I’m leading a workshop at the University of Derby’s International Festival of Decoloniality. The workshop, The Dissolution of the University (or how do revolutionary teachers teach, after Gaza?), connects to my next monograph, slated for publication in 2026: The Dissolution of the universities.
The proposal for the workshop is as follows.
Aim: to enable participants to build ideas for alternatives from some of the recent history of student and staff-led struggles against the University.
Objectives:
- to create space for participants to situate their own practice against some lessons from the student movement of the early 2010s and Gaza Encampments in England;
- to consider the potential for alternative, socially-useful forms of the university, designed to address global emergencies;
- to consider the potential for alternative, socially-useful pedagogies , designed to address global emergencies.
Description of problem:
‘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. Moreover, it has forgotten any meaningful engagement with decolonizing.
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. These include: Gilmore’s (2023) abolition geography; Day and McBean’s (2022) analysis of abolition revolution; Lewis’s (2019, 2022) work on family abolition; O’Brien’s (2023) analysis of communizing care; Davis’ (2005) focus (following du Bois) upon abolition democracy; work on theorising abolition feminism, by Davis, Dent, Meiners and Richie (2024); Ferdinand’s (2022) integration of decolonial and ecological thinking to point towards the liberation of space-time; and, Bogg’s et al. (2019) work on radical education and abolition.
This workshop places these connected moments and movements of struggle into dialogue with the eruption of protest over the genocide in Gaza. Student encampments responding to epistemic erasure and the complicity of universities offer ways of renewing this work against the settler-colonial University. As such this workshop develops a key question of radical educator Mike Neary in his work on student-as-producer. This becomes: how and where do revolutionary teachers teach, after Gaza? This questions the settler-colonial basis of the form and content of the University.
Our work will connect concretely into the themes on: building alternative structures for learning and knowledge-sharing; creating spaces for radical learning and co-creation; and thinking beyond crisis toward possibility and futurity. It seeks to enable participants to challenge our colonial insistence on the University and its pedagogies/disciplines. As a result, participants will engage with the history of radical alternatives as a moment of departure and resolution.
