Tag Archives: rhodesmustfall

writing about/against/beyond the alienated academic


Posted by hallymk1

You have to know what’s wrong before you can find what’s right

Toni Morrison. Song of Solomon.

as far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.

Carl Jung

A book against academic labour

I have just submitted my final draft of a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan, in their Marxism and Education series, entitled The Alienated Academic: The Struggle for Autonomy inside the University. This book reflects my work inside and outside the University over the course of the last decade. In this time, we have witnessed the re-engineering and repurposing of higher education, and the impact this has had on academics, professional services staff and students. In part this catalysed my engagement in a range of protests and occupations in 2010-11, alongside my work in co-operatives like the Social Science Centre in Lincoln and Leicester Vaughan College, and with the Open Library of Humanities. This stitches my thinking and my practice into other co-operative movements for dignity, and against the indignity of capitalist work.

However, my thinking and my practice have also been challenged personally, through a decade-long commitment to therapy. On one level, this work represents my attempt to understand, manage and move beyond manifestations of depression and anxiety, including their displacement or appearance as overwork. On a deeper level, it has been fundamental in enabling me to understand my own essence, in terms of how and why I have, at times, been estranged from myself and the world. This book encapsulates a moment and a movement in my recovery of myself in the world.

In terms of the themes of the book, it is meaningless for me to separate out my work inside and outside the University from the work I continue to undertake on myself. It is meaningless for me to separate out my labour as something unique in the practice of my life. As a result, it forms an attempt by me to engage with Marx’s conceptions of estrangement and alienation, in particular focused upon being and becoming, dignity and indignity, objectification and subjectivity, and the possibility for recovering autonomy.

As a result, this is not a book that describes academic life from the perspective of academic labour, in order to recover some idealised or utopian notion of the University. Rather, it is against academic labour, as a case study of the exploitation, expropriation and domination of labour by capital. Rather than reifying or attempting to recover academic labour, I attempt to situate the academic labour process, academic knowledge production, the academic self and academic communities against Marx’s conception of alienation, in order to look towards its abolition. This is influenced by Moishe Postone’s work on capital as a totality that is constituted as the automatic subject through social labour, and in particular the duality of abstract and concrete labour. This refuses the fetishised notion that labour is capital’s opposite and nemesis.

Alienated academic labour and the law of value

I am not using academic labour to critique the crisis of higher education (as a strand of the secular crisis of capital). Rather academic labour is the object of this critique, in order to work towards its abolition. Central to this is an understanding of academic labour in its relation to the structuring reality of the law of value. Understanding how value mediates social reproduction is crucial in understanding whether an alternative form of self-mediation beyond value, rooted in humane values, is possible. Here the work of István Mészáros, Peter Hudis and Simon Clarke are important in enabling me to understand the relationship between alienated labour and second-order mediations that appear to structure the world. This enables us to take a negative dialectical approach, in order to strip back the manifestations of our alienation in anxiety, ill-being, overwork and so on, and to work through their relationship to money and the market, and beyond that to the production of surplus-value, surplus populations and surplus labour, rooted in the division of labour, commodity-exchange and private property, which themselves emerge from alienated labour.

Indignation and dignity

However, in the book I am increasingly drawn towards the relationship between indignation and dignity as a response. Here, the work of John Holloway is important to me as is work around the Zapatista movement. This enables us to connect academic practice to societal, intellectual practice, including that fought for by academic and student activists in occupations and social movements. This is a key connection, and stitches my thinking into intersectional struggles for dignity. As a result, I have been trying to challenge my white, male privilege throughout the book, by connecting to a range of activists fighting for justice. These include: Sarah Amsler; Joyce Canaan; Melonie Fullick; Karen Gregory; Liz Morrish; Sara Motta; Kehinde Andrews; Sara Ahmed; Gurminder Bhambra; Kalwant Bhopal; George Ciccariello-Maher; Nathanial Tobias Coleman; Ana Dinerstein; Emma Dowling; Akwugo Emejulu; Silvia Federici; Priyamvada Gopal; bell hooks; Tressie McMillan Cottom; and Heidi Mirza.

I constantly question whether my thinking, writing and practice has done these inspirational people justice. This also forces me to question constantly my own naïveté in understanding by the positions. Attempting to connect in this way is not a moment of co-option, rather a moment of solidarity. It is an attempt to stitch my own practice into a wider tapestry of refusal, or of the indignation that emerges from capital’s subsumption of our lives and its denial of our dignity. Developing a front of understanding, rooted in a richer understanding of the differential experience of exploitation and domination, is crucial in developing empathy and solidarity, as a movement towards autonomy.

Beyond recent work on the crisis of higher education

This is important because recent work which offers a perspective on the crisis of higher education has tended to focus on the mechanics and ideological underpinnings of marketisation and financialisation, which are often in defence of the ‘public university’ or attempts to discuss public funding, regulation and governance. In general, these focus upon the education sector of the economy, the HE sector as a whole, or make the University the unit of analysis, and several focus on the mechanics or roll-out of neoliberalism. However, there are few books that focus on the academic and her labour as the unit of analysis, and none that do so in the context of the critical terrain of alienation.

Thus, I use a critical social theory of alienation (which has a rich analytical tradition that serves as a heuristic for critiquing academic identity and academic labour). This is a way into a discussion of the abolition of academic labour and the role of public intellectuals in the generation of mass intellectuality, and is framed by the work of Mark Cowling, John Holloway, Peter Hudis, Marcello Musto, Sean Sayers, and Amy Wendling, among others.

The structure of the book

The argument is broken down into three sections and nine chapters. These are as follows (with chapter abstracts).

Chapter 1: Awakenings (structure here)

Abstract

This chapter scopes and situates academic work against the key themes that underpin that work as alienating practice. It begins by addressing how the idea of academic labour as privilege blinds its practitioners to their estrangement from the products and process of work, alongside the relationships that emerge there, both in terms of the self and with peers. The chapter argues that academic being and becoming is stunted through the divorce of the academic from her labour, which is then overlain by a series of fetishes, including the student experience and ideas of educational value-for-money. This emerges from alienated labour, which is itself hidden by second-order mediations like private property, commodity exchange and the division of labour. This catalyses processes of proletarianisation through commodification, which are addressed in relation to the extant literature on the crisis of academic work.

