Over the past few decades, the rising importance of what researchers
have called 'cognitive capitalism', 'knowledge economies', or the
'information society' has accompanied significant developments in the
role, function and governance of universities. New waves of
scholarship and activism are attempting to understand these changes
and their implications for the present-day conditions of labor on the
university campus, as well as the future of universities in a global
context. In this session, we explore recent work on the university and
the global political economy of knowledge production, with a special
focus on building connections between critical theory and current
struggles. Submissions in formats outside the traditional conference
paper are encouraged.
Possible topics include:
- Role of the university in a global knowledge economy and in the
production of cognitive capitalism
- International and national competition for rankings, top students
and research dollars
- Changes in the structures of university governance and the growth of
an administrative apparatus
- Research funding and changing research priorities
- Patenting and privatization of university research and knowledge,
the formation of spin-off corporations or other university-corporate
partnerships
- Casualization and precaritization of university labor
- The effects of budget cuts and the recent economic crisis
- Struggles confronting these transformations and taking the
university as a site of intervention
- Institutional writing of the university landscape and the exclusion
of spaces of struggle from university narratives
- The relationship between these transformations and the university's
spatial organization and architecture