avoid detection. In addition to looking at the subjects that interest Philip N. Howard, the research designs errors that he makes in his investigations, the impact they have on public discourse and governmental debate, the activists he chooses not to include and exclude in his ethnographic analysis, his professional associations, the activists he promotes and the people that promote him – one can find evidence of Socialist bias within the theoretical framework he employs.

While one could argue that the unnecessary-to-the-discussion-at-hand citation of Frankfurt School’s Marxists like Adorno and Horkheimer, as Philip N Howard does in Digitizing the Social Contract: Producing American Political Culture in the Age of New Media, constitutes a tell as to his politico-epistemological orientation– this is insufficient evidence. So too is his unnecessary-to-the-discussion-at-hand citation of publications printed by the radical Zed Bookscollective and his familiarity with Marx’s personal history that he cites in his book New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen.

That Philip N. Howard cites Why Not Create a Shadow Government?by Michael Albert – who’s listed on TeleSUR’s websiteas a staff member – in the same article is more notable by itself, all the more so as in Howard’s in-text citation of him and in his listing of him in the References section the author is incorrectly attributed to “Alpert, M” rather than “Albert, Michael”. Without diverting at length into Freudian theories of repression and self-preservation, it’s worth wondering if this is an unconscious disassociation on the part of Howard as a means of intellectual self-preservation. Why is that? I’ll proffer two reasons why.

First is that it obfuscates the schools of thought informing Howard’s article. The first seven pages of results of Howard’s citation on Google does not detect the original article. Going to the website of the magazine listed as the publisher it is discoverable – that is if you know the correct name of the author.

Once someone goes to the ZCommunications landing page, as one needs to do to find the original source, you will learn that their slogan isThe Spirit of Resistance Lives.

ZMagazine, from whence the Albert article came is a “radical print and online periodical”. The Rebels with a Causemovie poster portion of this section’s header image was chosen because the film features Todd Gitlin, who has reviewed Howard’s book New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen– a fact reflected on his CV.

ZVideo, according to their write up, is a way to distribute this particular school of thought’s talks and classes that has “proven more accessible.” The speakers and subjects included in their library  are “Noam Chomsky’s [who has a] humor[ous] and casual speaking style, the dynamism of Hugo Chavez, and the atmosphere of an evening session at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India.”

ZNet is a “community of people committed to social change” and includes people such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos– one of the founders of the World Social Forum; Medea Benjamin– whose advocacy on behalf of Venezuela has granted her audience with Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro and who used to work with Deborah James, the former director of the Venezuela Information Office, someone interviewed as part of Lance Bennett’s Global Citizen Project; Greg Wilpert– who founder of VenezuelaAnalysis and the first Executive Director of TeleSUR English; Mark Weisbrot– who works at Center for Economic and Policy Research; Bill Fletcher– who had a TV show on TeleSUR English called Global African, and many more.

Marisol Sandoval, a Lecturer at the Department of Culture and Creative Industries at City University London writing in A Critical Contribution to the Foundations of Alternative Media Studies – posted in the City, University of London Institutional Repository –  agrees with me. She claims that there is “another type of alternative media that aims at establishing a counter-public sphere” and that “Examples for such a type of media are The New Internationalist, Z Magazine, Rethinking Marxism, Historical Materialism or Monthly Review.”

Secondly rationale is that it obfuscates the specific context which informs Philip N. Howard’s closing contentions. In the article Michael Albert is referred to as a “political hypermedia consultant” and not as the main proponent of Participatory Economics, or ParEcon, which is a form of anarchist economics. In the context of Albert’s larger body of work, he’s not just advocating some political marketing ploy but is using new language to describe V.I. Lenin’s Dual Power political structure – something much debated but groups such as the International Marxist Tendency.

Since I can imagine a reader protesting that this analysis in combination with the above network ethnography is not sufficient evidence to make my case there is, thankfully more that verifies my hypothesis.

In the article Automation, Big Data, and Politics: A Research Review, published in IJOC, Philip N. Howard argues that:

“the time is right to match dedication to critical theoryof algorithmic communication with a dedication to empirical research through audit studies, network ethnography, and investigation of the political economy of algorithmic production.”

How does he know this?

“We review[ed] the great variety of critical scholarship on algorithms, automation, and big data in areas of contemporary life…”

Philip N. Howard then expands on the lines of research he describes in that article in Creativity and Critique: Gap Analysis of Support for Critical Research on Big Data.

Anyone familiar with the Frankfurt School on reading the words I’ve bolded and put in italics and that Philip N. Howard includes in the keywords for the article should immediately pick up on what they reference. For those not familiar with compound components of critical theory one could download the Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory, which has entries that explain “even the most complex of theoretical discourses, such as Marxism.” To keep things succinct, however, I’ll provide a brief explanation as it relates just to this case.

In Introduction: Critical Scholarship, Practice and Education by Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel Di Mauro states that:

“The term “critical” refers to a tradition of critical theory. An often cited representative of this tradition is the so-­called Frankfurt School. This “school” consisted of a network of researchers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which operated from 1923 to 1933, moved to New York during the Nazi regime, but reopened in Frankfurt in 1950. Although the label “Frankfurt School” is problematic and inexact, it does permit associating some basic ideas with the notion of “critical”.

