Tag Archives: higher education

Ill-Being and the Hopeless University


Posted by hallymk1

Image of lichen-covered nodule on tree branch.

On June 14th, 2023, I presented an Ends of Knowledge reading group and seminar.

The blurb for the event is pasted below, and you can sign-up via Eventbrite. But I wouldn’t. That time has passed. But the slides are appended below the blurb. Thanks so much to Jamie Rákóczi and Harriet Cooper for their support and encouragement in this work.

Ill-being and the Hopeless University

Faced by the realities and lived experiences of intersecting crises, the University has become hopeless, in two respects. First, it has become a place that has no socially-useful role beyond the reproduction of capital, and has become an anti-human project devoid of hope. Second, it is unable to respond meaningfully with crises that erupt from the contradictions of capital. Thus, in its maintenance of business-as-usual, the University remains shaped as a tactical response to these contradictions. 

In spite of the uncertainties of life inside the pandemic, these demands increasingly reproduce precarious and proletarianised working conditions. Alienation, anxiety, estrangement unfold inside University workers, through their work, their relationships and their very selves. Whilst institutions focus upon well-being through symptomatic responses related to resilience, mindfulness and well-being. Yet, this is entangled with the reality that University work, like all labour, tends to catalyse ill-being.

Through crises of finance or epidemiology, or at the intersection of both, it is possible to trace how the intersection of socio-economic and socio-environmental crises both enable the structural adjustment of sectoral and institutional structures, and damage bodies and psychologies. As institutional forms develop high plasticity, cultures become pathologies, and activities are defined methodologically, individuals and communities are scarred. In the pandemic, the scars are made visible, in terms of reports of overwork, self-sacrifice and feelings of precariousness, underpinned by a sense of hopelessness and Weltschmerz, with physical and psychological manifestations, including headaches, fatigue, anxiety and depression. In spite of the pandemic, the University demands the internalisation of specific behaviours that become culturally-acceptable, self-harming activities. These subsume the humanity of intellectual work under economic determinations.

This anti-humanist terrain and its resulting, widening circuit of ill-being, serve as an opening for discussion.

Sign up link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ends-of-knowledge-richard-hall-ill-being-and-the-hopeless-university-tickets-603704575637.

Required Reading:

The Slides that I did not use, but that form the backbone to this work are available below.

You might also be interested in the stuff on mental health, ill-being, anxiety, depression, weltschmerz, elsewhere on this site. I share this as a form of eldership.


Notes on leaving UCU


Posted by hallymk1

I joined NATFHE in 1994. When it merged with the AUT and formed UCU, I migrated across. I had never not been on strike when called. I had never not picketed. Even on my own. Even in the rain. Even with senior managers walking past and telling me what a good job I was doing.

After being put at risk through a restructure under a new Pro Vice-Chancellor in 2005, I joined the UCU committee and became a health and safety rep. I stepped down in 2009 as my emotional health worsened. However, I remained on the committee. For the next few years, alongside caring for my Mum before she passed away and continued work, I was involved with the committee, occasionally in meetings with management. At that time, I was much more involved with student social movement activity, through occupations, and in a range of alternative education projects, detailed at http://www.richard-hall.org/beyond-work/

I miss those days. Somethings felt possible.

In 2018, my own position in University came under renewed stress, as a new Pro Vice-Chancellor looked to co-opt an Institute I was directing for a different purpose than that which we had agreed institutionally and previously. This was the most incredibly messy and stressful experience I have had in my working life. The conduct of this was inexcusable. However, I remain grateful to two members of senior leadership in the institution at that time who gave me incredible support.

This is also a period in which I finalised The Alienated Academic. And that gave birth to The Hopeless University.

In my description of this, my own trade union, UCU, is missing. The limitations of union power within a branch and an institution became very clear to me at this time. Whilst caseworkers and members were sympathetic, there was an overwhelming sense of powerlessness should I be threatened with redundancy. I remember other professors who were members expressing dismay in their fear that this could be visited on them. It was clear that this was a branch with limited organisation, which had to focus resources upon being service-based, and that, in extremis, one was on one’s own.

