I’m speaking at the Educational Innovation in Economics and Business (EdinEB) conference next Wednesday (3 June), in Brighton. The conference is focused on the interplay between theory and practice, with the focus on “Critically questioning educational innovation in economics and business: Human interaction in a virtualising world”. The abstract is here. The slides are below, followed by some key points.
The idea of educational innovation is subsumed under the circuits of commodity production and money. We are sold the idea that such innovation is emancipatory for learners, freeing them as competitive and entrepreneurial in selling their labour-power and themselves. In the face of the politics of austerity, global socio-environmental crises, and the emotional crisis of sociability and anxiety, are the market and a financialised existence the only way?
TWO. Innovation as fetish [slides 5-11]
The global North is awash in educational innovation that is being driven by the law of value, and the motive desire to make previously socialised contexts like higher education productive. In particular, we see: the focus on families operating as private capitals, investing in their own, permanent re-skilling so that they are competitive; the disciplinary focus on the educator’s professional development and productivity, especially related to digital literacy; and an obsession with data as a means of prediction rooted in financialisation.
THREE. Innovation and the secular crisis [slides 12-21]
Educational innovation needs to be analysed in relation to hyper-financialisation, which itself sits inside the secular crisis of capitalism. Here the work of Marx is enlightening in enabling us to analyse our social forces of production and the relations of production that dominate our lives and our environment. The issue then is one of power and the mode of production of our everyday lives. Moreover, this is situated against the self-expansion of value, which then marginalises or co-opts our very humanity. The failure of self-expansion has catalysed what is called the secular crisis as a failure of monetary policy, or a failure of profitability, and has resulted increasingly in the delegitimisation of capitalism, and the very education innovations that are being forced upon us. Overwork, anxiety, depression, bewilderment are functions of this delegitimisation. Have we failed, or does the mode of production fail us? How therefore do we enable the self-expansion of quantitative pleasing rather than projecting our neuroses which are themselves forms of false consciousness?
FOUR. Innovation and the sociability of academic work [slides 22-40]
Higher educational innovation alters the sociability of academic work, as it drives exchange rather than use and performance management. In this way it becomes a fundamental element in a structural adjustment policy that reshapes the relationships between academics and students. There is a range of policy pronouncements [Willetts and Byrne via the Social Market Foundation, and Rizvi et al via the IPPR], policy tools [like the Future Earnings and Employability Record, and the Teaching Excellence Framework], and funding streams that drive innovation [like learning gain], which enable transnational associations of capitals to drive variable human capital investment, financialisation and marketization. Here we see the work of Pearson driving the joy of data, venture capital investment in MOOCs, and Bain and Company’s response to “a world awash in money”. Educational innovations are sold to higher education as personalisation, or retention, or employability, or whatever. However, they are developed: in response to the development of a world market; in order to make previously marginal sectors of the economy explicitly productive; as a way of leveraging the ratio of the total surplus-value produced in society to the total capital invested; and to revolutionise the means of production.
FIVE. What is to be done?
SIX. Innovation and the colonisation of the soul [slides 41-44]
This is just a note on who has power in a world where environmental and production costs have been outsourced to the global South, and where the compulsion for innovation is driven by specific groups of men. What is the relationship between hegemony and counter-hegemony, as revealed through educational innovation?
The general intellect offers us a way of reframing educational innovation for alternative purposes beyond the market, at the level of society. The key here is how to define a different form of sociability, so that we are able to address global crises more appropriately. In this model there is a need to abolish the distinction between the University-as-factory and society, so that concrete collective work as a social force of production enables different ways of addressing problems. Here we have examples of innovative thinking and modelling from inside the University that focus upon the struggle for alternatives. These include The University of Manchester Post-Crash Economics Society and the Women’s Budget Group. We also have examples of innovative thinking and modelling from outside the University that focus upon the struggle for alternatives. These include People’s Political Economy and the Social Science Centre. We also have examples of the innovative thinking and modelling from inside-and-outside the University that focus upon the struggle for alternatives. These include the Manchester Open Data Project, the Telekommunist Manifesto, and the FLOK Society. The examples demonstrate that the process of innovation might be repurposed for outcomes that lie beyond the market, and which are shaped through critical pedagogy and co-operative practice.
