There is a new podcast episode available (episode 10: in which we discuss hope, purity and entanglement, whilst eating brownies), with my dear friend, Sarah Amsler from the School of Education at the University of Nottingham.
Peace.
Author Archives: hallymk1
TAA podcast, episode 9
There is a new podcast episode available (episode 9: in which I blather on about Christmas markets, bourgeois ideology and the protest of creativity).
Peace.
New podcast episode
Something has kicked-in, and I have decided to start speaking again. So, there is a new podcast episode available (episode 8 on hopeless professors and abject universities). The plan is that this kick-starts a few conversations with compadres about the liberal idea of hope and its intersection with higher education, in order to critique the hell out of that position ahead of writing The Hopeless University.
Peace.
Re-engineering Education: the University as Anxiety Machine
Next Tuesday I’m speaking at the Safeguarding Students: Addressing Mental Health Needs Conference. My slides are available below, and from Slideshare.
The intention is to frame this around:
- resources on academic ill-being;
- writing about weltschmerz;
- writing about hopelessness; and
- work on academic alienation.
Special issue: Impacts of neoliberal policy on the lived experiences of primary school communities
The introduction to the Special issue: Impacts of neoliberal policy on the lived experiences of primary school communities, has been published online first by Power and Education. I co-edited the SI with my compadre Mark Pulsford. The SI as a whole has contributions that ground neoliberal policies and logics in the everyday routines and practices within Primary school communities.
The papers to be included are as follows and in this order.
Editorial: Neoliberalism and Primary Education: Impacts of neoliberal policy on the lived experiences of primary school communities (authors: Richard Hall and Mark Pulsford – published online first)
How neoliberal policy inhibits partnership-building in the primary phase: A new social movements approach (Michael Jopling – published online first)
Local authority instrumental music tuition as a form of neo-liberal parental investment: findings from a deviant, idiographic case study (Ross Purves – published online first)
Power, influence, and policy in Arizona’s education market: “We’ve got to out-charter the charters (Amanda U Potterton – published online first)
Making little neoliberals: the production of ideal child/learner subjectivities in primary school through choice, self-improvement and ‘growth mindsets (Alice Bradbury)
A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Let Our Kids be Kids Protest (Angela Sibley-White – published online first)
Go into school, get a cushy job, move to a better area: male primary school teachers, neoliberalism and hierarchies of person-value (Mark Pulsford – published online first)
In the introduction, Mark and I ‘ask what it means to have a stake in a contemporary primary school community – and to what extent all stakes are valued’ (p. 4). We frame ‘two organising concepts for thinking about neoliberal policy and the lived experiences of primary school communities: ecosystem and subjectivity’ (p. 4), and go on to highlight the contradictions and ‘the extreme tension that exists inside schools and across school sectors in the global North, between policy demands for particular types of function or ways of functioning, and emergent dysfunction at the level of the individual, the family, the group or sub-population or the school’ (p. 9). Finally, in attempting to connect policy terrains to lived experiences at a range of scales and in a range of contexts, in order to point towards moments of resistance, we argue (p. 10):
In this special issue, each of the six papers describe and analyse new departure points for resistance. They highlight the messiness of policy that imposes particular forms of governance and regulation that prescribed particular, market-focused and commodified types of activity. This messiness spills over into the idea of community, communities, sub-groups or sub-populations, and whether they are able to generate agency and self-actualisation. However, joining the links between these departure points is fundamental if resistance is to be generated and maintained. Joining links between these departure points beyond primary education in the global North is crucial in demonstrating differential injustice in the global South, and in linking to injustices in other sectors of the economy. Only in this way can a meaningful engagement with lived experiences promote a scalable engagement with change.
the new politics of education: radical visions for further and higher education
Next Tuesday, 24 September, I’m chairing a discussion at the Labour Party Conference Fringe. The session is a joint UCU and Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS) event that emerges from some work that I undertook with Sol Gamsu of Durham University on A New Vision for Further and Higher Education. This was commissioned by CLASS, and we also wrote about it for WonkHE with a focus upon better policy-making through democratic renewal.
Participants at the session include: Jo Grady, the UCU General Secretary; Faiza Shaheen, the Director of CLASS; Vicky Duckworth, from Edge Hill University; Rob Smith, from Birmingham city University; and Emma Hardy MP, who is a member of the education select committee.
The discussion is titled: the new politics of education: radical vision is for further and higher education.
It takes place at 10.30-11.45am, in the Victoria Terrace of the Grand Hotel in Brighton.
There are further details on the Labour Party conference fringe website.
radical pedagogies livestream
Tomorrow, Thursday 19 September, De Montfort University is hosting “Radical Pedagogies: Macpherson 20 Years On”. The main focus of the event will be on how radical pedagogies can be used to highlight and address issues relating to race and institutional discrimination.
I have previously blogged about the event, including the call for papers.
