I am speaking next week at a British Academy Early Career Researcher Network event on Decolonising. My contribution will be titled:
Decolonising, Dissolving, Transcending the University.
Or what is the point of the University, after Gaza?
Or what is the point of the University, in end times fascism?
It will pivot around a request to consider the possibilities and limits of decoloniality in (and of) the academy, thinking about the following questions.
- Do we abolish and start again? If so, what are we abolishing? What are we starting?
- Can we (bear to) work within systemic limitations?
- What are our values in this? For what will we stand?
It will be framed around the following
- The stories we tell ourselves about the university;
- The stories we tell ourselves about decolonising the university.
- Are these stories about dissolving the university?
- Counter-narratives against what the University has become: being in-excess.
- Narratives of acceleration: towards the singularity.
- Narratives of dissolution, decolonising or transcending?
When I think about what I might say, I am reminded of the following statements.
‘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)
‘Such is surrealist activity, a total activity, the only one that can liberate humankind by revealing to it the unconscious, one of the activities that will aid in liberating people by illuminating the blind myths that have led them to this point.’
‘And then I think also to tomorrow.’ (Suzanne Césaire 1943)
‘Our struggle is not for the University; it is against what the University has become.’ (Mike Neary 2011)
I want to ask participants to question: how they feel about the University; what stories do they tell themselves about the University, and why?
A kind of abstract
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.
Slides are available as a PDF here: Decolonising, Dissolving, Transcending the University.