EIGHT. Is it possible to innovate against the rule of money? Is it possible to innovate so that learning and teaching enable self-actualisation in a world that is framed by emergencies?
There is a fuller blog-post on my topic of dismantling the curriculum in higher educationhere.
Abstract
As a response to on-going economic crisis and the politics of austerity, the higher education curriculum in the global North is increasingly co-opted for the production of measurable outcomes. Such co-option emerges through financialisation and marketisation (McGettigan, 2014), and encourages an obsession both with data that can be commodified as learning gain or teaching excellence (Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), 2015), and with the production of tradable services (Fallon, 2014; Harris et al., 2012). As a result, the relationships between teachers and students, and any hope for living more humanely, are driven by a commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of teacher/student performance. As a result the messy realities of the curriculum are lost and the concrete work that teachers and students do inside and outside the classroom is subsumed under the compulsion to create and accumulate value (Gates Foundation, 2014).
This idea of the subsumption of University life under the dictates of value is critical. It contains within it an unfolding of the relationships between teachers and students, institutions, the State and the market. One result of this unfolding is the production of academic commodities, including the curriculum and the ways in which performance against it is assessed. As a result, we witness the emergence of new tropes rooted in entrepreneurialism and future earnings (Davies 2014; Enterprise for All, 2014), and which restructures the work of teachers and students (Hall, 2014; Winn, 2015).
One way of rethinking this subsumption is to critique it from the perspective of those who are excluded. Educators might then ask, where are the curricula spaces inside formal higher education that enable education as the practice of freedom, when the only freedom available is increasingly that of the labour-market? (bell hooks, 1994) Here the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Masters House community (DTMH, 2015), the Social Science Centre (2015), and the global fossil fuel divestment movement (Fossil Free, 2015) are relevant in exploring alternatives. Such an exploration, rooted in the organising principles of the curriculum, asks educators to consider how their curriculum reproduces an on-going colonisation by Capital.
This keynote will describe the ways in which the design and delivery of the curriculum in the global North is used to open-up academic practices, so that new financial mechanisms can be created and markets created rooted in new, exportable services. Here the argument is that through performance management, the relationships between teachers and students have become tradable commodities that do not enable us to address global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises. The argument then connects these processes to the possibilities hinted at through alternative approaches to curriculum production and circulation that are rooted in collective work (Zibechi, 2012) and the idea of mass intellectuality. It will be argued that such work, rooted in a co-operative curriculum might enable educators to build an engaged curriculum, through which students and academics no longer simply learn to internalise, monitor and manage their own alienation.
References
bell hooks. 1994. Teaching to Transgress. London: Routledge.
Davies, W. 2014. The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition. London: SAGE.
Hall, R. 2014. On the abolition of academic labour: the relationship between intellectual workers and mass intellectuality. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 12(2): 822-37.http://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/597
What do we do in these half-days between £9,000 fees and what is to follow? When what we know will follow will be the grinding everyday of future earnings and employability records, and teaching excellence frameworks, and an obsession with learning gain, and the circuit of impact.
And all the while we wonder what is happening to the public-facing, public good that we hoped this academic life was about. As those with power argue for a removal of the ceiling on indenture. As those with power argue for outsourcing the fabric of the institutions which we thought were safe spaces. As those with power seek to monitor our every moment. As those with power seek to make us responsible for the safe running of the machine that destroys the fabric of our being. Forced to reproduce their alienation of our lives, inside the machinery of the institution, and inside the fabric of our public engagement, and inside our relationships with our students-as-customers, and inside our very selves.
Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.
And we can see that those governing networks that enforce learning gain, and the national student survey, and the research excellence framework, and the higher education achievement record, and the future earnings and employability records, and performance management, and new public management techniques and methodologies, and internationalisation strategies, and precarious labour rights, cannot care about all the ands. They cannot care that as well as teaching and assessing and administrating and researching and scholarship, that this is too much.
They cannot care that this reduces the capability of people and relationships to withstand stress.
They cannot care that this is too much.
They cannot care that this makes us anxious.