The full programme is also online now. We are intending to live stream several sessions as follows:
09.45-10.15: welcome
10.15-11.15: Silhouette Bushay’s keynote on hip-hop pedagogy
14.45-15.50: panel discussion on radical pedagogy and challenging racial discrimination
16.00-17.00: local educators’ panel discussion
The live stream will be available from our conference homepage (you will need to scroll down the page).
We are also planning to record each of the presentations in the breakout discussion/workshop sessions. There are abstracts for these available. The presentations will be available on the website too. We will be using #radicaldmu19 to curate the dialogue from the day.
There are thematic streams on:
- challenging institutional racism in education;
- radical Pedagogies in practice;
- against the attainment gap;
- decolonisation in practice;
- narrating raced and gendered experiences in education;
- disappearing narratives.
It promises to be a great event.
a dialogue on issues in higher education: authoritarianism; neoliberalism; and technocracy
The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC) invites a dialogue on issues in higher education involving the audit culture, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and technocracy. These issues are addressed in a special issue of Social Epistemology (33 (4): 2019), “Neoliberalism, Technocracy and Higher Education,” edited by Justin Cruickshank and Ross Abbinnett (https://bit.ly/2OBNhWV).
If you want to reply to any combination of an article or articles in the special issue, or to Cruickshank’s “The Feudal University in the Age of Gaming the System”, or to add your thoughts on relevant articles and issues, the Collective ask for pieces of 1,000-2,000 words with streamlined scholarly apparatus.
In the spirit of equitable exchange, they encourage participants to respond to one another’s work. The SERRC will host the dialogue. The dialogue will be integrated into an article or series of articles and, if desired, may serve as a basis for a book in the Collective Studies in Knowledge and Society Series (Rowman and Littlefield).
If you are interested in participating, please contact Jim Collier by 2 September 2019. Jim can also help sort access to the articles for you.
Details of the Special Issue can be located here.
Better policymaking needs democracy
Over at WonkHE, Sol Gamsu and I have a piece on better policy-making through democratic renewal. This connects to our recently-edited collection for the Centre for Labour and Social Studies on A New Vision for Further and Higher Education. In the WonkHE piece, we argue:
It is time that the politics of education was created by the grassroots – it is time for staff and students to recognise their collective potential and push for democratic renewal.
Authors from the report will be discussing the horizons of possibility for this vision at the Labour Party conference with Jo Grady (UCU General Secretary Elect) and a Labour Party MP on Tuesday 24 September in Brighton.
Social Epistemology: On Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Poetic Epistemology
I have an article accepted for publication in a special issue of Social Epistemology: a Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy that picks up on some work I have been doing previously on authoritarian neoliberalism (see presentations and notes from a BERA Special Interest Group symposium here and here). The article also attempts to maintain some momentum around academic labour, academic practice, knowledge formation and the critical terrain of decolonisation. In this, I explicitly connect to Audre Lorde’s work on life as a poetic existence.
The special issue as whole looks at the intersections of higher education and the University, neoliberalism as a contested terrain/heuristic, technologies and technocratic forms of management, and subjectivities. My abstract and references are appended below. The other contributors and pieces are as follows.
Robert Antonio: ‘Ethnoracial Populism: An alternative to Neoliberal Globalization?’
John Holmwood and Chaime Marcuello-Serovs: ‘Challenges to Public Universities: Digitalisation, Commodification and Precarity’
Elio di Muccio: ‘Core HR in British Higher Education: For a Technological Single Source and Version of the Truth?’
Justin Cruikshank: ‘Economic Freedom and the Harm of Adaptation: On Gadamer, Authoritarian Technocracy and the Re-Engineering of English Higher Education’
Liz Morrish: ‘The Accident of Accessibility: How the Data of the TEF creates Neoliberal Subjects’
Ross Abbinnett: ‘The Anthropocene as a Figure of Neoliberal Hegemony’
Jana Bacevic: ‘Knowing Neoliberalism’
ABSTRACT
As one response to the secular crisis of capitalism, higher education is being proletarianised. Its academics and students are shorn of autonomy beyond the sale of their labour-power. One heuristic for analysing this response is authoritarian neoliberalism, imposed as a means of enacting disciplinary practices in the name of the market with an anti-democratic rationale. This has a distinctly technocratic focus, rooted in techniques of performativity, including audits and assessments of teaching, research and scholarship, grounded in productivity, the management of time and value-creation. However, there are a range of intersectional and geogra- phical responses to such an imposition, through which it is possible to describe alternatives to these architectures of subsumption. In particular, a second heuristic emerges which challenges the restructuring of the University in the global North, erupting from struggles for decolonisa- tion. Here, Audre Lorde’s invocation to an integrated, poetic existence that situates bodies in places, and respects feelings and emotions as the site of epistemological development and understanding, underpins the possibility for dismantling hegemonic knowledge production. The article examines whether humanist narratives of solidarity, in particular from marginalised voices, might help academics and students to analyse their alienated labour and to imagine that another world is possible.
KEYWORDS
Academic labour; authoritarian neoliberalism; decolonisation; poetic epistemology
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