Section 1: the terrain of academic labour

Chapter 2: Crisis (structure here)

Abstract

This chapter details the mechanisms through which the secular crisis of capitalism is restructuring academic labour. This is in terms of policy that shapes a competitive environment, the financialisation of academic work through student debt, bond markets and so on, and through the commodification and marketisation of the outputs of academic work. Here, I describe how the incorporation of academic labour into the self-valorisation process of capital through research and pedagogic innovation enables a critique of the proletarianisation of the University.

Chapter 3: Alienation (structure here)

Abstract

This chapter situates Marx’s analysis of estrangement, alienation, fetishisation and reification against academic labour. It does this through a focus on the activity of production, in its relationship to material and philosophical conceptualisations. As a result, a dialectical understanding of the layers of objectification, separation, mediation and identity-development emerges. This categorical analysis enables an unfolding of capitalism’s mode of social metabolic control, and its relationship to individual essence, human capital theory, and the reality of being othered or negated inside the system. This develops an analysis of the expanding circuit of alienation (A-A’), and the potential for its overcoming through a focus on the richness of human experience.

Section 2: the terrain of academic alienation

Chapter 4: Knowledge (structure here)

Abstract

This chapter analyses the alienation of the products of the academic’s labour, as teaching or research, which are commodified and marketised for their exchange-value rather than their social utility. This is related to the competitive restructuring processes of research and teaching impact measures. Critical here is a connection to the internalisation by the academic of the disciplinary force of performance management, in the production, ownership and distribution of the products of academic labour. Marx’s conception of the general intellect as a form of alien knowledge and property, and its relationship to the separation of subject curricula and research, is important in describing capitalism as a naturalised system. Here the relationship between subjectivity and objectification, use and exchange, and the potential for new forms of humanism related to the functions of academic knowledge are developed.

Chapter 5: Profession (structure here)

Abstract

This chapter frames a discussion of whether it is possible for academics to move beyond fetishing their own labour-power as privileged. I ask whether it is possible to reflect at a social-level on the alienation of academic labour-power in terms of the alienation of labour-power in general? The chapter focuses upon the mediated conditions of work, in order to unpick the proletarianisation of academic labour-power. As a result, it becomes possible to describe the autonomy of capital as opposed to labour, and to uncover its ideological basis.

Chapter 6: Weltschmerz (structure here)

Abstract

This chapter develops the alienation of the academic from herself, as she is increasingly made and re-made as an academic entrepreneur whose labour only has worth where it is value. As a result, the internalisation of specific behaviours that are disciplinary becomes a key outcome for the system of production, with concomitant manifestations of physical and psychological distress. Here ideas of anti-humanism and dehumanism, linked to melancholy, anxiety and ill-being are analysed in relation to the proletarianisation of the University as an anxiety machine. The chapter addresses how formal and real subsumption, in terms of the re-engineering of the governance of higher education and the reproduction of academic labour in the name of value, feed off and into alienation.

Chapter 7: Identity (structure here)

Abstract

This chapter address the alienation of the academic from her species through the iron law of competition, reinforced through global academic labour arbitrage, research and teaching metrics, and performance management. The argument connects academic labour to the hierarchical, globalised forces of production that shape capitalist social relations, in order to discuss the form and the organising principles under which academic labour is subsumed for value. The chapter argues that academics have a tendency to reify their own labour such that it becomes something that they struggle for, rather than against. However, repeatedly adopting this approach can only lead to a sense of helplessness and alienation from other forms of globalised labour. By refocusing on the form of labour in general, rather than the specific content of academic labour, it becomes possible to move beyond reification towards struggle.

Section 3: the terrain for overcoming alienation

Chapter 8: Indignation (structure here)

Abstract

This chapter focuses upon the role of intellectual labour in a range of transnational struggles for an alternative form of social metabolic control. Pivoting around counter-hegemony and anti-power, the focus is upon the movement of dignity in the development of revolutionary subjectivity. This chapter discusses the possibilities for autonomous action by academics, which in-turn demonstrates solidarity or association with a range of struggles against labour.

Chapter 9: Autonomy (structure here)

Abstract

In this chapter, autonomy is critiqued in light of the duality that: first, capital is the automatic subject searching to secure permanent self-valorisation; and second, that our search for autonomy-beyond-labour is the crisis of capital. This struggle pivots around emancipation from labour, and for self-mediation as the key organising principle for life. The chapter focuses on the role of academic work and intellectual labour in developing the realm of autonomy/freedom and reducing the realm of heteronomy/necessity. Here there is a focus upon the richness of human life and the development of alternative forms of social metabolic control. The argument regards alienation and its revelation as a necessity in the transformation to life under communism. Thus, the chapter discusses the potential for the social, collectivised use of academic labour, through the liberation of socialised skills, practices and knowledge from inside the University.

The process of writing as a movement of becoming

The process of writing the book demonstrated to me how far I have come from my PhD, undertaken back when Methuselah was a boy. A year of reading about: academic labour; the labour theory of value; alienation in Marx and Hegel; academic knowledge production and the academic labour process; academic identity and academic being/becoming; and intersectional analyses of labour and the academic experience. This year of reading was distilled down into 300 pages of notes, on top of my already existing, published work on alienation and mass intellectuality. One crucial angle to this was to reflect on my reading through a series of conversations with academics about injustices rooted in (dis)ability, gender, race and sexuality.

This was then distilled down into the nine chapters. I was originally going to have eight, with the last two stitched together. However, I wanted to push myself beyond my usual focus upon explaining (and obsessing about) the crisis through negative critique, and instead to focus upon the possibilities for an alternative mode of becoming rooted in a movement of dignity pointing towards autonomy.

