The Obliteration of Truth by Management: Badiou, St. Paul and the Question of Economic Managerialism in Education

This paper considers the questions that Badiou’s theory of the subject poses to cultures of economic managerialism within education. His argument that radical change is possible, for people and the situations they inhabit, provides a stark challenge to the stifling nature of much current educational climate. In 'Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism', Badiou describes the current universalism of capitalism, monetary homogeneity and the rule of the count. Badiou argues that the politics of identity are all too easily subsumed by the prerogatives of the marketplace and unable to present, therefore, a critique of the status quo. These processes are, he argues, without the potential for truth. What are the implications of Badiou’s claim that education is the arranging of ‘the forms of knowledge in such a way that truth may come to pierce a hole in them’ (Badiou, 2005, p. 9)? In this paper, I argue that Badiou’s theory opens up space for a kind of thinking about education that resists its colonisation by cultures of management and marketisation and leads educationalists to consider the emancipatory potential of education in a new light

Growing the Grassroots or Backing Bandits? Dilemmas of Donor Support for Haiti’s (UN)Civil Society

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Concentration or representation : the struggle for popular sovereignty

There is a tension in the notion of popular sovereignty, and the notion of democracy associated with it, that is both older than our terms for these notions themselves and more fundamental than the apparently consensual way we tend to use them today. After a review of the competing conceptions of 'the people' that underlie two very different understandings of democracy, this article will defend what might be called a 'neo-Jacobin' commitment to popular sovereignty, understood as the formulation and imposition of a shared political will. A people's egalitarian capacity to concentrate both its collective intelligence and force, from this perspective, takes priority over concerns about how best to represent the full variety of positions and interests that differentiate and divide a community

The affective atmospheres of surveillance

The spaces that surveillance produces can be thought of as ambiguous, entailing elements that are ethereal yet material, geographical yet trans-geographical. Contemporary surveillance systems form numerous connections that involve multiple times, spaces, and bodies. Owing to their ubiquity, normalization, and yet clandestine characteristics, they seem to produce an almost unnoticed aspect of everyday life. The impacts, then, of contemporary surveillance systems appear to be particularly experienced on the margins of consciousness. Thus we find that an empirical analysis of this realm of experience is possible but requires one to look for such things as disruption, disfluency, and hesitation in the text of speech acts rather than clear representation. Through empirical analysis of narratives concerning everyday experiences of living with contemporary surveillance systems, this paper focuses on their possible affective impacts. In turn, we find it more fitting to think about the so-called “surveillance society” in terms of producing “atmospheres” rather than “cultures or assemblages,” and “affects” rather than “emotions.” © 2013, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved

‘Messy Democracy’: Democratic pedagogy and its discontents

This paper reflects on a recent participatory installation by the artists’ collective @.ac, entitled Messy Democracy, as a case study to raise questions concerning the ‘distribution of the sensible’ within the neoliberal art school. The project set up a quasi-autonomous artists’ space within Hanover Project gallery 9 April–3 May, 2018 at University of Central Lancashire, Preston. This exhibition functioned as a space of collective pedagogy, co-labour and ‘dissensus’ situated in relation to the wider operation of the department of Fine Art. It also sought to operate as a critical alternative to contemporary models of the art school, rooted in notions of usefulness and romantic self-realisation, but re-structured in the service of ‘commodification’ and ‘financialisation’ in wake of the Browne Report (2010). Most importantly, Messy Democracy represented a ‘theatocractic’ ‘undercommons’ for alternate and counter-hegemonic subjectivities to emerge. However, hierarchical logics, resulting from the hegemonic ‘distribution of the sensible’ stubbornly persisted even within this nascent pedagogic democracy

Florida in the Global South: How Eurocentrism obscures global urban challenges—and what we can do about it

According to Richard Florida, the world is in the grip of a ‘New Urban Crisis’. In his most recent book Florida recounts a visit to Medellín that provoked an epiphany in which he realized that the New Urban Crisis is global in scope. Unfortunately, Florida's discovery of the global South is informed by a deeply Eurocentric understanding of urbanization. This leads him to conclude that Southern cities should ‘unleash’ creativity, and he proposes that the United States should develop a global urban policy that would export a version of American urbanism. In this essay we deconstruct Florida's notion of the New Urban Crisis and show that its Eurocentric assumptions obscure the very real environmental, economic and political challenges facing cities in the global South and their residents