In this conversation, feminist studies and black studies scholar Nick Mitchell and Undercommoner Zach Schwartz-Weinstein discuss a range of topics: the politics of criticality; the labor politics of black studies and ethnic studies; the absorptive quality of the university’s administration of difference; the work of fantasy in academic labor; the origins of adjunctification and casualization; Black Lives Matter’s transformation into… Read more →
On June 4, 2015, Undercommoning held its inaugural workshop in Madison, Wisconsin. The closing session was our first Encounter session with M Adams and Karma Chavez, moderated by Thea Sircar. What is the role of university workers in supporting undercommoning and radical resistance occurring in our communities? How can we appropriate the resources of the university to take action beyond… Read more →
Summary: Stevphen speaks on militant research through collaborative, open process publishing, and on negotiating an ambivalent relationship to the university—appropriating resources while refusing to become the administrator of someone else’s precarity. [This is Part 2, continued from Part 1 here.] Read more →
Summary: Stevphen Shukaitis, editor of Minor Compositions, talks about the possibilities for open publishing as an experiment and a provocation. Drawing on his book, Imaginal Machines, he reflects on the challenge of resisting the recuperation of radical energies in work. As a professor in a business school, he shares his approach to radical teaching: using traditional materials for subversive ends. Read more →
Printer and writer, Dan S. Wang, talks about his projects that intersect art, politics, and labor—from teaching and public art with college students to anti-war and anti-prison activism, the Mess Hall, and the Compass Group—as collective experiments against individualizing economies of attention. Read more →
Nick Hengen Fox, a full-time faculty member at a community college, talks about the connections between successful union organizing and the classroom, radical teaching practice, and what “critical university studies” might look like outside of a university. Read more →
Summary: Professor Mike Neary speaks on the origins, purposes, and tensions of The Social Science Centre, Lincoln in the UK, an alternative form of higher education provision run as a formally constituted co-operative. The Social Science Centre sets itself against the usual colonial relations between universities and communities, seeking to occupy and re-invent the ‘idea of the university’ by producing critical,… Read more →