Structuring and restructuring the chapters took a month and underpinned a writing process that mirrored my PhD process – effectively hoover up as much research and reading as possible, structure the notes very closely into a potential argument that speaks to my soul, and then write obsessively. This meant that each chapter was written in around a week, beginning at the start of January. Since then I have written 70,000 words, with two re-drafts/re-readings. In part, using Dragon Naturally Speaking to write/speak/dictate the book has altered the process.

In this moment, I have had to think long and hard about self-care, in the balance between writing and life, and between work and life. Walking and music have been crucial to me.

The scariest moment has been in asking people I trust, including a couple of people I have not met but whose expertise and way of being in the world is an inspiration, to read and provide feedback. This is a moment of high anxiety, to the extent that I tweeted:

You know that moment when you decide to send something to someone who you really admire to read/comment on, when you feel you aren’t fit to lace their boots (professionally)? And that gut-wrenching anxiety? Well that.

This is a moment of baring my soul, of extreme vulnerability, of hope and the fear of despair. As much as I try to sublimate the fear of despair, it often ruptures my being. However, it is important to note that whilst researching and writing I have come off anti-depressants and begun the process of leaving therapy. This is a moment of taking ownership of my life – a movement for autonomy.

It is also important to note that this has happened whilst holding down my role at work, and also attempting to support those leading the Leicester Vaughan College project. This has meant having to work weekends and evenings – there is a conversation here about whether this says something about my estrangement from my wider life. It clearly says something about the integration of my work with my life; the integration of my thinking about my life beyond my labour.

In many respects this has also been a very difficult time for me, and my thinking around alienation has been reflected in my everyday life. A friend asked me what I would do once the book was submitted, given that it has taken up so much of my existence and helped me to redefine myself. She acknowledged that it had helped me to work through and beyond some difficulties, and that it had also served as a distraction. She is right that there is a moment of grief in its submission, and one that mirrors the loss involved in leaving therapy. A loss of the self and my relationship to a fetishised or reified other, to which I have projected bits of myself. However, through this mirroring, there is also a moment of reclamation – of reclaiming my life, potentially with a renewed way of examining it, and the ability to move beyond those things that we fetishise in the world.

A moment of pointing towards values rather than value. This is the real movement.

Music

In the process of writing the book, I have obsessively listened to the following whilst writing and walking and thinking. Maybe they tell us something about the contours of the book.

  1. Mogwai: Every Country’s Sun.
  2. Mogwai: Quay Sessions.
  3. Everything Everything: Night of the Long Knives.
  4. King Creosote: Astroman Meets Appleman.
  5. King Creosote: Diamond Mine.
  6. Jen Cloher: Jen Cloher.
  7. Sharon Van Etten: Glastonbury 2015.
  8. Wild Beasts: Smother.
  9. Wild Beasts: Two Dancers.
  10. Joe Goddard: Electric Lines.
  11. Public Service Broadcasting: Every Valley.
  12. Phoenix: lollapalooza 2013.
  13. This Is The Kit: Moonshine Freeze.
  14. This Is The Kit: Where It Lives.
  15. Sampha: Process.
  16. Shostakovich: symphonies number five, seven and nine.
  17. Sufjan Stevens: Carrie and Lowell live.
  18. Bon Iver: live on NPR.
  19. Hot Chip: live at Pitchfork, Paris.

 


Authoritarian neoliberalism, the alienation of academic labour and Walsall FC


Posted by hallymk1

Over at the architectural education podcast (Arch Ed Podcast) there is a conversation between me and James Benedict Brown about the state of higher education, with a little bit of jibber-jabber about Walsall FC.

In a connected development, I will be developing some of my thinking about HE in a forthcoming British Educational Research Association symposium, Debating theories of neoliberalism: New perspectives and framings in education research. The flyer can be downloaded here. My abstract is appended below.

Authoritarian neoliberalism and the alienation of academic labour

As one response to the secular crisis of capitalism, higher education is being proletarianised. Its academics and students, increasingly encumbered by precarious employment, debt, and new levels of performance management, are shorn of autonomy beyond the sale of their labour-power. This talk takes a Marxist political economic analysis of the implications of this lack of autonomy, in terms of the conception of subsumption (Hall and Bowles 2016; Marx 1867/2004). Movement towards real subsumption, revealed in financialisation and marketization, enables us to reconsider the utility of neoliberalism as a theoretical framework for analysing the re-engineering of the governance of higher education and the re-production of academic labour in the name of value (Clarke 2005; Davies 2014). In particular, this reflects upon ideas of authoritarian neoliberalism in the coercive orchestration of social relations in the name of markets (Bruff 2014). This reflection discusses the imposition of architectures of subsumption through which academic labour becomes a source of both overwork and anxiety. In analysing these connections it is possible to situate abstract, alienated academic labour alongside its psychological impacts, including anxiety and feelings of hopelessness (Hall 2018). The talk closes by examining whether narratives of solidarity, in particular from marginalised voices, might help academics and students to analyse and then move beyond their alienated labour (Johnson 2017). This frames such solidarity in terms of mass intellectuality, or socially-useful knowledge work, as a potential moment for overcoming alienation (Dinerstein 2015).

References

Bruff, I. (2014). The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism. Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 26(1), 113-29. Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2013.843250

Clarke, S. (2005). The Neoliberal Theory of Society. In Saad-Filho, A., and Johnston, D. (eds), Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. London: Pluto Press, pp. 50-59.

Davies, W. (2014). The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition. London: SAGE.

Dinerstein, A. (2015). The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hall, R. (2018). On the alienation of academic labour and the possibilities for mass intellectuality. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 16(1), 97-113. Available: http://bit.ly/2EisheS

Hall, R. and Bowles, K. (2016). Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 28, 30-47. Available: http://bit.ly/2dQMx8X

Johnson, P. (2018). Feminism as Critique in a Neoliberal Age: Debating Nancy Fraser. Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 19(1), 1-17. Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2017.1376937

Marx, K. (1867/2004). Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin.