NB the limits of labour solidarity is also the lesson that I take from my Dad’s work in precarious circumstances on factory floors. Note – this is not human or civil solidarity, or that in social movements (well, not necessarily, although it might be), but the limits erupting from within the compulsion to resell one’s alienated labour day-after-day within a prestige economy. At this time, I was supported by wonderful and beautiful people from the ground, like Sarah Amsler and Liz Morrish and Mike Neary and Keith Smyth.

In spite of these limits, or despite them, I became much more involved as an activist once the Vice-Chancellor at the time left their position. I authored DMU Renewed: a Manifesto, which drew upon work from the Branch Solidarity Network. I was involved in trying to renew and preserve the committee, as it tried to find its balance with an influx of new members. Again, this work was incredibly, emotionally trying and tiring, because it was haunted by egos and competing strategies and agendas. In hindsight, any meaningful articulation of change always felt secondary to tactical engagements with management.

And I was culpable. Up to a point.

And sometimes, when you work at the intersection of pragmatism and libertarian communism, the only answer is ¡Que se vayan todos! But that isn’t always clear at the time.

NB egos and competing strategies and agendas. These are lessons that I also project onto UCU nationally.

¡Que se vayan todos!

As the union branch became more active, I undertook casework (2018 – 22), and some negotiation, especially during Covid-19 (2019 – 22). This was a time when I was adjusting to having left long-term therapy (after a decade), and was also caring for my Nan, who passed away in April 2020, and then my Dad, who passed away suddenly in January 2022. I had intended to step down from the committee in late 2021, but was persuaded by some committee members to stay on. As a result, I was heavily involved in negotiation and casework during proposed redundancies in late Spring/Summer 2022. As with many union activists, and as was the case since I joined the committee, I had no time for this work allocated.

So, as with so many others, it took over evenings and weekends. And hearts and souls. And tended to be de-generative, and rarely re-generative. Alienation, reproduced over-and-over.

NB I must note how amazing the caseworkers and negotiators were during this dispute. I salute them. I remember discussing with the other negotiators how vulnerable we all felt. And how we had to return to negotiate, because what else was possible?

And, I should have been grieving my Dad.

I stood down from the committee in Autumn 2022. I had served on it in one form or another (often limited) since 2005, had always been active in meetings, had always been on strike and picketed, had written and negotiated and undertaken casework, had done work on health and safety. When I stood down I had one email from a current committee member thanking me for my time and energy. I had a second from a regional official. I am so grateful for their messages.

They also throw into stark relief that I had no other recognition of this work. Nothing from the committee or its officers. This local silence resonates with how I view the union nationally.

NB I understand the cry that this is thankless work, and that mine is just another representation of the weakness of (white, male, straight)(academic) egos. Yes, maybe. I have to sit with that. And yet, it was not thanks that I thought might be appropriate. Rather, an acknowledgement, a nod, a wish to go well. Something.

On New Year’s Eve I was in a local pub that was closing that evening. With friends, I was celebrating what the pub had meant to me/us. The evening was recalibrated when an angry former colleague confronted me about some casework that happened whilst I was caring for my Nan.  In the crucial moment for that part of the story I was bedridden with a migraine. And in that moment in the pub I was reminded that, during that case, a senior, national UCU activist had slandered me on email. I remember that nothing came of this following conversations with region. And I remember how overworked that office is as well.

What a mess the alienation and estrangement and egos of this labour makes of us, and of our relationships. What a mess it makes of our histories, presents and futures.

And this in the midst of the current dispute. I remember feeling uneasy that our branch, like others, had no discussion about the dispute in late summer 2022, and that I felt that we were bounced into a ballot for industrial action. Moreover, our branch was tired from a struggle over redundancies, which for some staff was still ongoing. There was an issue of organisation. And energy, both emotional and physical.

However, there was also an issue of our not having built an organisation around the 4 Fights nationally, in particular since the collapse of the (in hindsight) pointless action of 2020. Here, it is interesting to see the comments of national negotiators when analysing the recent UCEA/UCU negotiations, in which they did not take part as a group. Did we now understand what our disputes meant, or what winning meant inside the institution/nationally? Was this simply a campaign around pay, for which we would have no public support? Were post-92s being bounced into a struggle where the power/core dispute was over USS Pensions?