And on page 4 the authors continue that: “Another important figure in critical scholarship is Karl Marx”

In the article The Problem with “Critical” Studies by Joseph Heath – professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto – Heath describes reading a number of books for a prize and noticing a number of “profoundly cringe-inducing” patterns in them:

“the ambition for “critical social science” was to have, not just social science guided by normative commitments, but for those normative commitments to be made explicit. The biggest problem with the books I read is that they almost invariably failed on the second half of this.”

Indeed, this is the assessment Jolene Zepcevski’s puts forward in her review of Philip N. Howard – Why ‘Pax Technica’ Is A Good Book with a Bad Argument.

Despite the opening claim that the book will analyze ICT policy, all it really does is advance a number of normative commitments that are socialist in nature. This is evident not only in his choice of framing the evolution of options which net technologies present to social groups – evolving from Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action, to Lance Bennett’s Logic of Collective Action– but also in the wider, transnational framework which he uses.

After Philip N. Howard provides a bafflegab definition for the term Pax Technica  he states on page 147 that in this new arrangement of world power:

“In the pax technica, the core and the periphery are not territorially assigned but socially and technologically constructed.”

The concept of core and periphery emerges from World Systems Research and is strongly associated with the theorist who popularized it within the social sciences, the Marxist Immanuel Wallerstein.

Explaining all of the components of the theory and the reasons why this variant of dependency theory didn’t get the goods it’s promoters promised developing countries would fill a series of books – so here I’ll just point out that those who abided by its principles often frequently sought to apply solutions for problems based on pre-existing political commitments and thereby worsened them. There’s numerous examples of this in Pax Technica, but as it would require extensive exegesis I’ll instead point to Philip N Howard’s Political Communication, Computational Propaganda, and Autonomous Agents. There he makes an appeal to human rights that aren’t codified into law and writes that:

“social media sites and proprietary device networks can change their terms of service at any time without informing visitors, turning any speech or activity on the site into a criminal act. For Sandvig and others, this is a violation of the Fifth Amendment right to due process, which requires proper notice to the public of what constitutes criminal behavior”.

For anyone that has a basic understanding of law, there is a significant difference between the Terms of Service on a private social media platform and state and federal legal regulations.

No matter what one may say about the growth of the importance of social media in the general population’s consumption of news media – a person being kicked off Twitter or Instagram for violation of Terms of Service is worlds apart from government agents swarming a facility used to print material, confiscating the equipment and preventing them from publishing and circulating materials. These types of appeals to abstract rights abound in Philip N. Howard and helps explain why he has advocated for the Nationalization of Facebook on Slate – a policy position which is also promoted by the Communists Paul Mason and Lewis Bassett.

Philip N. Howard – Liberation Technologist

Lest this seem like an distorted reading of the Philip N. Howard’s theoretical framework it’s worth pointing out that he closes Pax Technicain praise of what he calls liberation technologies.

Whereas Liberation Theology is the importation and use of Marxist concepts absent from Christian doctrinefor the pursuit of geopolitical goals, liberation technology is a term widely used within the crypto-anarchistand cyber-communistcommunities to describe how the newest iteration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will be used in order to bring about the revolution.

While the modern conception is typically rooted in the speculated capabilities of present, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and People’s Commissar for Education and Culture Georg Lukas anticipated this in his notion of totality, as described in History and Class Consciousness.

Advocates of Liberation Theology and Liberation Technology share a similar worldview. Whereas the former sees the eschaton– the end of history – as emerging from mass conversion to “true” Christianity, at the end of an AK-47 if need be, the latter sees it as emerging from “true” non-mediated social relations, at the expense of breaking all existent laws, customs and social mores if need be.

For Liberation Theologists Colombia’s National Liberation Army, the ELN, is representative of such an ideologically-aligned organization. Their engagement in kidnapping, drug-trafficking, assassinations etc. is excusable as it is “God’s work”.

For Liberation Technologists Wikileaks and Anonymous, aka organizations engaged in terrorism-related activities are representative of such an ideologically-aligned organization. Indeed the Tor network, developed by Liberation Technologist Roger Dingledine, has helped facilitate drug trafficking and the financing of terrorism.

While the merits of apps such as Tsunamic Democraticand other platforms aimed at uniting disparate interest groups for political protest and organization are open for debate – it is certainly clear by the above analysis of Philip N. Howard’s published academic work and the existent case-history of “liberation technology” that advocacy of such positions using such terms is akin to how “Hands Off Venezuela” is equivalent to “Viva Socialism!”.

Philip N Howard – Audience Reception

Lest my interpretation of Philip N. Howard’s oeuvre seem to improperly highlight certain elements of his work, I’ve decided to highlight below some of how other researchers interpret his work.

The following section exhibits how Philip N. Howard’s work has been interpreted by other experts in the field and provides network ethnographic descriptions of the individuals and organizations that have cited his work which help prove, along with all of the other evidence, Philip N. Howard’s membership in the REDH network.