 


slides: partnership, co-operation and dismantling the curriculum in HE


Posted by hallymk1

I’m keynoting the Newcastle College HE staff CPD event today. My slides are appended below.

I have amended my keynote at Radical Pedagogies for this talk. However, the notes from that talk are still relevant.

Participants at the talk collated six questions. My responses are posted herewith.

ONE. How do we balance the fact that students spend significant amounts of money on their studies, but at the same time we want them to work for and with us in developing a curriculum and being active participants in the design and implementation of HE?

Money tends to mediate our relationships for us, so our work with our students risks forcing us to view them in terms of value-for-money. Where we exist inside institutions that have to maximise their income from fees, our classroom choices get squeezed because being taught or teaching intensity are perceived as enabling us to manage the risks around student progression. In part, this is defined through policies that situate students and their families as purchasers or consumers, and in part through fear or anxiety-based institutional cultures that situate views of students-as-partners, in terms of their access to curriculum content or specific services. One problem is where this becomes mutually reinforcing to the point where academics and teachers feel that they cannot innovate.

Having worked in several institutions, I have never seen a quality assurance department (or any department responsible for course/programme validation or periodic review) that has stymied curriculum innovation. However, trying to do this in isolation is problematic. Where you are the only teacher or teaching team that is focusing upon student-as-producer, or on co-creation, this can be isolating and high-risk. In part, this is because in that moment, co-creation appears abnormal. That said, I think we are all trying to get our students to co-create or to produce with us and for themselves, through project work, personalised assessments and so on, even where there are regulatory bodies involved.

So, I guess I would see the balance emerging from faith in your own practice, and your ability, in your teams, to discuss the value of student-as-producer or co-creation with the students. This means an open discussion with those students about: first, the explicit value that will be generated for them, in terms of employability and their ability to pay down their debts (NB there is another question here about whether you believe that is possible) – whether the focus is upon community work, employability, whatever; second, the importance of being able to self-manage rather than having to rely explicitly on others (such as a teacher) as a fundamental step towards self-actualisation; third, what this means for staff-student relations and what it means for students to teach themselves rather than being taught – where the role of the teacher changes but remains active; and fourth, the values that underpin this, in terms of mutuality (and mutual support), co-operation, authenticity and so on. There is something important here about the classroom experience moving towards independent learning (there can still be some teacher-focused/teacher-led work), including access to engagements with other communities (of students, in libraries and so on).

TWO. How can the ‘whiteness’ of curriculums be addressed given the lack of diversity in many HEIs?

This is really difficult. It is an ingrained cultural problem, which operates structurally and also subconsciously. As an entitled white, male professor my focus is on constantly questioning my privilege, and determining to enable a plurality of voices across the contexts in which I work. This is intensely problematic because individuals are coming from different spaces and places, with different preconceptions and amounts of intellectual/social capital. The spaces in which I work are also filled with power.

One of the problems of a lack of diversity in many institutions is that those individuals classed as representatives of minoritised groups can end-up picking up more emotional labour, in-part because BAME students see themselves reflected more appropriately in those members of staff and gravitate towards them. Also, those staff may be seen as exceptional cases, or they may have to develop a double or false consciousness, in order to survive and pass through the walls that Ahmed describes. The diversity agenda can also be a threat to some white staff and white students, who need to check their own privilege both inside and outside the institution.

There are a range of innovation projects, such as those on the attainment gap, which are attempting to address the curricula impacts of this, some with a focus on critical race theory. In other spaces there are direct challenges to dominant curriculum narratives, such as in the Black Studies undergraduate degree at Birmingham City University. There is also radical, student-led work, such as Rhodes Must Fall and the Why Is My Curriculum White? Collective. One key issue at the level of the sector is how to develop these initiatives into a movement that questions hierarchy and power.

At the level of the curriculum, I think this works through questions about the way in which the established curriculum and its content, delivery methods, voices and assessments, enable us to meet crises and to support the creation of another world. This means opening up with students about those voices inside the curriculum that are currently heard/silenced and what might be done differently – it is part of a democratic engagement with students about the of governance, structure, content and assessment of the curriculum. What narratives can we engage with in our teaching and how can we critique those in terms of perspectives?

If decolonising the curriculum is important to us then it is important to listen to activists like Angela Davies, Sara Ahmed, Lola Olufemi. The latter’s open letter to the Cambridge English department is particularly useful in decoding the curriculum from a perspective that has been marginalised. She talks about curriculum content, but also operational stuff like the location of books in Library stacks and whether the voices of the colonised are easy to locate. She also talks about who has a voice or is silenced in conversations, and who feels able to have a voice given the attitudes of some staff. She talks about everyday micro-aggressions in conversations, emails, feedback and so on. This connects to Ahmed’s work on working with students to question norms of conduct, and working with them to ask ethical questions about living better in an unequal world as a precursor to creating more equal relationships. This is why she is focused upon being courageous in supporting those who are made marginal or whose engagement with the institution is difficult because of specific barriers.

THREE. What examples are there of a curriculum being successfully ‘reimagined’ for a different or specific social purpose?

See the curriculum work of:

The Social Science Centre

Black Studies at BCU

Work by the Cambridge English Department on decolonisation

Student-as-producer case studies at Lincoln

Papers by: Goodson and Deakin Crick; Phillips et al.

It would also be worthwhile searching for “critical pedagogy in the classroom”.

See also the resources from the recent radical pedagogies symposium at Kent.

On research-engaged teaching, as a precursor to reimagining the curriculum:

Burgum, S., and Stoakes, G. (2016). What does research informed teaching look like? The Higher Education Academy/University alliance. Available at: http://bit.ly/2h2JLke

Healey, M., Flint, A., and Harrington, K. (2014). Engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. The Higher Education Academy. Available at: http://bit.ly/2s5UYbF

Healey, M., Jordan, F., Pell, B. and Short, C. (2010) The research-teaching nexus: A case study of students’ awareness, experiences and perceptions of research. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 47 (2). pp. 235-246. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14703291003718968

McLinden, M. et al. (2015). Strengthening the Links Between Research and Teaching. Education in Practice, 2(1), pp. 24-29.