And this anxiety is driven by the need for us to live two half-lives. In one we try to be partners in a social construction; in social sustainability; in a willingness to address those global issues that will fuck our world over. Partners in trying to find solutions that are not beholden to the structuring logic of the market. Yet this half-life decays quicker than the other half-life – the demands made of us to treat our lives as services that can be commodified and exchanged. Our whole lives now reproduced as labour-power. Lost to us.
And in making sense of the loss our cognitive dissonance places the use-value and the exchange-value of our work in screaming tension.
And how can we survive this?
But there’s no love man there’s no love and the kids are uptight
So throw a party till the cops come in and bust it up.
How do we survive as we see vindictive actions taking place against trades unionists and students who go into occupation? How do we survive when the police are invited onto campus to maintain a very particular narrative of democratic order? How will we survive when the senior management of universities increasingly resort to banning orders against protest? How will we survive when senior management are content to refer to students who question governance and power as “yobs”?
How will we survive when the tactics that were trialled and practiced and refined during the Coalition are amplified just as austerity is amplified?
How do we build an alternative when there can be no alternative?
And the question becomes what now for academics and students, in this “how”? What now in the face of a recovery that demands continual, Keynesian stimulus, and the attrition on wages and living standards and labour rights and welfare in order to maintain the rate of profit, and indentured study, and precarious life and work, and the permanence of deficits and debt, and narratives that hate and which demonise.
What now for academics and students as this crisis of over-accumulation, and its political impacts, flood into the University?
What now for academics and students as the value of their labour-power collapses in order to maintain the rate of profit?
What now for academics and students as their labour-power is alienated from them, and turned into work for which they have little use, beyond its ability to let them survive physically in a world that is cognitively and emotionally broken? And yet at the same time we can see that this physical survival is time-limited, as we continue to refuse to divest because we must consume.
You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan
And the next five years trying to be with your friends again
Because at the level of the State and in the hierarchies of universities, there is increasingly limited understanding of the political economic value of the labour of academics and students. And there is limited willingness to enable that labour-power to support the wider public good, as a form of mass intellectuality. There is just the attempt to scrub that labour-power clean of any risk.
The risk that is embedded in autonomy.
So that the activities of the University are governed by risk management as a futures-trading activity. So that anxiety about potential risks can be internalised inside the organisation and inside each of us. So that we can never focus on the present, because that present is immanent to past performance and mitigating future failure Where future failure is anything other than total quality excellence, all the time.
So how can we focus on this essay or this tutorial or this viva or this paper or this presentation, when our lives are governed by the demand that we are persistently and permanently alive to the next entrepreneurial possibility? How can we be present with ourselves and others in the present, when we must be internalising and reproducing continual improvement and learning gain and teaching excellence and research impact?
When we are trying to finesse the future and learn from the past, how can we be? In the face of entrepreneurial excellence, how can we be other than anxious?
Avoid all the plans cuz we’re making our day jobs
Into a steady career
We’re both high high high, high high on lemon sips
We all claw claw claw, cli-climb-on to sinking ships
And where do we look, in order to overcome the duality of an uncertain landscape for our labour and the certainty that our labour is no longer ours? The reality is that it never was, but it felt momentarily like we were the lucky few. With agency and power-over our work, and doing a job that we loved and which was worthy, and that made our families believe in our and their status. That we were someone with something to say. With a voice. With a purpose. With lots of badges.
And now what? Subsumed inside the market.
And now what? Waiting to find out how our labour will be co-opted once more. Even more. Ever more.
And now what, in that co-option by privateers seeking rents from our work, and by publishers seeking rents from our work, and by politicians seeking impact and tradable services from our work, and by transatlantic trade and investment partnerships seeking to open and dominate our labour for exchange, and by investment banks seeking to monetise the future and past of our work as derivatives?
And what now when these privateers and politicians and publishes and trading networks and investment banks act as an association? As a joint venture?
And what are the feelings we remember now? When we teach? When we present our work? When we listen to others teach or present?
What are our feelings when we hear about the foreclosing of opportunity beyond the market?