NB of course, that pensions dispute is fundamental and needs to be won. It deserves the support of all University workers, working (directly) democratically to liberate these deferred wages/benefits. To liberate future time. Future free time. For these workers.

I felt that aggregating the vote was risky for some institutions that remain less well-organised, and appearing to connect 4 Fights and Pensions, whether the disputes were separate on the ballot paper or not, was a problematic strategy. Moreover, when the ballot result came out and there were triumphalist statements made about an 80-odd per cent vote for strike action, based upon a low 50 per cent turnout, my heart sank. This meant that less than half of members had said they would take strike action, and this in a sector with relatively low union density, and next to no history of militancy.

Strike action and next-to-nothing else. Except our usual ASOS. Whatever that is, in such an ill-defined role that is never a trade. Where the labour of love trumps all else. And union legal notes said that National would support branches if management docked 100% pay, but which also reiterated that they could do so. And in places they have. All the pressure back on exhausted branches and individuals. And in-fighting and factions and vanguardism increasingly apparent when what we needed was leadership.

And anyway, we stop nothing with those numbers taking action. Or saying that they will take action. It is impossible to reimagine the university with those numbers.

Of course, it is difficult to know what we actually do stop, given that we are not a trade. Given that we are deeply stratified and fragmented, set against each other in a positional war of prestige operating at the institutional, disciplinary and individual-level. Given that we tend to overwork, and make-up lost time and activities in our own precious time. Given that we are brutalised (self-harm) inside our labour of love. These aren’t train services or postal deliveries. And it’s almost time for the NSS.

I also felt dispirited that our only apparent connection with sister unions, like Unison, was to ask them to contribute to our strike funds. The labour of academics is predicated upon of a range of professional services staff. The lack of cross-union solidarity, reinforcing privilege and hierarchy, goes on and on and on.

And all I could see was, at a National level, the Union maintaining a financial analysis that neglected the restricted and limiting financial health of individual institutions in any pay claim, and instead making claims about the reserves of the sector as a whole. As if they could be deployed equally. Moreover, there was a disengagement from the political economy of higher education, and the funding, governance and regulatory terrain upon which academic labour is forced to compete. Unless I had missed something, without any renewed funding settlement, and without any commitment for cross-sector bailouts, individual institutions were at risk from unfunded pay claims.

I ask myself, is that Russell Group institution down the road really going to bail us out when the shit hits the fan?

So what was the strategy to be? For academic labour across competing institutions?

This remains compounded for me by a lack of national organising and strategy that can resist the demands of transnational capital, and it is reinforced by a disconnect between national organising and horizontal, branch-based organising. A disconnect with sister unions. A disconnect with wider struggles in communities and society for other social goods. With factionalised, national decision-making exacerbating problems in the aggregation of separate demands (like pay equality, workload, and pensions), employers appear increasingly able to set class fractions of University labour in opposition. Operating in this context feels increasingly hopeless, with branches tending to build transactional rather than relational organisation locally.

Yet, I tried to remember that, for instance during the pandemic, University labour was increasingly placed at-risk, through proposed moves to fully-online degrees, or proposed salary cuts and promotion freezes for staff. There were also reports of significant lay-offs for fixed-term contract staff across the sector. I know that local branches did amazing work at this time.

Amazing work.

At the same time, I see that nationally we appear to have learned nothing from past struggles. We appear to have learned nothing from 2018 or 2020, and that latter capitulation in the face of epidemiological crisis. As we headed into this new struggle, it appeared clear that we did not have the base, the networks of solidarity, nor the strategy, to define what winning might look like, in particular for those made most marginal.

This point feels hugely relevant to me. In my lifetime inside institutions, I have never been involved in a project struggling for equality, in relation to gender, disability, race and ethnicity, or decolonising, that has been catalysed by trade unions. These have tended to come from individuals inside institutions defining or leading projects, or from pressure from without (for instance, in relation to sexual violence on campus). As a result, it is increasingly clear to me that trade unions cannot add meaningful momentum or energy into these struggles in a generative way, precisely because they are locked into and limited by a particular understanding of, and focus upon, labour relations.