Neary, M., & Winn, J. (2009). The student as producer: Reinventing the student experience in higher education. In L. Bell, H. Stevenson & M. Neary (Eds.), The future of higher education: Policy, pedagogy and the student experience. London: Continuum.

Lincoln University (2013). Student as Producer. Available at: http://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk/

Neary, M. (2010). Student as producer: a pedagogy for the avant-garde? Learning Exchange, 1 (1), p. 2.

Neary, M. (2016). Student as Producer: The Struggle for the Idea of the University. Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives, 5 (1), p. 90.

FOUR. How can the challenges of the ‘traditional classroom’ be overcome when students have such traditional and conservative perspectives of what education is and how it should be delivered?

I understand concerns around students being conservative and potentially wishing only to consume the curriculum for their learning/employability/positional gain, and that this emerges from a highly-assessed and relatively rigid school-based curriculum. However, preparing students for uncertainty requires an ongoing conversation with them about the value of the co-creation or co-production of the world. It would be awful if we used perceptions of students being conservative as a reason for doing nothing. Moreover, sometimes I think we reinforce that perception as a reality because we make assumptions about students not wishing to be more engaged and so we create our classroom environments in that image.

I think we just have to keep on attempting to question preconceptions (and we all have preconceptions that feel safe or enable us to feel safe in the world), and this needs to be done on a departmental or institutional scale. So the bottom line for me is that we need to be courageous in the conversations that we have and to base those on mutuality and solidarity. This is about attempting to enable students to own their own lives and we need to be clear with them about that from our opening conversations with them, before they arrive on campus.

FIVE. In what ways can student input inform and influence the construction of a curriculum?

SIX. Who is qualified to determine what social agenda should be at the heart of a curriculum? Should this be student-led, teacher-led, administrator-led?

We lead it as a community. It is part of an ongoing negotiation. However, the minute it is imposed it loses its veracity. The idea of co-creation or student-as-producer can be situated at the level of the organisation, but what happens inside the classroom has to be negotiated inside that classroom and be based upon agreed, humane values. It may be that the teacher takes more of a role in facilitating that conversation because she is more qualified to facilitate. I wonder whether anyone is qualified to determine specific social agendas at the heart of the curriculum, and therefore my focus would always be upon democratic co-creation, as much as that is possible. I recognise that there are problems with this, in terms of power, student voice, cultures, student experience/expertise, and staff ability to facilitate the curriculum in this way. I think we define our qualification to do this collectively.

So, student input can inform and influence the construction of a curriculum however you and they want it to, from the definition of activities, to the production of content, from peer-review and collaborative project work, to peer-assessment. Ideally this work emerges at the level of individual and social transformation, because we wish to reproduce a less-alienating world. To do so we need to out privilege and power. Here the practices of critical pedagogy offer hope. This may look different for different cohorts, or for students at different levels of study, but the starting point is in negotiation with them about the value of what it is you are trying to do, and what this entails for both your and their responsibilities in the curriculum. Clearly, this may be different for different students and that then becomes a problem, but focus upon a more authentic experience starts from the students.


dismantling the curriculum in higher education


Posted by hallymk1

On Wednesday I’m speaking at the University of Greenwich Open Lectures in Teaching and Learning.

The lecture will be broadcasted live via this link:  https://tinyurl.com/critical-pedagogy-2

The slides are appended below the abstract, which is based on this OLH article.

Abstract

The higher education curriculum in the global North is increasingly co-opted for the production of measurable outcomes, framed by determinist narratives of employability and enterprise. Such co-option is immanent to processes of financialisation and marketisation, which encourage the production of quantifiable curriculum activities and tradable academic services. Yet the university is also affected by global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which can be expressed as a function of a broader crisis of social reproduction or sociability. As the labour of academics and students is increasingly driven by a commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of performance, the ability for academics and students to respond to crises from inside the university is constrained by the market.

This discussion argues that in understanding the relationship between the university and society, and in responding to a crisis of sociability, revealing the commodification of the curriculum is central. This enables us to discuss the possibility that an open curriculum rooted in ideas of mass intellectuality might enable new forms of social wealth to emerge in opposition to a curriculum for private/positional gain. One possible way to reframe the curriculum is by re-imagining the university through the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Masters House community and the Social Science Centre. Such an exploration, rooted in the organising principles of the curriculum, asks educators to consider how their curriculum reproduces forms of colonisation. It is argued that such work enables a re-imagination of higher education that is rooted in an engaged and co-operative curriculum, with a focus on praxis.


slides and notes on academic alienation and mass intellectuality


Posted by hallymk1

I presented at the DMU Institute for Education Futures seminar yesterday. My paper is based on a forthcoming article in a special issue of TripleC on academic labour, and underpins work that I am doing towards a monograph on the alienated academic, for Palgrave Macmillan.

The slides are appended below.

There are a fuller set of notes here.


Closing the Attainment Gap Evaluation Role


Posted by hallymk1

At DMU, we are advertising a full-time, temporary (fixed Term until 28 February 2019) evaluation post (yes, I know it says project manager but it has an evaluation focus), focused upon Closing the (BAME) Attainment Gap.

Please note that I intend to convene an evaluation stakeholder group, to inform the generation of the research scope, questions, paradigm, methods, ethics and so on. This will include conversations around the connection of this work to developments in critical race theory and education, dismantling the master’s house and black studies, intersectional analyses, and so on.

Project Manager, Closing the Attainment Gap (the job details are here).

