A conversation at the Documentary Media Centre for #16DaysOfActivism


Posted by hallymk1

I spoke with John Coster yesterday (yeah, yeah, I know it was a UCU strike day) for Day 6 of #16DaysOfActivism from across the Parallel Lives Network. The programme takes a look at the range of takes on activism and what it means in practice. It runs from Friday 25th November – International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women – through to Human Rights Day on Saturday 10th December.

Our discussion focused on hopelessness and hope in-and-against the University. It spoke to issues of voice, grief, hospicing and abolition, in our intellectual work. It reminded me that when I wrote about courage, faith, justice, hope and peace, those values and their interrelationships are still important to me. You can access the full programme from the Parallel Lives Network site, and our discussion is available for Day 6, or below.

 


Online seminar and slides: on alienation, hopelessness and the abolition of the University


Posted by hallymk1

On Wednesday October 5th, 2022, at 15-18.00 (EEST) and 13-16.00 (BST), I’ll be facilitating an online session on:

“The Alienated academic and the Hopeless University with Professor Richard Hall”

My slides are appended below and available on my Slideshare, with a focus on alienation, hopelessness and abolition.

The Zoom link for the event is at: https://tuni.zoom.us/j/66510029426?pwd=MzVRQW1aaitYS1RXdjZqemkwUmo5QT09

The session is being hosted by the research group of Assembling Postcapitalist International Political Economies (POSTCAPE), at the University of Tampere, Finland. For more details about the event, see the POSTCAPE site. The group’s background to the event is given below.

I am very grateful to Mikko Poutanen, who is a PhD researcher in Political Science at Tampere, for this invitation ands his support, and for his ongoing work on academic and intellectual alienation.

Background

The research group of Assembling Postcapitalist International Political Economies (POSTCAPE) welcomes you to join us in an online seminar with professor of education and technology Richard Hall from De Montfort University Leicester (UK). Professor Hall has written extensively on the changes of UK higher education from a distinctly critical point of view, noting that academics are becoming alienated. Academic work as a “labor of love” is increasingly commodified, not only challenging but arguably damaging the conditions of intellectual work.

Writing in the context of the United Kingdom, Professor Hall’s work argues that the neoliberalization of universities has already progressed to the point that the university has become “hopeless”. Yet, within this hopelessness, there is also radical potential for new imaginaries for future intellectual work and mass intellectuality. Only when academics are ready to acknowledge the university is hopeless, can we begin salvage work of the university which is not and cannot be looking back for solutions.

The new imaginary for a university and intellectual work in general has to address questions of economic, gendered, racialized and environmental problems that the current university, mired in late-stage capitalism, is able to identify but to do very little to solve.

In this combined lecture and seminar, Professor Hall will first outline his diagnosis of the alienated academic and the hopeless university, and potential ways forward and then open for questions and comments in a seminar discussion. There will be a break between the lecture and the seminar.

Relevant works

Hall, Richard & Kate Bowles. 2016. “Re-engineering Higher Education: The Subsumption of Academic Labour and the Exploitation of Anxiety.” Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 28: 30-47.

Hall, Richard. 2018a. “On the alienation of academic labour and the possibilities for mass intellectuality.” tripleC 16(1): 97-113.

Hall, Richard. 2018b. The Alienated academic – The struggle for autonomy inside the university. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hall, Richard. 2019. ”On authoritarian neoliberalism and poetic epistemology.” Social epistemology 33(4): 298-308.

Hall, Richard. 2021. The Hopeless University: Intellectual work at the end of The End of History. Leicester: Mayfly Books.


Decolonising the PGR experience: resources


Posted by hallymk1

I am privileged to have been asked to speak today at the University of Exeter, Decolonising Research Festival.

NB I owe a huge debt to Drs Lucy Ansley and Paris Connolly who have made huge contributions to this work. It’s a partnership with them.

As is usual when I get a fee for speaking, I will be donating to a local rape crisis centre, so that the money stays in the local community. 

My slides are available from slide share and can be accessed below. There are some other, research-related resources, as follows.


