Dear colleagues, Please consider to sign the petition against the criminalization of critical social research in Germany in the case of a sociologist from Berlin who has been accused with charges of membership in a terrorist group due to categories like "gentrification" that he used in his scientific papers (!). With Kind Regards, CF -- _____________________________ Univ.Ass. Dr. Christian Fuchs Assistant Professor for Internet and Society ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research in Information and Communication Technologies & Society http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18 5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at Phone +43 662 8044 4823 Fax +43 662 6389 4800 Information-Society-Technology: http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at/fuchs/ Managing Editor of tripleC - peer reviewed open access online journal for the foundations of information science: http://triplec.uti.at Forthcoming BOOK: Fuchs, Christian (2008) Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge. **** Dear all, On 31st July 2007 the flats and workplaces of Dr. Andrej Holm and Dr. Matthias B., as well as of two other persons, were searched by the police. Dr. Andrej Holm was arrested, flown by helicopter to the German Federal Court in Karlsruhe and brought before the custodial judge. Since then he has been held in pretrial confinement in a Berlin jail. All four people have been charged with "membership in a terrorist association according to ァ 129a StGB" (German Penal Code, section 7 on 'Crimes against Public Order'). They are alleged to be members of a so-called "militante gruppe" (mg). The text of the search warrant revealed that preliminary proceedings against these four people have been going on since September 2006 and that the four had since been under constant surveillance. All four accused are critical social scientists and they do exactly what sociologists and political scientists should be doing. To read more about this situation, please visit: http://einstellung.so36.net/en/openletter. Newspaper article about those accused: "International Protest Over Berlin Sociologist's Arrest" http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2742395,00.html You can sign a petition at: http://www.policing-crowds.org/petition.html Best wishes, Manuel Manuel B. Aalbers Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation Columbia University New York m.b.aalbers@gmail.com <mailto:m.b.aalbers@gmail.com> ***** This email came through the mailinglist of the Critical Political Economy Research Network of the European Sociological Association http://criticalpoliticaleconomy.blogspot.com/