The project aims to extend the Value Added (VA) metric and Inclusive Curriculum Framework (ICF) currently used to address the black and minority ethnic (BAME) attainment gap at Kingston University, and share good practice amongst partner institutions. The ICF is the institutional approach to building inclusivity from ”concept to review”. The Framework applies a set of principles to the dimensions of learning and teaching to ensure success for all students through a curriculum that is accessible, reflects students” background and prepares them to positively contribute to a global and diverse workplace. The VA metric highlights differences in attainment which cannot be explained by student entry qualifications or subject of study. This moves discussions beyond the student deficit model leading to effective action and cultural change.

This role is designed to manage and embed project evaluation across De Montfort University. Working closely with the project team and staff working on our institutional Closing the Attainment Gap Project, your role is to maximise the validity and reliability of the project’s outcomes at DMU, through the appropriate implementation of evaluation methods. A secondary role is to assess the interconnections between the VA and ICF, and DMU”s approach to Universal Design for Learning.

You should have previous experience in leading project evaluation, and have an understanding of current pedagogic issues in Higher Education, including inclusive curriculum design and the experience of BAME and disabled students.

You should also have previous experience of report writing and presenting evaluation outcomes and results.

Role details and further information/enquiries are available here.


Dismantling the curriculum in higher education


Posted by hallymk1

On 22 November I’ll be speaking at the University of Greenwich Open Lecture Series, on the issue of dismantling the curriculum in higher education. I will build on my work on academic alienation, mass intellectuality and decolonising the curriculum. The abstract is appended herewith.

The higher education curriculum in the global North is increasingly co-opted for the production of measurable outcomes, framed by determinist narratives of employability and enterprise. Such co-option is immanent to processes of financialisation and marketisation, which encourage the production of quantifiable curriculum activities and tradable academic services. Yet the university is also affected by global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which can be expressed as a function of a broader crisis of social reproduction or sociability. As the labour of academics and students is increasingly driven by a commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of performance, the ability for academics and students to respond to crises from inside the university is constrained by the market.

This discussion argues that in understanding the relationship between the university and society, and in responding to a crisis of sociability, revealing the commodification of the curriculum is central. This enables us to discuss the possibility that an open curriculum rooted in ideas of mass intellectuality might enable new forms of social wealth to emerge in opposition to a curriculum for private/positional gain. One possible way to reframe the curriculum is by re-imagining the university through the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Masters House community and the Social Science Centre. Such an exploration, rooted in the organising principles of the curriculum, asks educators to consider how their curriculum reproduces forms of colonisation. It is argued that such work enables a re-imagination of higher education that is rooted in an engaged and co-operative curriculum, with a focus on praxis.


Against boundaries: Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

On Thursday I’m speaking at the University of Worcester Teaching and Learning and Student Experience Conference . The title of my talk is Against boundaries: Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education, and will be based on this Open Library of the Humanities paper. The abstract is appended below, and the slides are posted below that.

The higher education curriculum in the global North is increasingly co-opted for the production of measurable outcomes, framed by determinist narratives of employability and enterprise. Such co-option is immanent to processes of financialisation and marketisation, which encourage the production of quantifiable curriculum activities and tradable academic services. Yet the university is also affected by global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which can be expressed as a function of a broader crisis of social reproduction or sociability. As the labour of academics and students is increasingly driven by a commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of performance, the ability for academics and students to respond to crises from inside the university is constrained by the market. This keynote argues that in understanding the relationship between the university and society, and in responding to a crisis of sociability, revealing the bounded nature of the curriculum is central. One possible way to address this crisis is by re-imagining the university through the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Masters House community and the Social Science Centre. Such an exploration, rooted in the organising principles of the curriculum, asks educators to consider how their curriculum reproduces forms of colonisation. It is argued that such work enables a re-imagination of higher education that is rooted in an engaged and co-operative curriculum, with a focus on praxis.


BLTC17, The really open university: working together as open academic commons


Posted by hallymk1

On Wednesday I’m speaking at the Brookes Learning Teaching Conference 2017. I love this kind of invite, which enables a testing of ideas and a lot of listening to the practices, activities and hopes of others. My abstract is detailed below, with the slides posted after that. The talk enables me to return to that practical work I was engaged with in 2010-12, around the idea of/re-imagining the university. It also enables me to reflect on my recent work inside the University, on commons and co-operative practices.

This talk questions the role of pedagogic scholarship and innovation in addressing global crises of social reproduction. It argues that working together has both possibilities and impossibilities, which need a richer discussion inside the University.

In the past decade, fall-out from the Browne Review has given birth to a number of alternative education projects. These alternatives focused on creating spaces and curricula that prefigure more democratic ways of doing higher education, in which the boundaries between student and teacher are dissolved and where co-operation and peer-projects between scholars become fundamental. Examples include the Social Science Centre in Lincoln and the Really Open University in Leeds. These projects developed grounded, co-participatory scholarly communities, which acted as incubators for pedagogies like Student-as-Producer (Neary and Winn 2011; Pusey 2016).

However, they also share characteristics with transnational platforms like #RhodesMustFall and#Whyismycurriculumwhite, in attempting to push back against the structuring logics represented by the curriculum (Hall and Smyth 2016). These platforms also connect to co-operative forms of higher education like Mondragon University in the Basque country, the Little Schools of the Zapatista Movement, and the education sector of the Brazilian Landless Movement.

Reflecting on these alternative forms is helpful in analysing our responses to the crisis of higher education, in order to locate spaces for truly progressive pedagogies inside the university. If such spaces do exist, on what are they based and what is their relationship to the curriculum? How do they enable academics and students to respond to issues of inclusivity and diversity, collaboration and peer production? Three responses may be considered:

  • open, academic commons supporting a sharing economy inside and across a porous interdisciplinary curriculum;
  • safe, scholarly communities of practice, perhaps forming solidarity economies that refuse enclosure; and
  • positioning the university and curriculum within (and against?) the development of ‘mass intellectuality’, or socially-useful knowledge produced outside the university.