NB I come back to this issue of what is generative, below. However, my engagement in the 2010s in alternative education projects offered possibility. My engagement with trade unions throughout my working life should have been relational, and instead it was transactional, based upon an idealised, universal and reductionist conception of workload, casualisation and pay.

At a national level, the reproduction of the struggle appeared to pivot over the form in which decisions might be made, and upon which strategy might be set, based upon the desires of competing factions. I found this overwhelmingly demoralising. I know that this is set into a personal, post-pandemic context in which I am carrying a lot of grief. However, it feels like union members have no agency, or are kettled by constitutional/communicative designs that (deliberately?) limit agency. Of course, the work of, for instance, comrades from Notes from Below, helps us to see the possibilities and horizons for more democratic, horizontal working. I just don’t see how it is enacted. Co-opted, yes. Enacted, no.

This feels stymied by the claims made by Higher Education Committee and counter-claims made by those around the General Secretary about who has a democratic mandate, and what form that mandate might take. It is exacerbated in manoeuvring around who has a mandate to negotiate, and what is the role of branches, and the relentless use of social media to make up for a lack of an organised base. I increasingly felt the abject pointlessness of that manoeuvring in my soul. How was this actually going to provide material solutions or even possibilities for marginalised workers?

NB I was also, at this time, in solidarity with members of Unite at UCU who were in dispute over pay.

I wouldn’t mind if those asserted democratic mandates were based on significant turnouts, and gave an appropriate platform/foundation for the decisions that have been made. But I just can’t see that they do. Whether it is claims for 18 days of strike action, or for such action to be indefinite. Constant, direct democracy is needed. And is apparently impossible. Instead, I have seen posts about procedures by members of Committees, about why they voted as they did. All this simply highlights the broken politics of the union. And It is utterly dispiriting to watch.

Moreover, I know that strategy and organisation in the post-pandemic University, has enabled management to place more and more workers at-risk or potentially surplus to requirements. This has become an explicit management weapon in the class conflict now normalised across academia. During 2022-23, we have seen a range of redundancies proposed, alongside the ongoing use of casualised and precarious contracts for staff. Of course, this gave energy to long-standing campaigns against casualisation (#coronacontract), and significant local organising, which led to anti-casualisation agreements at the University of Bath, the Open University, and Sheffield Hallam University amongst others.

I salute these.

However, against the pandemic shock doctrine and struggles in the post-pandemic institution, it appears almost impossible for University labour to develop a counter-hegemonic project that pushes back against the transnational, capitalist and activist networks that oppose them. University labour, fragmented, with weak strategy, disorganised, and lacking wider solidarity, lacks the power to push back against finance capital as it associates with Vice-Chancellors, consultancies, venture capitalists working in educational technology, credit rating agencies, bond markets, and so on.

Increasingly, University labour appears unable to address: first, the divisions between fractions of that labour working in a prestige economy and looking to accrue intellectual capital; and second, the lack of class solidarity between academics, and both professional services’ staff and students. As Marx (1873) noted, ‘while the class struggle remains latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena’, capital will maintain its power. This is particularly the case where capital acts as a joint-stock company or association of capitals, able to mobilise significant resources in any class conflict.

And I am aware of autonomous struggles that erupt from within these divisions, demonstrating the deep antagonism between University labourers and their institutions and sectors. These include trade unions. However, and crucially, mirroring the teacher strikes in Chicago and Wisconsin in the last decade, we have witnessed unionised labour taking action from below and democratically, in spite of tentative agreements with management by union leadership. Having to take action autonomously, and horizontally, and democratically.

We have seen solidarity actions at the University of East Anglia. We also continue to see brilliant work against outsourcing, for instance in IWGB struggles at the University of London. Elsewhere, graduate students at the University of Michigan and Temple University in the USA are demanding living wages, in spite of tentative agreements with management by unions. We have also seen a range of student occupations protesting rent increases, and demanding cost-of-living support for students and staff. We have also seen movements against sexual violence on campuses, including the work of the 1752 Group based in the UK, which catalysed regulatory changes.