‘Whiteness is an immoral choice’: The idea of the University at the intersection of crises


Posted by hallymk1

With Raj Gill at DMU, and Sol Gamsu at Durham, I have a paper accepted in Higher Education: The International Journal of Higher Education Research, entitled ‘Whiteness is an immoral choice’: The idea of the University at the intersection of crises.

It is in a Special Issue on Higher Education in the Eye of the Covid-19 Storm, edited by Jason Arday and Vikki Boliver.

In it, we argue that whiteness has historical and material legitimacy, reinforced through policy and regulation, and in English HE this tends, increasingly, to reframe struggle in relation to culture wars. This article argues that the dominant articulation of the University, conditioned by economic value rather than humane values has been reinforced and amplified during the Covid-19 pandemic. The argument pivots around UK Government policy and guidelines, in order to highlight the processes by which intellectual work and the reproduction of higher education institutions connects value-production and modes of settler-colonial and racial-patriarchal control.


Decolonising Research Ethics


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Earlier I generated a presentation on decolonising research ethics, for the Decolonising the STEM Curriculum working group, being led by Lara Lalemi a PhD candidate at Bristol, working in Chemistry. Lara is part of the Creative Tuition Collective, which offers free tuition, extracurricular workshops and personal development support to pupils from low-income backgrounds, marginalised and underrepresented communities.

My slides are available as a PDF below, and an audio file is available here. They aren’t synced as an .mp4, because that is for the working group. However, I thought I’d make the raw information available, just in case.

My focus was the relationship between ethics and decolonising, with a focus on research ethics as relationality that works beyond equality, diversity and inclusion work. Here I am drawn to the following principles from our Decolonising DMU working position.

  • Diversify the syllabus, canon, curriculum, infrastructure and staff
  • Decentre knowledge and knowledge production away from the global North
  • Devalue hierarchies and revalue relationality
  • Diminish some voices and opinions that have predominated, and magnify those that have been unheard

Decolonising Research Ethics slides


Decolonising DMU and the PGR Experience


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With Lucy Ansley, I spoke about decolonising and the PGR experience at the first Decolonising the Research Degree, network event this morning.

The aim of the session was: to situate work on decolonising the PGR experience, inside an institutional programme of work (DDMU) that has not previously prioritised research.

Our slides are available below, or here.

Some resources include the following.

e: decolonisingdmu@dmu.ac.uk

w: https://www.dmu.ac.uk/community/decolonising/index.aspx

t: @DecolonisingDMU

DDMU Interim Report

DDMU self-audit tool for research centres/institutes

DDMU Resources/Papers


Has the University Become Surplus to Requirements? Or is Another University Possible?


Posted by hallymk1

With Krystian Szadkowski, I have a new journal article published in a Special Issue of Praktyka Teoretyczna, on Latency of the Crisis: globalization, subjectivity, and resistance.

The article is titled: Has the University Become Surplus to Requirements? Or is Another University Possible?

It is available at: https://doi.org/10.14746/prt2021.4.5

The abstract is as follows.

This article contends that the University has become a place that has no socially-useful role beyond the reproduction of capital, such that it has become an anti-human project. The argument pivots around the bureaucratic university’s desire for surplus, and its relationship to the everyday, academic reality of feeling surplus to requirements. In defining the contours of this contradiction, inside the normalisation of political economic crisis, we question whether there still exists space for an academic method or mode of subjectivation. We also critique the ability of the University in the global North to bring itself into relation with the epistemological sensibilities of the South and the East, which can treat other ways of seeing and praxis with dignity and respect. In grappling with the idea of surplus, and the everyday and structural ways in which its production is made manifest, we seek to ask whether another university is possible?


new book: The Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education


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Working with Inny Accioly (Fluminense Federal University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Krystian Szadkowski (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland), I have a contract with Palgrave Macmillan for an International Handbook of Marxism and Education. Our working proposal is appended below. We hope for a draft to be submitted in mid-2023.