Philip N Howard – Perceived as akin to Paulo Freire, Marxist Pedagogue

In Radical Pockets of Digital Democracy: Deleuzian Grandeur? Luke J. Heemsbergena lecturer at Deakin University and writer of WikiLeaks apologiaclaims that Philip N. Howard’s four year Network Ethnography match the views of Paulo Freire.

Paulo Freire, along with Marx, Gramsci and General Zamora, are some of the most revered thought-leaders amongst those advocating 21stcentury socialism.

While not reflective of Philip N. Howard per se, it is nevertheless interesting to note that Dr. John Asimakopoulos, a sociology professor at CUNY-Bronx who identifies as an organic intellectual– an allusion to the Marxist Antonio Gramsci – decided to advertise his book The Next Great Transformation from Kleptocracy Capitalism to Libertarian Socialism through Counter Ideology, Societal Education, & Direct Action, which has a forward by Marxist educator Peter McLaren, in the brochure for the APSA Politics After the Digital Revolution Conference– an event at which  Philip N. Howard gave a presentation.

Other academics, that have wrote long format reviews of Howard, Evgeny Morozov, for instance, identifies as a Marxist and Todd Gitlin has been named as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Robinson Salazar Péreza, a Mexican Critical Theorist and Social Scientist, also promotes Howard, in the context of documents which explicitly references the Network of Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity (REDH).

 Philip N. Howard – Perceived as akin to Cristian Fuchs, Marxist Cultural Theorist

Another person with whom Philip N. Howard is frequently associated with is Christian Fuchs.

The author of books such as Social Media: A Critical Guideand Reading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism– after signing up to his Triple C (Communication, Capitalism, Critique) email list I learned that the email server that he uses is the same one used by the ELN (as you can see from the above) and the FARC (as you can tell by looking here).

In Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News by Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young, part of a series called Disruptions put out by Routledge press, the authors similar cite Philip N Howard in the same context as Christian Fuchs.

In Rethinking Ideology in the Age of Global Discontent: Bridging Divides a book edited by by Barrie AxfordDidem Buhari-GulmezSeckin Baris Gulmez Fuchs and Howard are again placed side by side – not in contrast, but complementarily.

In Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy Siva Vaidhyanathan, who also authored the book The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System similarly seems to think that the avowed Marxist Fuchs and Philip N. Howard have similar views.

Philip N. Howard’s Research Promoted by Methods and Organizations Connected to Cuban-Venezuelan Intelligence Agencies

As Wikipedia is an interesting place to determine an author’s reception I decided to search there for instances of Philip N. Howard’s name.

The first citation I examined was made by a Wikipedia user without a page named CWDrea whose only contributions was three edits made to the Arab Spring page.

The content of those edits were to make the claim that the Arab Spring protests were completely non-violent – an empirically false claim attested to by numerous journalists, activists and government authorities present at the events – as well as to include a citation of Philip N. Howard’s article ICT’s and the Fuzzy Causes of the Arab Spring.

A second citation of Philip N. Howard came from a student in a 2016 Columbia University Course called Order and Violence taught by Christopher Blattman.

When I looked at Blattman’s Curriculum Vitae, I learned that he’s a research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy and Research.

Joseph Stiglitz, Mark Weisbrot and Danny Glover are all members of the CEPR advisory board and all have close connections with the Venezuelan government.

The CEPR has published a number of research articles that are, according to Clifton Ross and the numerous others subject area experts he cites in his article Pandering to the Imperial Left: The New CEPR Report “crude piece[s] of gringo-chavista whitewashing aimed at gaining sympathy for “the cause”.

This isn’t surprising when one looks at the people involved in the organization. One of its board members is “Danny Glover, who received over 18 million dollars from Hugo Chavez. Joseph Stiglitz, a long-time Bolivarian Revolution defender and advocate of state-centric economic behavior is also a board member of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, as is Venezuela crisis denier Mark Weisbrot and Warden Bellow, a founding member and promoter of the Sao Paulo Forum. Mark Levinson, who is a lifelong advocate of Democratic Socialism is also on the board as is Deborah James – the former executive director of the Venezuela Information Office and a participant in Lance Bennett’s Global Voices project. Eileen Applebaum, who’s cited by TeleSUR here, is also a member.

After Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa fled the country for definitive charges of corruption and the rumors that Venezuela’s ally the FARC-EP had helped fund his campaign, three of the executive leaders of Center for Economic Policy and Research were among the signatories of a public warning about the dangers of Ecuador “returning to neoliberalism”.

Who thought fit to share this public declaration of anti-neoliberalism? Cuba’s Network of Intellectuals, Artists and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity.

This, notably, wasn’t the only Sao Paulo Forum associated intellectual to promote Philip N. Howard.

David Evan Harris, a Sao Paulo University graduate whose first writings are about the benefits of ALBA also promotes Philip N. Howard. Two of his articles appear within the syllabus for the Social Movements & Social Mediacourse he teachers. I could certainly find more evidence in the academic world that proves my point of Dr. Howard’s connections REDH, but I’ll stop for now to summarize and close my case.

Given all these overlaps in “elective” affinities it’s perhaps no surprise that Philip N. Howard’s research was cited in an editorial hosted on TeleSUR – El neoliberalismo millenial y la campaña de Bolsonaro, or The Neoliberal Millenia and Bolsonaro’s Campaignand by the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in Malaysia.

