Dear friends,

It's been a few months since we meet at King View and it's time for an
up-date. Budd thinks it would be a good idea if we kept in touch with each
other's progress and volunteered me to coordinate the dissemination of
news. I'm happy to do so.

This is the first of occasional and hopefully frequent contacts in which we
share our news on the SML Project and other related topics of interest.
I'll kick it off with news and updates. If you prefer, I can collect your
news and send out one message with updates or you can each email all of us.
Again, I'm happy to be the clearinghouse, so if you have news to share,
please feel free to pass it to me and when there's a few messages, I'll
coordinate sending them out.

Meanwhile here's the news:

Pramod and Budd are working on a second draft of the proposal and have cut
the length in half, tighened the wording, added some of the output from
King View and as soon as they're happy enough with it, will e it out for
comments.

Pramod leaves for India arriving on the 30 Jan. to look at some of the
projects there for SML. He'll report more on his return.

Budd continues to liaise with others and is looking at where to showcase
the SML Project. Possibilities include Ottawa 25-27 August. It's called The
Participatory Democracy Forum: Deepening our understanding and practice on
participatory democracy and beyond. Deadline for proposals is 31 Jan and
Pramod is working on meeting the deadline.

Budd and I are thinking about a few things such as funding and the meeting
we're going to have at the Commonfire Conference and how to further the
work there. More to come on those topics...

There are some other conferences you may find of interest:

Conference on althernative futures and popular protest
Manchester Metropolitan University
[email protected]
29-31 march
will address contemporary historical social movements and popular protests
social movement theory
utopias and experiments
ideologies of collective action.
 

conference on social movements, collective action and social change
16-18 April
University College Cork, Ireland
[email protected]
www.ucc.ie/ucc/depts/sociology/home.htm
will address comparative analysis of the so-called new and re-emergence of
old, forms of collective protests and social movements
 

Rethinking citizenship: critical perspectives for the 21 Century
29-30 June
University of Leeds
[email protected]
www.leeds.ac.uk/law/conferences/citizenship/homepage.htm
will address the following topics and citizenship...
sexuality
identity
globalization
culture
dialogics
corporatations, capital and...
nature
social movements
communities
migration
children
crime
gender
cyber
ethics of
ageing
embodied

Best wishes. Please send me news and updates...
Deborah