NB here, I remember and show solidarity with the Survivors Justice UCU network, who campaigned for an independent investigation and justice for the victims of sexual harassment at UCU, including in the handling of their Rule 13 complaint on sexual harassment within the union.

Rather than a reliance upon historic and formal, labour organisations, increasingly I see generative actions that point towards the validity of organising as a social movement. For generating networks that reinforce relations of mutuality and dignity between plural individuals and groups, engaged in struggles within the same terrain. I simply cannot see how the bureaucratic hegemony and privilege of the University itself can be challenged by the bureaucratic hegemony and privilege of the trade unions that claim to oppose it.

This thread by Working Class History, demonstrates the limitations of unions that “are not pure organisations which represent the will and economic interests of their members. They are large, bureaucratic organisations, which exist within capitalist economies and within legal frameworks built by capitalist states.” That is their condition. I can work with it if we are working beyond it. But we aren’t.

In this, and in spite of claims that student learning conditions are staff teaching conditions and labouring conditions, there has been much less evidence of activist forms of mutuality between academic labourers and students. I remember going on demonstrations in 2010 and 2011, and being kettled, alongside a minority of academic teaching staff. I remember going on demonstrations against austerity, alongside a minority of academic teaching staff. I remember being in alternative education projects, alongside a minority of academic teaching staff.

And in spite of the global education struggles of the early 2010s, the strikes occurring in UK higher education since 2018 have produced limited anti-capitalist content, and almost no discussion of what might lie beyond labour relations in the toxic University. In this, the abolition of the University, and of (academic) labour inside capitalism is nowhere on the agenda.

Increasingly, I cannot see how the structures, cultures and practices of the labour organisations open to me, which are so entangled with the alienating realities of the capitalist University, make it possible for University workers to imagine another type of institution, let alone another world. The transactional nature of unions militates against a deeply relational, alternative way of producing knowledge. It appears increasingly to me that trade unions, like universities themselves, merely reproduce hopelessness.

And this is my current position. It is not a permanent position. All positions are conditional and open. As Subcamandante Marcos argued, ‘[a]ll final options are a trap.’ When I reflect back now, in all my years of trade union activity, it never felt generative or possible, or opening out of a new horizon of possibility. The spaces and places that have felt possible have been outside the University and outside of labour unions, in the struggle within social movements that seek to imagine the world otherwise. These spaces and places have felt relational, rather than transactional.

I come back to that, because it is how I feel about how I have been treated in relation to the free labour that I have given to my union over the years, which went unrecognised as it passed. If we are going to treat each other transactionally, rather than relationally, as we claim that the university is ours, and if we refuse to honour the care and dignity that individuals bring to their work, then we are lost. A university that is not grounded in the mutuality of dignity as an act of love is not enough. Never enough.

And I write this in response to a committee member having a student whom I was teaching deliver me two UCU stickers, on a strike day. Not handing them to me directly. But sending a student as a messenger. Carrying the equivalent of a white feather, perhaps. Of course, this person didn’t know that I had left the union a month before. This person didn’t know that I could not cross the picket line whilst I was a member of the union, and that I was so utterly dispirited by how this campaign and this dispute were being run, and the claims made about it. That I was so dispirited by how I saw previous failings being replicated over and over and over again.

Of course, I recognise and still process that I was part of one UCU branch and its committee for years. Make of that what you will. Clearly, some of those failings are my failings, in particular, in our inability to build something predicated upon mutuality, solidarity and relationality.

And in this, I am reminded that Notes from Below remarked:

We hope this scrutiny is accepted as a good faith attempt to build a better, more equitable union that is run from its roots.

I am also reminded of the words of a very dear friend who said to me back in 2018:

I bloody love trade unions. I just don’t like them very much.

I will try to hold these entangled positions as I find my way. For now, that cannot be within UCU.

Peace be with you.


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


Posted by hallymk1

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


Posted by hallymk1

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


new book: The Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education


Posted by hallymk1

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.