I find this latter research-article especially revealing as it implies that the popular rejection of Evo Morales from Bolivia supported by law enforcement officers and the military due to his corrupt patronage networks and anti-democratic activities is marred as “less justified” because of Twitter bots. Like the Communists in the Chiapas, Egypt and Occupy, here again Howard presents a false picture of faceless movements. Because of this poor theoretical underpinning and reliance upon categorically invalid forms of quantitative social science he fails to investigate the much more telling facts of the matter such as disinformation networks connected to news outlets, the extensive circulation online of deepfake nudes within Pro-Nicholas Marudo Facebook groups intended to humiliate Jeanine Añez and Fabiana Rosales de Guaidó, evidence that photos claiming to be protest violence by police that are staged with makeup and actors or are from different times and locations, or going into the issues I mentioned earlier about Venezuela’s online and in real life activity. Indeed, the bullets of messages in an information warfare often comprise equally of what is not there as what is.

Philip N. Howard: Conclusion

All of the above evidence indicates that Philip N. Howard is a member of the Cuban and Venezuelan Intelligence sponsored Network of Intellectuals and that one of the activities that is required of him in exchange for professional support is for him to use his credentials as an expert to deceive the Public and to provide fraudulent or misleading testimony to government bodies perceived as enemies to REDH.

The sum rationale for this argument developed into the following propositions:

  1. Someone that had previously corrected errors in his publications, but refuses do so as it relates to research that misdirects attention from Venezuela
  2. Someone who’s faulty research findings is part of a project to invalidate the Brexit vote
  3. Someone who’s faulty research findings is part of a project to invalidate the election of U.S. president Donald Trump
  4. Someone who’s faulty research findings is part of a project to invalidate the election of Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro
  5. Someone whose first instance of field-research was covering a Communist insurgency (Zapatistas) in Mexico that exploited individual activists, academics and NGOs for political ends along netwar lines
  6. Someone who engaged in embedded investigation with an organization (Indymedia) formed in the wake of the Zapatista conflict to replicate their model worldwide
  7. Someone whose supervisor at the University of Washington helped organize the NorthWest Social Forum – a political organization promoted by and directly connected to Venezuelan intelligence
  8. Someone who helped found an academic program funded and promoted by George Soros, which was populated by multiple academics associated with the World Social Forum and Occupy Wall Street
  9. Someone who receives grant money from organizations that also support avowedly socialist academic projects
  10. Someone whose public political positions related to Steve Bannon are the same as the Canadian Communist Party, the Hands Off Venezuela network, and the British Socialist Workers Party
  11. Someone who – like numerous other socialist parties and academics not open as to their party affiliation – advocates for the nationalization of Facebook
  12. Someone who has published a monograph about one of the main Marxist sociologists that has multiple, active connections to the São Paulo Forum, the PSUV and the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity
  13. Someone that promotes the research of Black Lives Matters/Black Liberation Movement associated sociological research
  14. Someone whose published academic uses cryptic allusions to Communist schools of thought in their theoretical framework and avows to being a Critical Theorist
  15. Someone who promotes the Liberation Technology school of thought, which is a variation of the socialist Liberation Theology movement
  16. Someone that promotes other artists and intellectuals whose activism and political positions align with the goals of Cuban and Venezuelan Intelligence Services
  17. Someone whose published academic work is promoted via methods typical of Cuba and Venezuela’s Network of Intellectuals and Artists
  18. Someone whose published academic work is promoted by actors associated with Cuba and Venezuela’s Network of Intellectuals and Artists
  19. Someone who refuses to answer questions about their research and their political connections despite such behavior violating the spirit and letter of the appropriate academic professional code of ethics
  20. Someone whose speech acts provided to the US and UK government can be described, respectably, as misdirection and disinformation

is an enchufado scholar, that is a scholar that is “plugged in” to provide services and material support to the regime of Nicolas Maduro in exchange for the receipt of benefits and funding.

After all, it certainly appears that the effect of Howard’s academic publishing and testimony is to spread disinformation and encourage misdirection on behalf of the Socialist network which has helped make Philip N. Howard appear to be an expert in a field of ICT and not just a partisan political advocate in an Oxford robe.

Notes from Inside Collaborative Networks: Ten Lessons for Public Managers

Inside Collaborative Networks: Ten Lessons for Public Managers

by Robert Agranoff

Indina University–Bloomingon

This paper offers practical insights for public managers as they work within interorganizational networks. It
is based on the author’s empirical study of 14 networks involving federal, state, and local government
managers working with nongovernmental organizations. The findings suggest that networks are hardly crowding out the role of public agencies; though they are limited in their decision scope, they can add collaborative public value when approaching nettlesome policy and program problems.

Extended discussions were undertaken in the field on two separate occasions with more than 150 public officials, in addition to field observation and examination of network documentation.

Lesson 1: The network is not the only vehicle of collaborative management.

Lesson 2: Managers continue to do the bulk of their work within the hierarchy.

Lesson 3: Network involvement brings several advantages that keep busy administrators
involved.

Lesson 4: Networks are different from organizations but not completely different.