What are our feelings when we hear about how marginalised groups are fighting to be heard inside the academy? When we hear women protesting sexual harassment on campus? When we hear students and academics who wish to dismantle the university as a form of colonialized and colonializing house? When we hear postgraduate students and precariously employed academics voicing concerns about casualization? When we hear students and academics calling for divestment and to leave fossil fuels in the ground?
Perhaps what it means to speak is to register that this space and time of higher education is not what we thought it might be. And that what we hoped it might be will be way beyond our comprehension in the next five years. So that it might just have been a dream.
And that what we hoped it might be is not the institution or the idea of the campaign to defend what never was and never could be. Nothing and nowhere.
Perhaps what it means is to take their instantiation of risk, and their trading in our psyches on our fears of being punished for being anything other than excellent, in every way and all the time. Perhaps we take this past and futures trading and show what it is doing to our individual and collective selves, and our individual and collective ability to face socio-environmental crisis. To face a crisis that is rooted in our political economic; our very material history.
To try to find spaces and times to refuse and push-back against their trading in our psyches.
To try to find spaces and times to refuse and push-back against the demand for entrepreneurialism and exchange. Because entrepreneurialism and exchange just demonstrate the fleeting nature of our status and the self-harm of a constant need to reproduce ourselves anew.
To try to find spaces and times to refuse to download and install their fear of their potential loss of control. Because their control risks blinding us to wider, structural and societal iniquities. So that we risk reinforcing those iniquities of debt, precarity, outsourcing, the attrition on labour rights, delegitimation, the militarisation of the campus, through our silence.
And we cannot do this on our own. Alone inside higher education. When we are through the looking glass.
And it keeps coming until the day it stops.
Fight or flight? Or just give up?
Because sometimes we forget that we spent t he last five years discussing and planning in occupations and social centres and co-operatives. And we remember that people are fighting austerity and organising foodbanks and fighting for the right to a home and for asylum. And in the face of this all they could do was militarise against that organisation.
Any movement is what you make of it – I won’t be ceding the ground to conspiracy theorists, or the liberal centrists, or the nationalists. There is a real chance here, and to pass it up without any engagement is jawdropping.
Sometimes I forget that we might be stronger than we think.
I’m speaking at the Educational Innovation in Economics and Business (EdinEB) conference on 3 June, in Brighton. The conference is focused on the interplay between theory and practice, with the focus on “Critically questioning educational innovation in economics and business: Human interaction in a virtualising world”. I will be speaking about the following…
Abstract
The global economic crisis of 2008 has been followed by a persistent recession, with low levels of growth, weak aggregate demand, and high levels of underemployment or unemployment. This forced an engagement with the idea that the global economy is witnessing a secular stagnation or crisis, which has in-turn recalibrated the landscape of English higher education, with implications for the idea of the University. This process has amplified the twin forces of marketization and financialisation that are reconstituting the higher education sector for the production, circulation and accumulation of value.
As a result of this restructuring for value, educational innovation has been subsumed under political economic realities, which stipulate that there is no alternative to the logic of choice and competition. This political economy is underscored culturally and pedagogically through an obsession with innovation that includes: redefining academic labour as entrepreneurial or for employment; enforcing a creative curriculum; amplifying the use of data to establish learning gain; co-opting the staff/student relationship as partnership; developing internationalisation strategies through open education.
This keynote will argue that educational innovations might usefully be examined in light of the relationships between: technological and organisational innovation; the dominant political economy that is affecting competing educational providers; the disciplinary role of the State in shaping an educational space for further capital accumulation; and the subsumption of open networks to the realities of performativity and performance management. The argument will situate educational innovations inside-and-against Capital’s drive to subsume labour practices inside technologically-mediated forms of coercion, command and control, rather than to enable social mobility or emancipation.
It will be argued that the ways in which such educational innovations and the services that are derived from them are valorised might offer a glimpse of how the processes that drive capital accumulation might themselves be resisted. The argument will draw on the examples of The Post-Crash Economics Society (PCES) at the University of Manchester, the People Political Economy Project in Oxford, the International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics (ISIPE), and the Rethinking Economics conference, in order to examine the social relationships that emerge around notionally neutral, educational innovations. We might then ask, is it possible to reclaim human interaction and sociability in a virtualising world?