I ran a workshop on the dissolution of the universities at the International Festival of Decoloniality 2026 on Tuesday. This was such an enlivening event, in particular in bringing a range of stories and narratives into conversation, in a way that was truly international. As important, it was intercommunal, intersectional and intergenerational in intent and delivery. My thanks go to the organisers, and in particular Dom and Igor for their commitment to creating this space for us.
My slides are available here, as the dissolution of the universities.
I opened up a conversation about the potential for dissolving the university as the primary or sole focus for, or locus of, our intellectuality, by asking individuals to think about their own stories of the university. I wanted to bring these into conversation with the reality that the university is being dissolved through authoritarian governance and finance capital, whether we like it or not. I wanted to understand how this might relate to our collective forms of agency, and our potential to know ourselves and our intellectual practises differently, in order to show up for ourselves and others differently. Here, a range of collectives and networks, not least Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, help me to consider sociability, mutuality, relationality in a different register. They helped me to consider different ways of doing, being unknowing in a world facing intersecting global emergencies.
For me, this engagement with guiding principles and reciprocity commitments, opens out the potential for weaving and analysis of the capital-relation with those that to shine a light upon its settler-colonial and racial-patriarchal intentionality. So, I asked participants to engage with On Sharing, from the University of Utopia and the Demands of the SOAS Gaza Encampment, to ask whether other universities were possible. This returned me to starting points. In particular, it feels important for us to think about the questions that drivers, and our starting points for reimagining and activating other worlds. At the moment, I am spending time with Max Haiven’s questioning of whether it is possible for us to imagine a society that no longer needs the university. This points us to a range of abolitionist, decolonial and anti-capitalist struggles. It reminds us that other worlds are possible.