Leaving university with little employment prospects and not even much chance of an unpaid internship, the only thing that seemed realistic was to start a new initiative. Whilst studying at Weymouth college I ran – for about six months – an online satirical magazine and a few of my student friends produced illustrative cartoons. This experience convinced me later that instead of being just another jobbing journalist at a 150 year-old newspaper or magazine, I could actually start a new magazine that did things differently.
Stir Magazine was inaugurated out of a deep dissatisfaction with the majority of journalism: while journalism did it’s job of horrifying and angering its readership, it offered little in the way of alternatives. It presented the problem – well-researched and peer-reviewed of course – but had little if anything to say on how the reader might be directly involved in actively transforming this situation. With this in mind, I invited activists and authors to contribute articles on how community-led and cooperative approaches were changing the face of media, farming, education, sports and other essential aspects of our lives.
This book – STIR Volume One – features the public’s anger, a serious analysis of why we are experiencing these economic and ecological crises, but most importantly, what can be done about it.
The book has a limited first print run of 400 copies but is also available as free e-book.
On the 24th November we are launching Stir Volume 1 in hardback. The online magazine has been an extraordinarily popular and for this reason we also wanted to appeal to those who prefer a more tactile read. Both the online magazine and the book will we hope further aid those who are seeking an alternative to the malaise of the mainstream status quo. At a moment when alternatives are not obvious to all and most responses to austerity are all too predictable, this crowdfunded collection of articles and interviews from the first years of Stir Magazine — www.stirtoaction.com —looks at how inspiring and innovative groups are taking cooperative and community-led ideas from the margins to the mainstream.
Simon Critchley discusses practice and theory and the importance of the Occupy Movement; Raj Patel argues that we should be demanding the world we can live in and not the world that the food industry can accommodate itself to; Derek Wall presents gift and commons-based economies as alternatives to the Market/State duopoly; David Bollier looks at how we can stop the private plundering of our common and public wealth; Nina Power analyses a decade of protests and riots and argues that we should be actively seeking to overturn a system that makes them necessary; Marianne Maeckelbergh is excited by the rise of horizontal decision-making in Occupy but looks at the problems with the process; Glyn Moody reviews the battle between copyright and the internet and the responding digital militancy; and James John Bell and J Cookson explain how campaigners need to move past sounding the alarm and into effective solutions.
The book also features David Boyle of The New Economics Foundation, Brian Van Slyke of Toolbox for Education and Social Action, Naomi Glass and Clare Joyof OrganicLea, Megan Saunders of The Real Food Store, and Guppi Bola and Bethan Graham.
More than 160 people were involved in getting this book authored, edited, illustrated, designed, crowdfunded and published.
Edited by Jonny Gordon-Farleigh and Abby McFlynn of Stir Magazine.
For review copies or interviews, email [email protected] or tel 07967781905
