Tactics: practical and imagined (original) (raw)
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Creating spaces of refusal in the neoliberal academy
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
Collective action has always been the heartbeat of social justice movements. However, existing systems pressure people to focus on hypercompetition and eradicate the ability to collectively resist systemic oppression. Unfortunately, education scholars rarely critically and theoretically analyze how they can and do collectively refuse neoliberal pressures in the context of higher education. In this article, we examine how neoliberal contexts induce individualistic hyper-competition, fragment community, and hinder collective action in academia. Building on this analysis, we draw from our own experiences to highlight some of the ways that scholars advocating social justice might create space and time to challenge these pressures and provide time to focus energies on local radical forms of refusal. Specifically, we highlight the value of creating spaces and time for radical care, radical dreams, and radical formations. We conclude with questions that invite readers to join us in grappling with how to envision these spaces.
08/06/2021 Collaborative Praxis: Unbinding Neoliberal Tethers of Academia * Feminista Journal
Feminista Journal, 2021
In the course of our conversations in conceptualising this piece, we agreed on three things – a) we adapt to no form of homogeneity, b) we hold space for each other and b) we ponder on various forms of collective and collaborative working. In using each of these terms as our thinking praxis, we have tried to illuminate facets of academia as it displaces us (in the form/identity we inhabit). We open our discussion with the neoliberal conditions that inhibit our agencies in the university. For instance, neoliberalism forces us into an isolationist, individualist conception of labour where structural inequality is made invisible and a politics of care untenable. Similarly, unpacking our positionality illuminates the creation of value and worth through gender as a colonial social construct. “If woman and black are terms for homogeneous, atomic, separable categories”, writes Maria Lugones, “then their intersection shows us the absence of black women rather than their presence”. Worth and value, then, are located in the bodies that are most proximally institutional, if not the institutions themselves.[1] Denial of worth and value, together with isolation, invariably leads us to an urgency to create community and collectives – things that are integral to feminist movements. And in centering these communitarian and collective praxes, we also come in direct existential confrontation with academia itself. To find what resonates to our experiences that are distinctive in themselves, but communicative on a common struggle. In this piece, we hope to rage through these sites of disenfranchisement and other fractures while simultaneously trying to imagine ways in which collaboration centers itself in academia.
Philosophical Studies in Education, 2017
The move to position education within a narrow discourse of economic rationality, efficiency, accountability, market logics, and any number of other tenets of neoliberalism has seemingly become commonplace. The concretization of such a discursive framework within daily practices is dangerous, not simply because it situates education as a commodity rather than a social good, but more crucially because it suggests that this logic is not a logic at all, but an ahistorical reality. This is often reflected at my own institution when faculty and administrators discuss new initiatives deemed necessary to make up for the shortfall of state funding in an ongoing budget crisis. We discuss targeting new demographics of students who are less dependent on state aid and how to better collect data on graduation rates/salaries of alumni to meet the growing emphasis on performance-based funding at the state and federal level. We often verbalize this logic by considering ways to “market” programs in ...
Zines: Crafting Change and Repurposing the Neoliberal University. ACME. 15(2).
bell hooks famously insists that education can be ecstatic! It can be a 'practice of freedom' that disrupts unequal power relations and generates social justice. According to hooks, university education can only become this type of energetic practice if students and educators alike experiment, feel and take risks in the classroom. This paper asks: how can we cultivate and sustain this energetic approach to education given the restructuring of the neoliberal university comprising reduced state funding, increased precarious labour and an expectation for speedy delivery? Grounded in classroom experience, I explore how slow pedagogy can contribute to a growing Slow Scholarship Movement that takes collective action against the fast-paced, metric-driven neoliberal university. In particular, I examine how the practice of crafting feminist-inspired 'zines' might function as a tool to repurpose universities into more generative, loving spaces for engaged learning and living.