Lesson 5: Not all networks make the types of policy and program adjustments ascribed to them in the literature.

Lesson 6: Collaborative decisions or agreements are the products of a particular type of mutual learning and adjustment.

Lesson 7: The most distinctive collaborative activity of all of the networks proved to be their work
in public sector knowledge management.

Lesson 8: Despite the cooperative spirit and aura of accommodation in collaborative efforts, networks are not without conflicts and power issues.

Lesson 9: Networks have their collaborative costs, as well as their benefits.

Lesson 10: Networks alter the boundaries of the state only in the most marginal ways; they do not appear to be replacing public bureaucracies in any way.

It is time to go beyond heralding the importance of networks as a form of collaborative public management and look inside their operations.

it is well known (1) that “the age of the network” has arrived (Lipnack and Stamps 1994), (2) that hierarchy and markets are being supplemented by networks (Powell 1990), (3) that public managers are enmeshed in a series of collaborative horizontal and vertical networks (Agranoff and McGuire 2003), and (4) that networks need to be treated seriously in public administration

Public manage- ment networks are, in every sense, collaborative connections like social networks, although they not only comprise representatives of disparate organiza- tions but also go beyond analytical modes. They are real-world public entities.

Agranoff and McGuire define collaborative management processes as “the process of facilitating and operating in multi organizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved, or solved easily, by single organizations”

Although it is certainly true that mutual dependency is leading to an increasing number of horizontal relationships crossing many boundaries, lateral connections seem to overlay the hierarchy rather than act as a replacement for them.

Program specialists frequently (and more naturally) work across agency boundaries. Their work is technical or based on specialized knowledge, and it is geared to solving problems, belonging to epistemic communities, and acting on shared beliefs.

For the line administrator, however, it is largely business as usual most of the time, dealing with internal POSDCORB matters, along with increasing collaborative pressures.

Why do networked accountability bodies persist? Because they deliver different forms of public value to their multiple participants.

Networks can perform a great many public service purposes. They not only bring many parties to the table but also have the potential to expand the resource base. The most important element of the resource base is the potential for knowledge expansion, a function that administrators said was indispensable.

From knowledge comes the possibility of new solutions derived by, owned, and implemented by several parties.

The key to sustained network involvement is performance, and the key to performance is adding public value by working together rather than separately.

The first benefit is the value added to the manager or professional, such as learning new ways to collaborate, intergovernmental skills, and how to network, along with enhanced technical and information and communications technology skills. Second are the benefits accruing to the home agency, such as access to other agencies’ information, programs and resources; access to information and communications technology; cross-training of agency staff; and most important, enhanced external input into the internal knowledge base. Third are the collective process skills that accrue from working together over a sustained period of time—for example, developing interagency planning, piloting an adaptation of a new technology, developing a mutual interagency culture that leads to subsequent problem solving, and experimenting with electronic group decision technology. Fourth are the concrete results accrued, such as an action plan, a capability building conference, new interagency strategies, and multiagency policy and program changes. These types of value-adding performance results sustain administrators’ efforts in collaborative undertakings.

It is an accepted fact that bureaucratic structures have become more flexible and permeable over the past century. Today’s organizations are becoming more conductive—that is, they are continuously generating and renewing capabilities, bearing in mind the alignment between internal forces and external demands, including the importance of creating partnerships through internal–external interaction, building alliances and coalitions, forming and reforming teams across functions and organization boundaries, and collaborating to actively manage interdependencies. In this sense, perhaps bureaucracies and standing networks appear a good deal alike because both need to be concerned with managing complex partnerships, with blurring boundaries. The difference is that one structures and creates rules and strategies under the umbrella of one organization, whereas the other must interorganizationally and collectively create structures, rules, and strategies that fit their multiorganizational needs.

In the 14 public management networks studied, four types of public value were queried, and managers found substantial benefits in each dimension.

  1. The first benefit is the value added to the manager or professional, such as learning new ways to collaborate, intergovernmental skills, and how to network, along with enhanced technical and information and communications technology skills.
  2. Second are the benefits accruing to the home agency, such as access to other agencies’ information, programs and resources; access to information and communications technology; cross-training of agency staff; and most important, enhanced external input into the internal knowledge base.
  3. Third are the collective process skills that accrue from working together over a sustained period of time—for example, developing interagency planning, piloting an adaptation of a new technology, developing a mutual interagency culture that leads to subsequent problem solving, and experimenting with electronic group decision technology.
  4. Fourth are the concrete results accrued, such as an action plan, a capability building conference, new interagency strategies, and multiagency policy and program changes. These types of value-adding performance results sustain administrators’ efforts in collaborative undertakings.

Virtually all of the 14 networks studied operated with some form of council or board, elected by the entire body of agency representatives, very much like the board of directors of a nonprofit organization.

