this saturday my friend Valery (together with Eric & Merijn) are hosting a mini conference called ‘Migrant Media Metropole – New labour struggles in the global city‘ at the Balie in Amsterdam.

Migration and media-activists gather with theorists and labour organizers to discuss and share best practices in the fight against precarity and insecure labour conditions. [...]

ran into some amazing slideshows in the last couple of days which somehow remind me of my trip to Dubai, India and China (see here) late last year. first, the New York Times (which apparently is one and a half inches less wide these days) has a beautiful slideshow from construction sites in Dubai (see [...]

… and thus you have to fly around french airspace when you are going from amsterdam to lisbon and back. takes about an hour and twenty minutes more than the direct route, but creates a somewhat beautiful route display on the in-flight entertainment system:

also reminds me of a picture i took like three years [...]

yesterday i saw john & jane, a film about call center workers in new bombay by Ashim Ahluwalia, which is running as part of the berlin film festival. the filme is an impressive, beautifully shot (but sometimes slow) portrait of six persons working in a call center (‘4th dimension’) which provides a range of services [...]

it is almost four years ago that i finally finished my thesis (‘The freedom of movement of workers in the context of the Eastern enlargement of the European Union’ – download the pdf here) and concluded my studies in comparative political science at the University of Amsterdam. After finishing the thesis and getting my diploma [...]

i almost missed my flight today. first air france offered me €150 and hotel costs if i would consider flying the next day as the flight was overbooked. given that it was sunny 30C in BsAs and snowy -2C in berlin i immediately accepted their proposal. i was given a voucher for €150 and asked [...]

so apparently the government of Maharashtra (the same idiots who came up with the brilliant idea to rename bombay into mumbai) thinks it can improve the position of women by stenciling ‘women empowerment’ on the back of every second rickshaw in the state (the other half has ‘if a girl studies progress will happen’ stenciled [...]

among other things i dropped my camera (a canon powershot pro1) today. i had dropped it once before and nothing had happened then but today it broke. the 30 cm fall from a table on a stone floor resulted in parts of the casing coming of the body and the trigger casing being broken so [...]

last week we had a research and development workshop at waag society. about 20 of us had to engage in 2 days socratic talking. i still do not really know what exactly this was suposed to accomplish but there are two additional days to come, so lets see.
for the first day of the workshop we [...]