Alternation Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa, 2021
In this article, we provoke the question as to the potentiality of dissent in a neoliberal higher education assemblage circumscribed within the metaassemblage of late global capitalism. We offer a counter-intuitive exploration of the much-vaunted post-apartheid South African fetish, social cohesion, to argue that such ideological imperatives, when institutionalised and theorised Suriamurthee Moonsamy Maistry et al. 212 in and through higher education, run the risk of developing false consciousness, a temporal pseudo-engagement that unwittingly reasserts the master narrative, namely that of self-absorbed, neoliberal pursuits. While we maintain our loyalty to the greater higher education project in South Africa, our contemplation is for an agonism that maintains a necessary attentiveness in a rapidly changing, performative arena. Methodologically, we consider figurational fugue as contrapuntal, polyphonic composition comprising a sequence of six individual personal narratives that are subjected to a diffractivity, an attending to difference with a view to analysing dissent as productive and generative. We invoke Mouffe's (2013) agonisticsthe notion of an antagonistic logic that challenges liberal democratic notions of social cohesion, one that contests the domesticating nature of the aggregative harmonious that liberal social cohesion falls foul of. We contend that social cohesion's rational consensus seeking is unproductive in South African higher education. We argue instead for a deliberative conflictual consensus that is dialogic and generative: a Deleuzian higher education (curriculum) space that is perennially dissonant and encourages rhizomatic dissent, and provocative, yet productive, encounters.
Scope of the Course: This course examines the neoliberal transformation processes in the higher education with special emphasis on everyday academic life. The course starts with an exploration of space accorded to (academic) knowledge production in capitalism. It proceeds to the discussion of the way academic life—both in terms of campus and office spaces, and the academics' involvement in knowledge production regimes—has evolved throughout the different phases of capitalism. The focus of the course is the most recent, and still ongoing neoliberal phase. Within the scope of the course, we will read, among others The main questions this course will ask are: 1) What are the structural factors that necessitate the use of the term " academic " labour? 2) What are the distinctive features of labour processes that require distinguishing between academic and non-academic labour? 3) What are the junction points between academic and non-academic labour processes within the academic space? 4) How do neoliberal knowledge production regimes differ from other forms of capitalist mode of production? 5) Where and how is the agency situated in neoliberal knowledge production processes? 6) Where and how can one search for a balanced method for understanding the interplay of structural and agency-related aspects in the reproduction of neoliberal knowledge regimes? 7) What are the similarities and differences among the neoliberal knowledge production processes at national and international levels—i.e., is there a global division of academic labour across countries? 8) How do different axis of identity— gender, ethnic, religious—crosscut class-based politics in the knowledge production regimes? The course is designed to offer ways and routes to address these and related questions. Certainly, we will not be reaching to definite conclusions and decisive answers to the questions that will guide us all throughout the term. Yet, we will have acquired the textual and perspectival means to locate the state of affairs in contemporary academic knowledge production processes with a comparative perspective. In so doing the course will evolve through three axes: 1. Understanding neoliberalism; 2. Locating academic knowledge and academic everyday life into modern societal and political settings; 3. Understanding the global division of academic labour across genders, ethnicities, and classes—cross-cultural comparative work on academia. Weekly outline of the course is thus divided along these three axes.
The accelerated university: Activist- academic alliances and the simulation of thought
2010
Resentment regarding the demise of the university due to neoliberal corporatisation proliferates, and for good reasons. For many academics and activists, what is needed to salvage the ‘original’ university is a move outside its institutional borders so as to foster online and mobile alliances with anyone or anything that represents radical alterity vis-a-vis neo-liberalisation. This paper will show by way of analysing ‘activist-research projects’ that many of these projects reveal a passionate nostalgia or desire for the ‘real’ liberal university and its possibility of justice through social critique and dialogue. It will argue that this performance of the liberal university of critical thought, its move ‘beyond’ its institutional walls, and its desire for dialogue with and enlightenment through the ‘other’ to make happen the university’s original objective, is itself complicit in an ongoing usurpation of such thought in a increasingly accelerated global economy and its new modes of...