The real work in all of the networks studied was done in either standing committees (e.g., finance, technology transfer, tele-medicine, educational applications, transportation technical review) or focused and usually shorter-term workgroups (e.g., ortho-infrared mapping, bicycle and pedestrian, broadband usage, community visitation, water and wastewater treatment)

Because all networks do not really make decisions, it is prefer- able to refer to many of their deliberative processes as “reaching agreements” rather than “decisions,”

In collaborative bodies, decisions and agreements are necessarily based on consensus, inasmuch as participating administrators and professionals are partners,not superior–subordinates.

they are co-conveners, co-strategists, co–action formulators, co-programmers, and so on. It is also true that public agency administrators possess neither ultimate legal authority (except, of course, within one’s home agency domain) nor control over all technical information. Authority in the network is shared with the many stakeholders at the table: other administrators, program specialists, research scientists, policy researchers, and interest group and advocacy association officials. Among the partners, it is unlikely that any single agency or representative at the table will have the legal authority or financial resources to completely approach a problem.

informational: wherein partners came together almost exclusively to exchange agency policies and programs, technologies, and potential solutions. Any changes or actions were voluntarily taken up by the agencies themselves.

developmental: wherein partner information and technical exchange were combined with education and member services that increased the members’ capacities to implement solutions within their home agencies and organizations.

outreach: wherein the activities of the developmental network were engaged; in addition, however, they also blue-printed strategies for program and policy change that led to an exchange or coordination of resources, although decision making and implementation were ultimately left to the agencies and programs them-selves.

action networks, wherein partners came together to make interagency adjustments, formally adopt collaborative courses of action, and deliver services, along with information exchanges and enhanced technology capability.

Creating a collective power of new possibilities.

The issue is to bring about enough cooperation among disparate community elements to get things done.

In order to open up new possibilities, the networks studied used six distinct predecision or agreement learning strategies.

They prepared for brokered consensus through (1) group discussion or exchange of ideas; (2) political negotiation of sensitive concerns and intensely felt needs; (3) direct applica- tion of technology or preestablished decision rules or formats; (4) application of preestablished, formulaic procedures (e.g., those related to regulations, grants, or loans); (5) data-driven decisions or agreements (e.g., market studies, usage patterns, traffic or accident counts); and (6) predecision simulation or electronic base groupware or other decision techniques.

“Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information”

Whereas data refer to discrete, objective facts, and information is a message in the form of a document or an audible or visual communication, knowledgeis more action oriented, both in process and in outcome. Knowledge management has two dimensions: explicit knowledge, which can be codified and communicated easily in words, numbers, charts, or drawings, and tacit knowledge, which is embedded in the senses, individual perceptions, physical experiences, intuition, and rules of thumb

In the networks studied, the process of knowledge management in many ways defined the major focus of their standing committees and working groups.

First, essentially all of them began by surveying the universe of data and information that their partners had developed or could access, plus external databases of use to them.

Second, this information then used to develop their “own source” explicit knowledge using resources such as libraries, map inventories, strategic plans, fact sheets and policy guides, focused studies, surveys, conferences and workshops, electronic bulletin boards, process reviews, long-range plans, models and simulations, and market studies.

Third, tacit knowledge was rarely formally codified, but it was regularly approached through stakeholder consultations, best practices booklets, workgroups as “communities of practice,” study project report panels, expert presentations, specialized workshops, SWOT workshops, hands-on technical assistance, community leadership development sessions, forums on “what works,” direct agency outreach, help desks, and public hearings.

Fourth, the networks tried to organize the explicit/ tacit interface not through codification but through informal feedback on the myriad of knowledge management activities in which they engaged, usually through some informal post-project assessment or at its board or steering committee meetings.

Fifth, most of the networks directly served some of the knowledge management needs of their partner agencies by producing formal reports, responding to data requests, supplying modeling and planning data, circulating policy reports, sponsoring in-agency forums and report sessions, providing technical expert linkages between the network and specific agencies, and in some cases, providing agency-requested studies.

In the same way that organizations seek structured predictability, networks try to use their open-ended processes of coordinating purposeful individuals who can apply their unique skills and experiences to the local problem confronting the collaborative undertaking

Beyond the formal structure of the governing body and working committees and groups were four elements of power.

First, virtually every network had a champion (and in two cases, two champions)—a visible, powerful, and prestigious public agency head or nonprofit chief executive officer who organizes or sustains the network. The presence of the champion in the network signaled to others in the field to “stay in” and “cooperate.”

Second, there was a political core, normally comprising the primary participating department heads or federal government state directors and chief executive officers of the non- governmental organizations. These managers tended to be part of the governance structure, they sent a message to other participants that the network was important to be involved with, and they were the people who were most likely to be involved in high- level interagency negotiations and resource accommodations.

Third, there was a technical core, primarily workgroup or committee activists who knew the most about a particular topic (e.g., watershed management, planning, geographic information systems, finance, regulation, information and communications technology, and so on). Because a great deal of the work was bound up investigating problems, creating knowledge, and looking for feasible solutions, their work was at the core of network activity, and the most knowledgeable of these individuals held considerable operating power.

Finally, there were paid staff who held the network together through their support efforts, which in the 14 networks ranged from one or two persons who devoted to the network full time to 18 full- or part-time participants in one action network.

This power structure is deep, and the four dimensions overlap in practice—it is every bit as real as those in the organizations from which representatives are drawn.

If managers give up or add to the job of internal operations to engage in cooperation, they obviously do this at some cost.