There is no way out but through


Posted by hallymk1

At a couple of recent discussion events around The Hopeless University, I have been asked what is to be done? For a variety of reasons, I didn’t give the answers that I perhaps might have done. Instead, I pushed the idea that this was about revealing stories of trauma, denying the validity of externally-imposed recommendations, blueprints, and utopias, and developing new forms of relationality.

After the fact, and thinking this through in a little more detail, I realise that there is some safety for me in focusing upon the critique of the University, which is contained in the first five chapters of my book. This is a classic academic safety mechanism and learned behaviour. Now, I realise that I was denying people the opportunity (potentially) to discuss ways through the morass and hopelessness. Perhaps I was conditioned by the safety and security of a hopeless position. Perhaps I was also conditioned by my general tendency to feel alone in any room, left to pointing out what is wrong, rather than developing a sense of belonging that might help us walk elsewhere.

Anyway, this is what I now think, and I’m grateful to those who asked questions, and who have forced me to rethink what I think.

There is no way out but through

The final two chapters of the book position how I feel about our work in our universities. My position is that I have to work through my despair at the state of the world, and the structures, cultures and practices, which we have created, and that re-purpose themselves pathologically and methodologically to deny our agency. Doing this work takes courage and faith, not only in myself, but also in my relationships. Doing this work enables me to mourn the world we have created and reproduce, and thereby to yearn for something different, and to be indignant.

In this, I take heart from the return of history, and a sense that we have material agency in the world. I take heart from those who are building social networks around food banks, whilst I am indignant that they are needed. I take heart from those protesting in Hungary for LGBTQIA+ rights, whilst I am indignant that this work must be done. I take heart from those communities in Namibia protesting for reparations rather than simply reconciliation from Germany for its genocidal colonialism, whilst I am indignant that this work must be done. And on, and on, and on. And in this I recognise the skills, knowledges, capacities, capabilities, and humane values that enable the struggles, and that show us alternative ways of knowing the world.

I see a range of collective, lived experiences, which push against the capitalist notion that we are at the end of history, and that enforces particular forms of abstraction as limited, indirect or one-sided ways of knowing and experiencing the world. I see a range of collective, lived experiences, which shine a light upon an ability to sit with trauma and to push beyond it, and the ways in which our dominant political economy demands that we suture or cauterise our wounds in the name of business-as-usual.

These collective, lived experiences of trauma highlight the entangled nature of our subjectivities and beings, beyond their reduction to labour-power. Here, the idea of composting, decomposing and recycling appeals to me, because it is about acknowledging that we have created this system of social reproduction that denies humanity-in-nature. Therefore, we have the power to create something else. In the book I note:

Decomposing opens-up the struggle for plural worlds. Multiple, mutual ways of knowing erupt from the theorisation of singular, lived experiences, which themselves set the grounds upon which the manifestations of our exploitation, expropriation and extraction are made common. Whilst suffering is absolutely relative, situating the cause, rather than the effects, of that suffering in critiques of our mode of social reproduction, enable us to move beyond symptomatic responses, and address the ways in which our differences, fed upon and exacerbated by capital’s social metabolic control, also offer us a potential moment for mutuality and unity.

Here, a focus upon direct democracy between all individuals helps us to invert associations of capitals that deny humanity for-value. Decomposing these associations offers a way of constructing ecosystems that can recycle the nutrients of social goods into local communities. Communication across communities, or communes, such that a commune of communes acts as the basis for such ecosystems, is pivotal in defining and meeting universal social needs. Universities and their infrastructures are central to this process, including in their decomposition and recycling. They have the ability to help in the diffusion of technological and organisational solutions for reducing the realm of necessity, for generalising access to the means of production, and for refusing the extractive relationship between humans and nature. This requires a significant cognitive and psychological movement amongst individuals and communities. However, in asking those communities to discuss what is necessary for their existence, and how might they live in a world facing the intersection of crises, it is life-affirming.

