Dear critical geographers,
You might be interested in these interviews with radical geographers
recently posted on ClassWarU.org:
"On ‘Service Learning,’ Precarity, and Building the Urban Commons
with, against, and beyond Universities"
http://classwaru.org/2013/04/20/on-service-learning-precarity-and-building-the-urban-commons-with-against-and-beyond-universities/
"A Brief History of (CUNY) Time: Recent Radical University Organizing in NYC"
http://classwaru.org/2013/04/30/a-brief-history-of-cuny-time/
"Unsettling the University: For Abolitionist, Decolonial Education Struggles"
http://classwaru.org/2013/05/02/unsettling-the-university/
See below for summaries of the interviews. More interviews will be posted soon.
cheers,
Class War University
Summaries of the interviews:
"On ‘Service Learning,’ Precarity, and Building the Urban Commons
with, against, and beyond Universities"
Summary:
An adjunct discusses her experiences with using ‘service learning’ in
classes to engage students in militant co-research and community
organizing. Such projects can build radical relationships across
universities, public schools, and marginalized communities, but
require a lot of work – the challenge of building ‘the urban commons.’
Such work must also grapple with the dangers of recuperation in
academia. Beyond the university, she discusses her engagement with
urban commons in neighborhoods, such as through co-operatives. What
kind of advantages and disadvantages does the flexibility of adjunct
labor offer? From the position of precarious work and life, how can
we organize for mutual aid across our workplaces and communities?
-> read more: http://classwaru.org/2013/04/20/on-service-learning-precarity-and-building-the-urban-commons-with-against-and-beyond-universities/
"A Brief History of (CUNY) Time: Recent Radical University Organizing
in NYC – Interview with Matthew Evsky (Part 1)"
Summary:
Drawing on first-hand experience, Matthew Evsky (pseudonym) shares a
recent history of student and labor organizing at and around the City
University of New York (CUNY), including the Adjunct Project, Campus
Equity Week, the CUNY Time Zine, Occupy CUNY, and the Free University
of NYC. He delves into the complex relationships between students,
contingent faculty, the broader faculty union, and the confusing
processes of university exploitation. The emergence of Occupy CUNY
burst into a week of action with a student sit-in that was violently
repressed by campus security. Although seeing undergraduate
organizing as the driving force behind a revival of campus activism,
Occupy CUNY connected radicals with each other and built supportive
direct relationships across divisions of workers and students.
Emerging from a working group on radical pedagogy, the Free University
of NYC has enabled people to transform classrooms into spaces of
radicalization.
read more -> http://classwaru.org/2013/04/30/a-brief-history-of-cuny-time/
"Unsettling the University: For Abolitionist, Decolonial Education Struggles"
Summary:
In this interview, Matthew Evsky speaks on ways that the education
system is bound up with policing, mass incarceration, and settler
colonialism. How can we integrate education struggles with
abolitionist, decolonial approaches? For resistant alternatives, we
can look to Liberation Schools and free, cooperative universities
embedded in communities. Facing major barriers to these from racism,
we must call on white people to renege on their racist bargain with
the state and capital. How can we popularize such an abolitionist
politics with narratives that convince people to be for annihilating
the very system that gives them privileges?
read more -> http://classwaru.org/2013/05/02/unsettling-the-university/
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