Many line managers are said to be protective of agency autonomy for one of four reasons: (1) the agency manager knows best, and therefore should carry out its mission and programs; (2) loss of autonomy is associated with the loss of control and guidance of the agency; (3) people place a greater value on losses than on gains; and (4) autonomy reduces uncertainty

 

Real costs associated with network participation that the managers and professionals articulated. Six general cost categories were indicated:

(1) time and opportunity costs lost to the home agency as a result of network involvement

(2) time and energy costs resulting from the protracted decision-making process, based on nonhierarchical, multiorganizational, multicultural human relations processes

(3) agreements not reached because of the exertion of organizational power or the withholding of power

(4) network gravitation toward consensus- based, risk-aversive decision agendas

(5) resource “hoarding,” or agencies’ failure or unwillingness to contribute needed resources

(6) public policy barriers embedded in legislation, coupled with legislators’ or other policy makers’ unwillingness to make needed changes, which, in turn, frustrated collaborative decisions.

All of these appear to thwart progress within networks.

To a degree, the deliberations of the network and the in- volvement of nongovernmental organizations clearly influenced the courses of action taken by government, and in some cases, new programs and strategies emanated from network deliberations.

Three Large Caveats

First, when it comes to policy decisions, it is almost always the public institutions that make the ultimate call, and in the case of implementation, it is the agency.

Second, in virtually every public management net- work, it is government administrators at federal, state, and local levels who are the core or among the core actors in the network. They are able to inject legisla- tive, regulatory, and financial considerations right into the network mix, which hardly marginalizes them.

Third, many collaborative efforts outside the network form are more tightly controlled by the government, in the form of grant expectations, contract provisions, or loan conditions, tying the nongovernmental orga- nization to the public agency in a tighter way.

Today’s wicked policy problems, dispersed knowledge and resources, first- and second-order effects, and intergovernmental overlays guarantee that managers must engage other governments and nongovernmental organizations

 

Business Concepts, SWOT Analysis Matrix A Structured Planning Method for Evaluate Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats Involved in Business Project Diagram.

 

 

Notes from Complexities, challenges and implications of collaborative work within a regime of performance measurement: the case of management and organisation studies

Complexities, challenges and implications of collaborative work within a regime of performance measurement: the case of management and organisation studies

By Emma Jeanes, Bernadette Loacker & Martyna Śliwa

https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2018.1453793

ABSTRACT

The current demands on higher education institutions (HEIs) to become more efficient and effective have led to increasing performance pressures on researchers, and consequently on the practices and outcomes of researcher collaborations. In this paper, based on a qualitative study of collaborative experiences of management and organisation studies scholars, we explore the complexities and challenges of researcher collaborations under the current regime of academic performance measurement. Our study suggests that researcher collaborations are underpinned by four main rationalities: traditional-hierarchical, strategic-instrumental, scholarly-professional and relationship-orientated. We find that strategic-instrumental rationalities are the most prevalent and typically infuse other rationalities. Our research demonstrates that there are potential adverse consequences for the quality and purpose of outputs, the effects on collegial relationships and risks of exploitation and reinvoked hierarchies in collaborative relationships. The study reveals some of the problematic implications for academics and HEIs that emerge as a consequence of research productivity measurement.

KEYWORDS

Academic hierarchy; business schools; New Public Management; researcher collaboration; research performance measurement

Critics of academic performance management, and especially research productivity measurement, have highlighted that it gives rise to individualistic behaviours and practices, reinforcing competitive- ness and potentially undermining collegiality (Ball 2012). Lynch (2015, 199) warns that those who have internalised the productivity imperative are likely to develop an ‘actuarian and calculative mindset’, and to adopt a way of relating to the university organisation and to other academics, including collaborators, in purely transactional, career-oriented terms.

This incentivises collaborative publications since both quality and quantity of output matter for assessing research productivity and can even impact global rankings.However, questions have been raised about the quality of outputs produced under the regime of ‘excellence’. For example, it has been argued that as a result of these measurements, academics might be more concerned with producing publications that conform to external quality evaluation criteria rather than striving to produce what they consider their ‘best work’

The increasing predominance of journal lists and rankings as performance measurement tools tends to exert a ‘homogenizing impact’, stifling scholarly diversity and innovation. A specific study of management scholars has further shown a tendency to approach writing for academic publication as a ‘game’ rather than a process of critical inquiry

Collaboration is commonly considered a vehicle for building professional networks, sharing knowledge, ideas, skills, experiences, workload, resources and risks associated with the research process, and for improving future employment prospects as well as attracting research funding for the collaborating parties

A variety of rationalities inform prevalent practices of researcher collaboration. Below we critically discuss these rationalities, which we term as:

(a) traditional-hierarchical

(b) strategic-instrumental

(c) scholarly-professional

(d) relationship-oriented.

Interpersonal Problems:

Even though his name (senior collaborator) is last in the alphabet, he puts his name first … I’ve tried to address it but there’s been no response. So you kind of feel like the hierarchy has been slipping in … I didn’t really know how to handle that.

These ‘less mutually collaborative research teams that come together more because of employ- ment and institutional relationships’ (Louis-MCR-BC) were widely evident. Such tolerance for inequality results in systematic burdens and challenges placed on those lacking an established institutional position, who are compelled to collaborate.