The metaphor of decomposing enables me to see that capital and its institutions created mycorrhizal networks that infect and inflect our lives for the extraction of surplus. They make us redundant beyond our labour-power and become toxic to us because they internalise exploitation and expropriation in our very beings. Can we decompose this, remove the toxins produced by value, and recycle our skills, knowledges, ancestries, lands, capacities and hearts for another world?

We make our own history

We make our own history, and we have the ability to do so in every moment, and to do so collectively. In the book I write:

The present is pivotal, and the process of healing is one of questioning, and then mobilising or moving. This reproduces the potentiality of preguntando caminamos, or asking, we walk (Marcos 2002), as a recovery of the idea that we make our own history and our own paths through collective dialogue, based upon where we find ourselves. We can only move towards ‘our true heart’ (ibid.: 268) in the next moment, by understanding our modes of knowing, doing and being in the present moment. This teaches ‘how the world was born and show where it is to be found’ (ibid.: 276), as a movement of dignity. The struggle for movement delineates life as pedagogic practice, and erupts from our present, hopeless situation as a demand for generalised, intellectual engagement with alternative ways of making the world, and being in it. It is predicated upon abolishing separation, for instance between teacher and student, and transcending roles, such that each individual articulates their intellectual capabilities as a social activity.

This is a process of reintegration, in particular of self and other.

As history returns, this is also a struggle for reintegrating hope and hopelessness, such that we can be courageous and faithful in articulating our yearnings. This is a yearning beyond the forms, pathologies and methodologies of University labour. It is for intellectual work in society, which takes self-determination as its content and thereby opens-out new forms that give everyone free access to human intellectuality: everything must be for everyone. As a deeply relational practice (Yazzie Burkhart 2004), its starting point cannot be reform of the University and its crisis-driven existence. Like our ignorance, the search for a cure merely prolongs our agony. Instead, we must speak and listen, question and make paths, guided by those ‘who continue without hearing the voices of the powerful and the indifferent’ (Marcos 2002: 32).

Here, thinking about being guided by those who continue without hearing the voices of the powerful and the indifferent, I consider my own practice. How I can contribute to a new universal conception of life, framed around a counter-narrative to the universe of value. How I can help by listening to shared stories of trauma, and finding ways to build mutuality and new forms of relationality. How I can help those stories find new audiences. How I can help us recover our mass intellectuality at the level of society, rather than reproducing the general intellect as commodified knowledge from within the University.

I am also thinking about how such sharing might enable us to build a new qualitative experience of life, beyond its current quantification as human capital, commodity, surplus everything. Our ability to share and relate singular experiences of exploitation, expropriation and extraction, and to bring that into relations with the particular, colonial and patriarchal demands of our political economy, is a starting point for taking a step in a new direction.

This requires a different quality of relationship that points beyond power and prestige. It requires that we call out what we see and experience, and bring any privilege that we have to the use of others, in order that they can share their stories and we can build empathy. It requires that we remember what we have built collectively, and seek to dissolve that into the fabric of society, rather than seeking to extract rents from it.

It also demands that I focus upon building a base for a counter-narrative, through my work in a trade union, in committees, in mentoring, in projects, and also outside the University, in my relationships and voluntary work. Moreover, this needs to be grounded in care and dignity. It needs to be grounded in a collective discussion of the world for which we yearn, and pointed in a direction beyond the toxicity of capitalist reproduction and its institutions.

This discussion needs to accept that not everybody will chain themselves to a pipeline, be able to withstand being kettled on demonstrations, be able to teach, be able to write, be able to lobby, be able to bake, be able to care whilst others are protesting, and so on. However, we might accept that it is okay to bring our own selves to our collective struggles in those ways that nurture us. It took the system that we are in centuries to unfold as it has, and that will not be reversed overnight. The work of moving through painful and differential for different bodies, and will take time. But there is nothing else other than living death.

And in this ongoing, tortuous struggle, we might accept that whilst we act inside the University, we are also acting for a world beyond the University-as-is. We are looking to link our narratives of trauma to those elsewhere. We are looking to build solidarity across institutions, communities, networks and sectors, in order to describe other worlds. We are looking to accept the many-sidedness of life, and the many-sidedness of ourselves. We are looking to realise the end of the end of history.