Burn It Down: The Incommensurability Of The University And Decolonization

As students and a professor in, but not of, an American liberal arts college, we ask whether our current institutions of higher education are compatible with a project of decolonization. Grounded in our own testimonios and drawing on a genealogy of Western knowledge, we argue that U.S. higher education authorizes and perpetrates settler colonial violence. Furthermore, based on our experiences surviving this violence, we conclude that the Universitas adapts to inhibit and neutralize institutional reform that might challenge its coloniality. As such, we find that higher education is not only incompatible, but irredeemably incommensurable with decolonization. In being incommensurable, we ask ourselves whether we should transform higher education or burn it down and start anew? We argue that we do need to burn it down, and we look to how individuals within the institution already work towards the development of a new social structure, one that will outlast and supplant higher education. We identify three constructive and transformative techniques currently used for this purpose: empowerment, survival, and conversion. These techniques are a combination of stances towards, relationships to, and practices within, the institution that build collective futurities no longer dependent upon higher education

A closer look at the X-ray transient XTE J1908+094: identification of two new near-infrared candidate counterparts

We had reported in Chaty, Mignani, Israel (2002) on the near-infrared (NIR) identification of a possible counterpart to the black hole candidate XTE J1908+094 obtained with the ESO/NTT. Here, we present new, follow-up, CFHT adaptive optics observations of the XTE J1908+094 field, which resolved the previously proposed counterpart in two objects separated by about 0.8". Assuming that both objects are potential candidate counterparts, we derive that the binary system is a low-mass system with a companion star which could be either an intermediate/late type (A-K) main sequence star at a distance of 3-10 kpc, or a late-type ($>$K) main sequence star at a distance of 1-3 kpc. However, we show that the brighter of the two objects (J ~ 20.1, H ~ 18.7, K' ~ 17.8) is more likely to be the real counterpart of the X-ray source. Its position is more compatible with our astrometric solution, and colours and magnitudes of the other object are not consistent with the lower limit of 3 kpc derived independently from the peak bolometric flux of XTE J1908+094. Further multi-wavelength observations of both candidate counterparts are crucial in order to solve the pending identification.Comment: accepted for publication in MNRAS, 5 pages, 3 figure