References

Hall, R., & Smyth, K. (2016). Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education. Open Library of Humanities, 2(1), p.e11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.66

Neary, M., & Winn, J. (2011). The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education. In M. Neary & J. Winn (Eds.), The future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience (pp. 192–210). Continuum. Retrieved from http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/1675/

Pusey, A. (2016). Pusey, A. (2016). Strike, occupy, transform! Students, subjectivity and struggle. Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, 26(2), 214-32. Retrieved from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08841241.2016.1240133


notes for ‘alternative education’


Posted by hallymk1

On Wednesday I wrote that a while back I’d been asked to contribute to some work-in-progress on the idea of dangerous words. The three terms I selected were ‘immiseration’, ‘managerialism’, and ‘alternative education’. The work-in-progress hasn’t progressed so I’ve decided to publish what I wrote a year ago, starting with ‘immiseration’ and ‘managerialism’, and finally with ‘alternative education’ today.

The brief given was to:

  • explore the connections between a particular set of selected terms and their role in contemporary social relations, where these words function as one aspect of social relations and not as ‘empty signifiers’;
  • question the increasing use of some words in the public and private domains and to explore the effects of these words and the logic that underpins them, on meaning-making and on creating possibilities for improving life;
  • critique these terms as one aspect of social relations in education;
  • discuss acts of separation that are made possible through simultaneous processes of distinction, differentiation and stratification, whilst bearing the possibility for their representation.

The idea is to uncover tools to refuse the neoliberal/capitalist idea of education as a neutral and technical process, which in-turn imposes its ideology on us. This ideology uses a language that teachers, educators, researchers, students and parents are encouraged to co-opt. Occupying and refusing certain words, and finding alternative ways of doing, making, creating, sharing, pooling, gifting (against producing, services, productivity, entrepreneurialism and so on), are critical moments in resistance and refusal. Ultimately they are critical moments in a process of liberation.

Alternative Education

Alternative education raises questions about whether another world is possible. Alternatives ask educators and students to question the governance, regulation and resourcing of hegemonic, institutionalised forms of education, alongside their curricula, through both negative critique and prefigurative practices. The idea of an alternative questions the legitimacy of formalised spaces, often standing against both their forms and content, and as a result defining an educational undercommons (Harney and Moten 2013). Such an undercommons is a space for solidarity and resistance, from where resources and relations can be drawn. It might exist inside formal education, as a sector of the economy or in its institutional forms. An undercommons forms an underground that enables subversion and new forms of organisation, and which problematises dominant narratives about education (for entrepreneurship, growth, sustainable development and so on).

In this being inside-and-against the school or the university, alternative education takes the perspective of voices that are marginalised because they are racialised, gendered or rendered economically-valueless or indebted, in order to re-imagine and re-produce new forms of educational life or sociability. The idea of an alternative also emerges beyond formalised spaces, in autonomous communities that exist beyond the school or university as it is re-purposed as a factory (Cleaver 2002; The University of Utopia n.d.).

This idea of alternatives being in, against and beyond recognises that hegemonic educational institutions have been subsumed within the circuits of capital. This means that the governance and forms of such institutions, and the work of academics, professional service staff and students, have been re-engineered by capital on a global terrain. Moreover, the labour that takes place inside these institutions is repurposed and re-produced in its relation to money capital, productive capital and commodity capital, in order to generate surplus value, surpluses, profits and so on. The domination of capitalist social relations over academic labour is driven by the abstracted power of money and the generation of surplus value. This opens up the possibility for alternative forms of education, both inside formal spaces and beyond the boundary of the formal, to become new sites of struggle in response to the on-going crisis of sociability. This crisis is signalled by the co-option of socially-useful knowledge, or the general intellect, so that it can be valorised (Hall 2014; Virno 2004). Educational relationships have been productively intensified in order to facilitate the expansion of capital, rather than for the solution of global, socio-economic and socio-environmental crises. Inside the school or the university, educational innovations are fetishised as emancipatory, whereas in working against and beyond these spaces, scholars in alternative educational spaces are working to abolish the relations of production that drive societies to ignore concrete emergencies (Hall and Smyth 2016).

From inside-and-against the hegemonic institution, alternatives articulate the limits of formal education, including its problematic nature as a public or private good (Marginson 2012). Here, the idea of the school or university as a form of enclosure of knowledge and practice is refused through public intellectualism or educational activity that is conducted in public. Such activities widen debates over ideas and fields of study beyond the academy to the public, in that they refuse both the colonisation of disciplinary spaces by academics and the delegitimation of certain voices. This public activity contains the germ of militancy (Neary 2012; Thorburn 2011) because it aims to do and then to be counter-hegemomic. As a form of workers’ enquiry, militancy in research or pedagogic practice points towards projects that produce knowledge useful for activist ends. This may take the form of open education or scholarship that refuses neoliberal recuperation (Eve 2015) for the production of marketised outcomes like performance data, or new spaces for the generation of surpluses or profits. Such refusals question the societal value of business-as-usual models for public, higher education (Open Library of Humanities 2016).

However, experiments that are against hegemonic practices also offer the potential for radical experiment, alongside the re-imagining of education as a distributed, co-operative, democratic activity. Such experiments question education’s relationship to society. Prefigurative responses then emerge in the pedagogic practices of social movements rooted in pedagogy (Caldart and the Movement of Landless Workers 2011), and through forms of resistance inside the university grounded in community and environmental justice (Pearce 2013), resistance to gender-based violence, and trades union educational activity (Scandrett 2014). This work situates the experience of the educator and student against that which emerges from within social movements, in order to address the possibilities for alternative forms of knowing and being. Here traditions of critical pedagogy are central to the ways in which critical knowing and being emerge to challenge the dominant framing of learning, teaching and scholarship as separate from society and everyday life (Amsler 2015; Motta 2016).

Work that emerges beyond formal educational contexts is situated in practical, alternative initiatives that point towards alternative, societal re-imaginings of education. Such re-imaginings are forms of autoethnogaphy, framed by the idea of the student or educator as co-operative activist, and as such operating collectively through organic intellectualism (the Social Science Centre 2016; People’s Political Economy 2013). Such alternatives offer a means of using critical sociology and critical pedagogy to analyse concrete moments of crisis of specific communities, such as the politics of austerity and climate justice (Buxton and Hayes 2015; Lockyer and Veteto 2013).

