Apologies if you've seen this already - again, pretty pertinent stuff
(seemingly...)
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of nina
Sent: 24 November 2007 21:19
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [anarchist.academics] [Fwd: [edu-factory] second round of discussion]
This might interest some of you - I thought many posts were a bit
verbose and self-indulgent, but I've still learned lots from some of
the
discussion threads last time.
To subscribe to the list on which the discussion will take place,
visit:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/edufactory_listcultures.org
To subscribe to the list of announcements, send an email to:
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [edu-factory] second round of discussion
Dear Friends,
Edu-factory is back. The second round of discussion will
start on 25 November 2007 and continue to the end of
February 2008. The discussion will explore the processes of
hierarchisation in higher education and the potentialities
for the construction of a global autonomous university. As
before we are setting up a calendar of scheduled
contributions. Please see the prospectus below and write to
us at [log in to unmask] with a suggested date if you are
interested to contribute a scheduled post.
Although we are still using this list for announcement
purposes, the discussion will take place on the new
edu-factory list. The new list runs on mailman software,
which means there will be an automatic archive plus daily
digest options, etc. that users can choose. If you are
currently subscribed to this list, we will transfer you to
the new list before the new discussion starts. Please let us
know if you prefer not for us to transfer your currently
subscribed address in this way.
The start of the new discussion will also coincide with the
launch of the edu-factory website in a number of cities. So
far launches will be taking place in
and
site either by bringing it to the attention of your networks
or by arranging a launch in your city (perhaps in the
context of another event). We want to make edu-factory as
global as possible.
With thanks,
Edu-factory collective
Claudia Bernardi
Simone Capra
Anna Curcio
Alberto DeNicola
Paolo Do
Miguel Mellino
Brett Neilson
Gigi Roggero
Davide Sacco
ESC Atelier Occupato, Roma (http://www.escatelier.net/)
Prospectus for Second Round of edu-factory discussion, 25
Nov 2007 ¡V 28 Feb 2008
The first round of discussion on the edu-factory list showed
that, despite the many differences between universities and
countries, it is possible to identify a global trend and
common experiences in the world of the university. These
stem from the pervasiveness of the market and the processes
of corporatisation that universities in many parts of the
world are undergoing. But they also involve the struggles
and movements that have contested academic borders as well
as wider power structures, claiming the free circulation of
knowledge and practicing alternative forms of knowledge
production.
The emergence of the university as an important actor in the
global economy is thus marked by a constitutive tension. In
this conflictual field, it is easy to fall back on a
nostalgic attitude that longs for the reconstruction of the
ivory towers that were once the privileged seats of national
cultures. It is also possible, however, to interrogate the
processes of production of subjectivity in the new
¡¥knowledge factories¡¦ with neither nostalgia nor
apologies for the present. Needless to say, edu-factory has
taken this second path.
The first round of discussion focused on the processes of
corporatisation, the transnational dimension of the
contemporary university, and forms of resistance and
conflict in the production of knowledge. On this basis, we
propose to focus the next three months of discussion on two
new axes of discussion.
The first is the question of hierarchy. Today the university
is one of many actors ¡V private and public, formal and
informal ¡V within a complex and rapidly changing market
for knowledge and education. Academic institutions have
begun to think of themselves as competitors against others
in this market. In many countries, universities are
positioned in league tables, constructed through ever more
calibrated ways of quantifying performance and the quality
of knowledge. Not only this, but individual offices and
departments within institutions are also compelled to
compete, vying for students or research funds, and, in some
cases, contracting services such as teaching space or
information technology expertise to each other. Furthermore,
academics, students and other university workers come to see
themselves as entrepreneurial subjects, engaged in race to
excel or just survive and often adopting a corporate
attitude that makes them insensitive to how the changes in
their workplaces relate to those in the wider economy.
Today the value-form of knowledge is related not so much to
its quality but to the ways in which it positions those who
produce or acquire it in the labour market. This is why, in
the next round of discussion, we propose to focus on the
struggles surrounding access to the university. Today, these
struggles involve those filters and gate keeping functions
that actualise the processes of hierarchisation and control
the mobility of students insofar as they are the bearers of
labour power. These filters and gate keeping functions range
from quasi-feudal systems of patronage (still embodied in
conventions such as the letter of recommendation) to
standardized tests like the GRE (based on cognitivist
assumptions about reasoning and analytical skills that do
not apply equally to all social groups). To this we must add
the filtering of students by regular systems of grading,
streaming and school assignment as well as the control of
international student mobility through foreign language
tests and complex systems of border policing. These
technologies of hierarchisation operate across the global
spectrum of education, establishing the line that separates
literacy from illiteracy as well as those that divide
unskilled from semi-skilled and skilled labour.
Undoubtedly these processes of hierarchisation intersect
with lines of race, class and gender. But entry to the
university no longer occurs through the classical dialectic
of inclusion-exclusion, but rather through devices of
differential inclusion. As it transforms itself into a hub
for the accumulation of human and social capital, attracting
brains within the global competition for talent, the
university becomes one of many nodes for the regulation,
control and disqualification of labour power. There is also
a disciplinary division of labour in the university, which,
on the one hand, embodies the classic conflict of the
faculties, but, on the other, produces transdisciplinary
sites where the hierarchisation of labour takes on new
complexities. One of the grounds of this division is
language, which, whether enforced as language of instruction
or mandated as language of publication, oscillates between
serving as the sacred vessel of a unique culture and as a
mere tool of communication in a networked economy
increasingly driven by linguistic relations. What is
exploitation today? What are the new paradigms for the
command of labour power? To respond to these questions it is
necessary to approach the contemporary division and
hierarchisation of labour not as presuppositions, but as
results, or effects, of the relations we want to
investigate.
The second axis of discussion involves the central question
about which the edu-factory project turns: how to construct
an autonomous university? In the first cycle of discussion
there were productive confrontations between different
experiences of auto-education and ¡¥experimental
colleges¡¦ in
With their multiple strategies, these experiments converge
in the search for lines of flight and immediate practices of
resistance and conflict within the university.
We propose to continue this line of investigation in the
second round of edu-factory discussion, focussing this time
not merely on single experiences of auto-education but on
how to link them into a transnational organised network. It
is envisioned that many of the contributions in this second
axis of discussion will be collectively written, exploring
the potentiality for the invention of new institutional
forms that trouble divisions of both labour and discipline.
We also hope to organise an event in the northern summer of
2008 to allow some of the contributors to this discussion to
gather for face-to-face encounters.
Hierarchisation and multiple forms of resistance, the
construction of autonomous institutions and the breaking of
processes of governance and control: these are the themes,
or better the challenges, we would like to confront in the
coming round of discussion. We also think it is impossible
to discuss the construction of a global autonomous
university without considering problems that only seem
technical at first sight: from the question of the use of
information technologies and open source software to the
access to funds necessary to realise such a project. It is
thus necessary that these questions form part of the debate
in a way that doesn¡¦t confine them to an unjustifiably
separate dimension but which also avoids the drift of the
conversation into merely technical matters. This should
allow the list to take the form of a cooperative project
composed of multiple and heterogeneous subjectivities, just
as the conflicts in the production of knowledge on the
borders of the global university are themselves multiple and
heterogeneous.
>
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