I’m contributing a seminar to the University of Bristol, School of Education, Conversations in Education 2026-27. The event on Wednesday 11 November at Noon is hybrid, and tickets are available from the School of Education’s Eventbrite.
Seminar Title: The Dissolution of the Universities
Abstract:
‘I must begin // Begin what? // The only thing in the world that is worth beginning: // The End of the World, no less.’ (Aimé Césaire 1956/1969)
‘Our struggle is not for the University; it is against what the University has become.’ (Mike Neary 2011)
The English University feels very broken. We witness a political economic crisis for institutions that is tightening. Through this, the power of finance capital is a limiting factor shaping the horizon of our intellectual work. Beyond value-for-money, our universities are shaped against culture wars, fetsihised ideas of freedom of speech, and authoritarian responses to student protest in the form of Gaza encampments. It feels like this terrain has been unfolding in ever more negative ways, in spite of the demonstrations, occupations and alternative education projects in the period after 2010, following: the Browne Review; Occupy! and the Bank of Ideas/Tent City University; and the movement of the Squares. Whilst the energy of these dissipated, a range of recent abolitionist praxis, with a deep, historical lineage, helps us to question how our intellectuality might be released towards a new horizon. Praxis connecting abolition geography, family abolition, communising care, abolition democracy and feminism, and the integration of decolonial and ecological thinking, point towards the liberation of space-time. Or perhaps towards the abolition of the present state of things. This intervention thinks about the place of the University in connecting struggles across social goods that might resolve a new society, and metabolise new social forms. It does so in relation to the (largely) student-led revolts against the settler-colonial University, to develop a key question of radical educator Mike Neary in his work on student-as-producer and pedagogy of excess: how do revolutionary teachers teach? In addressing how we might live in dissolute days like these, this becomes: how and where do revolutionary teachers teach, after Gaza? Our questioning opens out our stories of radical alternatives, as moments for resolving anew.
My intervention will speak to a discussion I am having the previous week with members of the British Academy ECR Network’s Elevate programme. At that event I will speak about: Decolonising, Dissolving, Transcending the University. Or, what is the point of the University, after Gaza?
It will be designed to consider the possibilities and limits of decoloniality in (and of) the academy.
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Do we abolish and start again?
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Can we work within the systemic limitations?
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What are our values in this?
It will be framed around:
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The stories we tell ourselves about the university;
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the stories we tell ourselves about decolonising the university;
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Are these stories about dissolving the university?
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Counter-narratives against what the University has become;
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Narratives of acceleration;
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Narratives of dissolution, decolonising or transcending?
Values, and also the relationship between decolonising and abolition will be central. So will the need/desire for stories and storytelling.