In particular, these alternatives are infused by comparative analyses with the pedagogic practices of indigenous communities and people of colour (Motta 2016; Zibechi 2012), for whom the crisis of sociability imposed by capitalism is on-going, historical and material. These analyses specifically relate co-operative, inclusive educational practices of creating and legitimising communities, and challenge the on-going colonisation of knowing and being. They offer ways to refuse the dominant power relations of knowledge production inside contemporary capitalism, and instead speak of decolonisation by feminised and racialised subjects on the margins. This enables those projects to establish unique analyses of educational possibility from within new, emancipatory horizons. These analyses recognise the desire for progressive and democratic forms of education: first, in terms of its governance and politics, and the social relations that circulate inside educational spaces; and second, in terms of enacting radical pedagogies grounded in the abolition of power relations in the classroom.

From this complex educational ecosystem, alternatives sit against the neoliberal enclosure of existing structures and forms, like the school and university. They stress: first, democratic activity, based upon a radical politics; second, militant research strategies, which see research as a tool for political action and for widening the field of struggle against the re-production of alienating forms of education; third, the re-definition of scholarship undertaken in public, as a revolutionary activity. In a politics of community engagement and cross-disciplinary activity, and in radical education collectives, these strategies form cycles of struggle that point towards possibilities for: detonating the school or university (Amsler and Neary 2012); using prefigurative pedagogical practices that enable labour to become the crisis of capital, so that it might become for itself rather than being for capitalisation or valorisation (Occupied California 2010; Holloway 2002); and describing what society might become (The School or Designing a Society 2016).

Alternative education is a reminder of how the sociability that was once understood as emerging from the fluidity of the classroom is increasingly lost to educators and students, as value (the determining purpose) now drives sociability. This is the world of financialisation and marketisation, which strip academics, professional services staff and students of their autonomy. Thus, educational lives are restructured as accumulated value, impact, excellence, student satisfaction and employability. It is here that alternative education offers a way of disengaging from these normalised behaviours, in order to re-engage with problems of the global commons. The alternative is a form of collective, educational repair, rather than our response to crisis focusing upon becoming more efficiently unsustainable.

By engaging with marginalised voices inside, against and beyond educational contexts, alternatives attempt to define safe spaces through which the collective work of dismantling can begin. This work of dismantling is rooted in revealing power structures and ways of building the world that are alienating, because they they strip our work, our cultures, our relationships and ourselves from us, in order to valorise them or to silence them. This work of dismantling operates at the level of the institution and the classroom, but it also operates at the level of society (Hall and Smyth 2016; Motta 2016; Rhodes Must Fall 2016). Thus alternative education establishes sociability as the critical, pedagogical project, grounded in actually-existing examples of academics, activists and communities engaging with the work of dismantling our abstract experiences, and addressing their concrete impacts. As a result, it is possible to associate educational repair with wider societal repair, where it is framed by a re-focusing of life upon self-actualisation as dynamic and fluid, and rooted in a different conception of what is to be done (bell hooks 1994).

References

Amsler, S., and Neary, M.. (2012). Occupy: a new pedagogy of space and time? The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 10, no. 2: 106-38.

Buxton, N. and Hayes, B (eds. 2015). The Secure and the Dispossessed. London: Pluto.

Caldart, R.S. and the Movement of Landless Workers (2011). ‘Pedagogy of the landless, Brazil’, in Wrigley, T., Thomson, P., and Lingard, B. (eds), Changing schools: Alternative ways to make a world of difference, pp. 71-84, Routledge: London and New York.

Cleaver, H. (2002). Reading Capital Politically. Edinburgh: AK Press.

Eve, M. 2014. Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/597/638

Hall, R., and Smyth, K. (2016). Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education. Open Library of the Humanities, 2(1), p.e11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.66

Harney, S., and Moten, F. (2011). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions.

Holloway, J. 2002. Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto Press.

hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to Transgress. London: Routledge.

Lockyer, J., and Veteto, J. (eds. 2013). Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Permaculture, Ecovillages and Bioregionalism. Oxford: Berghahn.

Marginson, S. (2012). The Problem of Public Good(s) in Higher Education. 41st Australian Conference of Economists. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/people/marginson_docs/ACE2012_8-12%20July2012.pdf

Motta, S.,and Cole, M. (2016). Constructing 21st Century Socialism in Latin America: the Role of Radical Education. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Neary, M. (2012). Teaching Politically: Policy, Pedagogy and the New European University. The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 10, no. 2: 233-57.

Occupied California (2010). After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://libcom.org/files/afterthefall_communiques.pdf

Open Library of Humanities (2016). Retrieved 5 July 2016 from https://olh.openlibhums.org/

Pearce, J. (2012). Power in Community: A Research and Social Action Scoping Review. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www/ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Pages/Connecte-Communities-Scoping-Studies-and-Research Reviews.aspx

People’s Political Economy (2013). 2013 Inaugural Report: from foundations to future. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from https://agentofhistory.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ppe-report-2013.pdf

Rhodes Must Fall. (2016) Rhodes Must Fall. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://rhodesmustfall.co.za/

Scandrett, E. (2014). Popular Education methodology, activist academics and emergent social movements: Agents for Environmental Justice, Interface: a Journal for and about Social Movements, 6 (1): 327-334.

School or Designing a Society, The (2016). Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www.designingasociety.net/

Social Science Centre, The (2016). Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://socialsciencecentre.org.uk

Thorburn, E. (2012). Actually Existing Autonomy and the Brave New World of Higher Education. Occupied Studies. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://bit.ly/xzcPRO

University of Utopia, The (n.d.). Anti-Curricula: A Course of Action. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from http://www.universityofutopia.org/sharing

Virno, P. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Zibechi, R. (2012). Territories In Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements. Oakland, CA: AK Press.