Where seniority-based collaborations have been experienced as problematic, some researchers have developed a ‘calculative mindset’ towards collaborations.

Rather than collaborations achieving greater creativity and pluralism, under the current regime of academic performance measurement, it is likely that collaborative practices foster a scholarly ‘monoculture’ and thus lead to narrow, incremental, often self-referential and superficial projects being embarked upon – i.e. ones that are seen to hold the promise of bringing highly evaluated, quantifiable and thus ‘excellent’ outputs, and contributing to researchers’ career progression.

This output-orientation in relation to the main objectives of collaborations reflects a broader observation stemming from our study in that strategic-instrumental rationalities underpinning col- laborations were the most widespread in our sample of participants. This demonstrates that, in a ‘partnership or perish climate’ (Berman 2008, 167), strategic-instrumental considerations tend to sup- press other collaborative rationalities such as those focusing on scholarly activities, projects and relationships. Even where academics claim a relationship- and friendship-based ‘ethics of care’ and ‘gift giving’ to be core to collaborations, they simultaneously express an instrumental approach to collaboration and, specifically, an underlying need for the creation of ‘added value’ (Macfarlane 2017) through publications.

Problematic collaborative practices and relations are, however, not limited to ‘vertical’ collaborations.

Strong performance cultures in HEIs tend to encourage academic malpractices, delineated by a lack of contributions, reliability, mutual responsiveness, trust and, thus, a lack of collegiality and engagement within collaborations.

Scholarly responsibility appears to be replaced by a sense of institutional accountability, mainly defined by meeting performance targets and metrics.

Our study demonstrates that current performance and research productivity pressures in HEIs ‘crowd out’ some important academic values and ideals, such as the pursuit of research out of scholarly curiosity and an aspiration for critical inquiry, and the cultivation of diverse and mutually supportive collegial relationships – in support of an unquestioning acceptability of demands for strategic, output-oriented and career objectives-driven academic practices.

We see the ascent of the opportunistic, career-driven scholar who cultivates strategic, low-risk high-output collaborations, which may foreclose more interesting, inventive and valuable forms of research and jeopardize collegial relationships informed by critical reflexivity, equality and mutual trust.

While we do not argue against the aspiration to produce high-quality research, our study of researcher collaborations among MOS academics underlines that the (un)intended con- sequences of the prevailing performance management regime and its emphasis on efficiency, excellence, relevance and accountability are far-reaching, for academics and for HEIs.

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Notes from Collaborative Knowledge Management—A Construction Case Study

Collaborative Knowledge Management—A Construction Case Study

doi:10.1016/j.autcon.2009.03.015

by Bhargav Dave, Lauri Koskela
Salford Centre for Research and Innovation, University of Salford

Abstract: Due to the new threats and challenges faced by the construction industry today, construction companies must seek new solutions in order to remain ahead of the competition. Knowledge has been identified to be a significant organisational resource, which if used effectively can provide competitive advantage. A lot of emphasis is being put on how to identify, capture and share knowledge in today’s organisations. It has been argued over the years that due to the fragmented nature of the construction industry and ad-hoc nature of the construction projects, capture and reuse of valuable knowledge gathered during a construction project pose a challenge. As a result critical mistakes are repeated on projects and construction professionals have to keep “reinventing the wheel”. Given the nature of construction projects, collaborative knowledge management seems to be the most appropriate solution to capture project based knowledge. Information and communication technologies offer a number of solutions to implement collaborative knowledge management solutions. This paper discusses a range of these solutions and presents a case study where a collaborative knowledge management solution is implemented across a multi functional construction company.

The work presented in the case study was carried out while the first author was employed by the case study organisation. A social web application was implemented to solve a particular knowledge sharing problem within the organisation’s concrete pumping business. The new solution provided an effective and simple way to create knowledge by taking employees’ ideas through an iterative cycle of discussion.

Keywords:Knowledge management, Social web applications, Construction

The construction industry fails to retain project knowledge for future reuse. Some common factors behind this are; personnel changing companies or industry, teams being separated after completion of a project, lack of a standard platform to capture and share knowledge, lack of motivation, etc. Many companies have documentation processes such as post project reviews, in place to capture such knowledge, however in most instances these are not properly documented, and if documented they remain locked in archives.

During the monthly meetings and general supervision it was observed that the operators in both workshops regularly identified innovative solutions to solve problems of varying complexity. However due to a lack of formal documentation and sharing procedure, this knowledge was not retained and operators kept “reinventing the wheel” on a regular basis. It was also identified that a significant amount of commonly used information could be shared across the depots, however due to the lack of a sharing platform this could not be achieved.

the following issues were identified, which limited its use in this context:

  • Knowledge is only captured in form of documents, which are static in nature and don’t support the knowledge creation lifecycle
  • Operators, other than who created knowledge, can’t comment or update documents
  • Rich content (i.e. picture, multimedia) is not easy to embed or associate with knowledge
  • Searching within the knowledge base is not efficient
  • Multiple versions of same documents exist leading to confusion
  • Social interaction is important aspect of knowledge creation, this is not supported by the existing platform

 

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