Overview

The Handbook to Marxism and Education is an international and interdisciplinary volume, which provides a thorough and precise engagement with emergent developments in Marxist theory in both the global South and North. Drawing on the work of authoritative scholars and practitioners, the Companion explicitly shows how these developments enable a rich historical and material understanding of the full range of education sectors and contexts. In this, it will develop a dialectical understanding of the interactions between the following.

  • The importance of Marx’s dialectical method in critiquing education.
  • Transnational and national governance, regulation and funding of education.
  • Histories and geographies of educational development and change, for instance in relation to corporate forms, the binaries of public/private education, issues of marketisation and commodification.
  • The structures, cultures and practices of formal and informal educational organisations.
  • The lived experiences of education by centring a range of intersectional analyses.
  • The educational role of new social and political movements, like decolonising, indigenous rights, Black Lives Matter and Rhodes must Fall.
  • The web of life and ecological readings of education.

This work proceeds in a spirit of openness and dialogue within and between various conceptions and traditions of Marxism, and brings those conceptions into dialogue with their critics and other anti-capitalist traditions. The Handbook contributes to the development of Marxist analyses that push beyond established limits, by engaging with fresh perspectives and views, which disrupt established perspectives as a movement of dignity. Following the introduction, the work is divided into three parts.

  1. ‘Marxist modes and characteristics of analysis in education’, which provides a broad conceptual and historical context
  2. ‘Emerging currents in Marxism and education‘, which tracks the trajectories of emerging and developing issues in education.
  3. ‘Marxism, education and alternative conceptualisations of life’, which examines in detail the possibility to describe alternative educational futures.

The Handbook is designed to be an emerging, deliberative and dialogic guide to the relationship between Marxism and education.

  1. The Handbook focuses upon the intersection of the plurality of Marxist traditions, with both the full range of transnational educational contexts, and the historical/material development of categorical analyses in relation to emerging social issues. In this way, it mirrors the objectives of relevant companions to Marx’s Capital, which seek to interpret from specified positions, and enable the reader to generate analytical tools for themselves in their own context.
  2. The Handbook enables material and historical analyses of emerging currents that are shaping education globally, including how capitalism is re-engineering learning environments, teaching practices, and student engagement and learning, alongside the national and transnational governance, regulation and funding of educational institutions.
  3. The Handbook provides a rich, conceptual and transnational engagement with emerging work on alternative perspectives, including: Buen Vivir, Critical Environmental Education, “Environmental Justice and the web of life; critical university studies; movements for institutional abolition; critical or radical pedagogy; and social justice, including #BLM, decolonising, indigeneity and critical feminism.

NB The intention is to connect with a full range of emergent issues, rather than develop a standard genealogy or archaeology of Marxist categories as they apply to educational contexts. Thus, there is a deep engagement with issues of social justice, for instance, in relation to decolonising, indigeneity, queer education and intersectionality. There is a desire to draw out the links between structures, cultures and practices of education through a Marxist lens, and to bring these into conversation with emergent issues in relation to identity, environment, social reproduction and so on.

NB there is dialogue and negotiation with authors to be undertaken, including through the process of drafting chapters. This will undoubtedly impact the ways in which the volume is structured over-time, and we will keep this under review.

Finally, and crucially, the Handbook will recognise and work with genealogies and archeologies of work that has been undertaken in relation to Marxism and Education. These genealogies, and the authors who are so central to them, will be referenced and referred to within the Handbook. However, we do not see the Handbook working within/from those genealogies and archeologies. We do not wish to maintain established or dominant perceptions and conceptualisations of Marxism and education, rather we wish to disrupt those and engage established positions in a dialogue with emerging issues (for instance, intersectionality, decolonising, the web of life). We also wish to give a range of authors, from contexts previously made marginal, new spaces for voicing and weaving.

As a result, we look forward to disrupting particular positions and opening-up/out the possibility of new research and new voices shaping the direction for the field. In any authentic and meaningful, pedagogic and educational engagement with a range of intersecting, global crises, new voices and positions are required. Other ways of knowing and imagining and being in the world have never been more urgent.


Decolonising DMU: Building the Anti-Racist University


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I’m speaking on Decolonising DMU: Building the Anti-Racist University online, at a University of East Anglia event, hosted by UEA’s Decolonising Interns’ group. My slides and abstract are noted below the event details.

