AG CFP: Organizing the Edu-factory: Radical Geography and Collective
Action in the Academy
"As was the factory, so now is the university. Where once the factory
was a paradigmatic site of struggle between workers and capitalists,
so now the university is a key space of conflict, where the ownership
of knowledge, the reproduction of the labor force, and the creation of
social and cultural stratifications are all at stake. This is to say
the university is not just another institution subject to sovereign
and governmental controls, but a crucial site in which wider social
struggles are won and lost."
-Edu-factory Manifesto
This roundtable discussion will approach the politics, practice, and
strategy of organizing academics within the university. We welcome
abstracts or statements of interest from graduate students,
tenure-track, or adjunct faculty that seek to grapple with the
question of collective action and the academy. How has unionization
been viewed within the academy? What is the relation of the academy to
proletarian struggles and capitalist exploitation? How can and should
radical geography influence our relationship to our own work? How do
meritocracy as an ideal and tenure as a practice impinge upon the
politics of collective bargaining?
Through organizing this session we hope to bring into sharp focus the
disjuncture between the theoretical positions of radical geography and
the manner that we often exempt our own lives from struggle,
preferring instead to support struggles external to those of our own
subsistence. We also hope to trouble dominant notions of professorial
privilege, the precarity of adjunct employment, and to open up for
discussion the dual nature of graduate student work as both labor and
training. We envision a roundtable discussion with four or five
participants with a range of experiences who will engage in
constructive conversations with each other and the audience. Please
send a statement of interest to [log in to unmask] no later than
October 12.
--
Nathan L. Clough
Ph.D. candidate
Dept. of Geography
The University of Minnesota
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