The Knowledge Lab is an attempt to provide a collective space for anti-capitalist reflection. It is located at the margin of the university, an institution essentially geared towards the production of knowledge as a resource for corporate interest and as justification for particular constellations of power relations. The Knowledge Lab is hence also an attempt to claim back some of the university's space, resources and know-how from the military-industrial complex and make them available for people concerned
The knowledge lab grew out of conversations at the anarchist bookfair in 2004, where the "anarchist academics" session featured on the programme for the second time. So many people came to both sessions that all that could be done was intros and quick networking - those sessions made it very was clear that more time and space was needed for socially and politically engaged people and those on the margin of the institutionalised "knowledge factories" to (be able to) get together, somehow. Join the mailing kn
The Knowledge Lab was founded at Lancaster University in North West England and originally funded by the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) , for the purpose of "bringing together activists and academics to discuss aspects of the capitalist economy driving globalisation from above - such as enclosures, precarious labour, structural violence, colonialism, and their justifying cultural imagery – and to make visible alternative architectures emerging through processes of globalisation from below, i.e. throug