‘That Other History’ Online Symposium (Mixed Panel)

Friday 10th December 2021 from 11.30 AM to 1:00 PM

For more information, email: decolonising.interns@uea.ac.uk or click the link to join this 10th December event.

‘That Other History’ Symposium Poster has details and a QR code for access.

NB there is also a published paper with some e-prints available on Teaching in Higher Education. The paper is titled Struggling for the anti-racist university: learning from an institution-wide response to curriculum decolonisation.

 

The following are the three topics/panellists.

  1. ‘Critical Decolonisation in British Education – Exploring the space between Representation and Romanticisation.’ Kaeya Zui (UEA-LDC)
  2. ‘Decolonising DMU: Building the Anti-Racist University.’ Professor Richard Hall (DMU) and Dr Lucy Ansley (DMU)
  3. ‘Collective Reflections on trying to ‘decolonise’ UEA.’ Moé Suzuki (UEA-PPL), Arzhang Pezhman (UEA-LDC), Megan Pay (UEA-PPL)

Abstract

Whilst a number of universities are moving forward with Race Equality Charter work, and broader equality, diversity and inclusion activities, De Montfort University (DMU) has initiated a dedicated Decolonising DMU (DDMU) project, aimed at building the anti-racist University. Building upon work on the awarding gap, the first phase of the project had five strands (Institution, Library, Students, Staff and Research). In its second, emergent phase, the work will shift to focus upon: equality of education and research; progression, talent and representation; governance and accountability; and understanding culture and behaviour.

The project explicitly builds upon a working position grounded in abolitionist, indigenous and critical race positions, which question ontological and epistemological approaches, and which stress social justice. This draws upon existing intellectual and activist practices, and reveals the tensions of bringing such theoretical, methodological and practical positions into conversation with institutional change projects. Where those projects are governed through established change-management methodologies, inside institutions with legacies of power, prestige and privilege, anti-racism as alternative ways of knowing, doing and being potentially jarring and threatening.

Here, DDMU seeks to uncover the tensions in reintegrating such praxis within University structures, cultures and practices. This is important inside institutions that historically centre whiteness, not just in knowledge production but in their everyday lived experiences. In terms of structures, cultures and practices, this brings the University into relation with individual and communal issues of white fragility and privilege, double and false consciousness, and behavioural code switching.

In order to address some of these issues around whiteness, the DDMU project is researching what decolonising means to its stakeholders, through staff/student surveys, student diaries, DDMU team diaries, and staff interviews. This work has revealed: the complexities of meaning around decolonising and its relationship to anti-racism; personal issues that frame and understanding of and engagement with decolonising; structural, institutional issues in delivering meaningful transformation; differing conceptions of the nature of the University; and, the need to explore empathy, relatedness and lived experiences.

In this paper, we draw out some of the themes from this research, in order to reflect upon the development of an institutional project, focused upon delivering long-term, cultural change. We reflect upon the limits of transformation, the relationships between structures and agency, and issues of positionality (for instance, in terms of the identities of researchers seeking to understand lived experiences of marginalisation and trauma).


LOL My Praxis: The Hopeless University


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My friend and compadre, James Brown (the other one) nominated me for the lolmypraxis podcast, in order to talk about my work on The Hopeless University.

LOL, my praxis! The timely, interdisciplinary, and entirely un-REFable academic/comedy podcast! Striving for four star, world-leading excellence in terms of originality, significance, rigour, and sarcasm.

The episode is available on Apple and Spotify.

Episode Notes

Dear Lord, what a sad little obsession we have with a retro episode of Come Dine with Me…this episode we’re joined by the hopeless Professor Richard Hall. We’re here to radicalise your pedagogy and diversify your curriculum with the help of a straight white man.

You can find Richard’s research here: http://www.richard-hall.org/ and get his new book The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of the End of History for FREE here: http://mayflybooks.org/?page_id=305

This work is very deliberately not central to my public engagement and future REF Impact work.

I had some qualms about one phrase I used in the podcast. I discussed it in these tweets.