The second volume of ULTRA-RED: A Journal of Militant Sound inquiry, edited by the international sound art and popular education collective Ultra-red is out! The journal is investigating movement-based listening practices that take the forms of militant inquiry and political education. 

“No movement without listening!”

The second volume of the ULTRA-RED is dedicated to the “Learning Circles for Palestine.” Contributors reflect on the current Palestine conjuncture several years after solidarity actions spread across university campuses around the world. It is now clear that the crackdown on student activism was a pretext for the dismantling or capturing of public institutions. The move against dissent also provided common ground for neofascists and liberals to enforce a consensus with imperialism. 

The second volume of ULTRA-RED begins by pairing poems from Palestine with poems detailing the attacks on pro-Palestine students on university campuses. The journal then moves into its main feature: a dozen conversations with student and community groups. Each conversation is framed as a learning circle in which reflections shape critical questions and mark contradictions that speakers (and journal readers) continue to consider in the present moment. These learning circles come to the journal largely from contexts where Ultra-red members are involved in anti-capitalist and anti-racist base-building in Los Angeles, New York, London and in Novi Pazar. Additionally, we hear reflections on the Palestine conjuncture from the Bethlemen-based scientist and public-educator, Mazin Qumsiyeh as well as Palestinian Liberation Theologian and popular-educator, Omar Haramy. Through a list of listening protocols, the journal also offers a guide for readers to pursue their own learning circle for Palestine.

The journal continues with a special section titled, “The Case of Apartheid South Africa and Israel.” This section combines historical and personal reflections on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa with a photo essay on anti-apartheid solidarity in the U.K. from the 1950s to the 1980s. Both articles underscore the historical links between South Africa’s apartheid government and the state of Israel and the alliances established between anti-apartheid and Palestinian liberation movements.

The journal concludes with new dispatches from ongoing militant investigations. We read about Southern Italy where activists attempt to build a movement across multiple struggles from anti-extractivism to farm workers. A dispatch from the direct democracy movement in Serbia. And, an oppositional research detailing the role of neofascist operatives in pursuing hegemony in the U.S. by targeting poor people’s movements and capturing university infrastructure and curriculum. 

This volume of ULTRA-RED is edited by Dont Rhine and Robert Sember in collaboration with Zissel Aronow, Janna Graham, Chris Jones, Zoe Kisselbach, Elliot Perkins, and Araceli Veloz, and it includes numerous contributors.

Ultra-red began as a queer techno duo coming out of AIDS activism. Since starting in 1994, Ultra-red has expanded into an international collective rooted in different popular struggles such as anti-racism and anti-gentrification. In the early 2000s, the collective began experimenting with militant sound inquiry synthesizing diverse forms of organized listening in Left and social movements. 

Designed by Ott Kagovere, the second volume of the journal has 340 pages, and includes dozens of images in black and white as well as full color.

We are grateful to the Kone Foundation for supporting the production of this volume.

You can order the book directly from us or from our distributors.