'By ones and twos and tens': pedagogies of possibility for higher education

This paper concerns the relationship between teaching and political action both within and outside of formal educational institutions in the UK. The context of this relationship is the recent period following the Browne Review on the funding of higher education in England (2010). Rather than speaking directly to debates around scholar-activism, about which much has already been written (Autonomous Geographies Collective 2010; Haworth 2012; Thornton and Maiguashca 2006), I want to stretch the meanings of both teaching and activism. The purpose is to contextualise the politics of contemporary higher learning in light of the diverse histories and geographies of critical education more generally, and to think about the relationship between critical knowledge that is produced within and for the university and that which is produced in other spaces, particularly informal educational projects. My primary interest is the sorts of learning that are cultivated in projects working on principles of ‘prefigurative politics’ in the UK and internationally. My argument is that some of the knowledge which is most needed to fight for the university as a progressive social institution is being produced not within the institution’s physical and conceptual walls, but in more informal and politicised spaces of education. Being receptive to these alternative forms not only can expand scholarly thinking about how to reclaim intellectual life from the economy, but can emancipate the imagination which is required for dreaming big about the creation of higher education as and for democratic life

Beyond all reason: spaces of hope in the struggle for England's universities

England’s public university system has been groaning and lurching toward privatization for decades. Until recently, however, it was still possible to argue that “the attempt to close off and render impossible the experience of education as a collaborative pursuit of a public good and to make possible its full commodification has not yet wholly succeeded” here.1 Despite being deeply disillusioned with increasingly neoliberal forms of academic work, many academics have thus also maintained that these could never be totalizing; that their implementation could be mediated through critical professional practice, and that social-democratic justifications for public higher education could prevail even within discourses that had become inhospitable to the very idea of the public itself. [...

The logics of occupation

Outline from a seminar facilitated at Nottingham Critical Pedagogy, Univeristy of Nottingha

Co-operation and education: a review of Tom Woodin's 'Co-operation, learning and co-operation, learning and co-operative values'

Organised co-operation has the power to transform inadequate and oppressive social situations, and to enable collective human flourishing – such is the first impression made by this important collection of essays on co-operation and education. The book offers windows onto the rich diversity of co-operative practices that have historically created, nurtured and defended conditions in which non-capitalist and pro-democratic forms of learning can flourish. [...

Bringing hope to crisis: critical thinking, ethical action and social change

INTRODUCTION This paper departs from this point to consider whether and how crisis thinking contributes to practices of affirmative critique and transformative social action in late-capitalist societies. I argue that different deployments of crisis thinking have different ‘affect-effects’ and consequences for ethical and political practice. Some work to mobilize political action through articulating a politics of fear, assuming that people take most responsibility for the future when they fear the alternatives. Other forms of crisis thinking work to heighten critical awareness by disrupting existential certainty, asserting an ‘ethics of ambiguity’ which assumes that the continuous production of uncertain futures is a fundamental part of the human condition (de Beauvoir, 2000). In this paper, I hope to illustrate that the first deployment of crisis thinking can easily justify the closing down of political debate, discouraging radical experimentation and critique for the sake of resolving problems in a timely and decisive way. The second approach to crisis thinking, on the other hand, has greater potential to enable intellectual and political alterity in everyday life—but one that poses considerable challenges for our understandings of and responses to climate change..

Learning at the edge: troublesome knowledge, public pedagogies and critical research

This is a paper presented to participants of an EdD study school at the Centre for Educational Research and Development, University of Lincoln

Taking great pains: critical theory, affective pedagogies and radical democracy

The consolidation of neoliberal capitalism over the past decade has been intense, as has the articulation of critical and creative responses to it. One of the most remarkable is the turn towards forms of political resistance that seek liberation from the logics of state and capital while – or through – simultaneously creating alternative, radically democratic modes of existence. Many of these draw on anarchistic and autonomist traditions of critical theory which assert the possibility of prefiguring alternative political projects as well as critiquing existing ones, thus appearing to transcend what Herbert Marcuse described as a ‘vicious circle’ of liberation (1964, 1967). We have thus seen a proliferation of work on problems of prefigurative politics, autonomy, co-operation and self-valorisation; significantly, there is renewed attention to pedagogy in critical theory and as a political practice. However, there is still little attention to the affective and social labour that this type of prefigurative theory and practice requires, or to the systemic critique of the conditions of possibility for it to constitute a challenge to neoliberalism. My concern is that these lacunae can lead to misinterpretations of the meaning of radical democracy and of its possibilities and limitations as a challenge to the logics of neoliberal capitalism and other forms of dehumanising power. In this paper, I draw on work with British-based cultural workers who are active in radical-democratic projects to illustrate how bringing practical work into conversation with critical theories of political subjectivity, on the one hand, and theories of affective pedagogy and politics, on the other, can contribute to strengthening both theories and practices of radical democracy

Strengthening the teaching of university social science

A contribution to a roundtable on pedagogy and pedagogic (in)equalit

For feminist consciousness in the academy

I was recently invited to reflect on the conditions of women in British universities with a group of students and colleagues exploring the politics of the corporate academy. INTRODUCTION: Rather than trying to speak in some hackneyed way for ‘women’, I decided to reflect on the anti-feminist nature of the neoliberal rationalities now dictating academic life within universities, and on the subversions of critical feminist ethics, methodologies and pedagogies in higher education today..

Strivings towards a politics of possibility

It stands to reason that critical theorists should be interested in the newest student movements working to challenge the neoliberalisation of higher education. Yet, while these politics are pushing the limits of critical knowledge about the cultivation of new modalities of radical political resistance, their theoretical significance remains marginalised within the academy. While the academic literature is replete with analysis of the long-anticipated ‘crisis of the university’, many professional responses to the most recent privatisation policies have been muted and ambivalent; or, at the very least, hopeful that the trends can be arrested or mitigated by sanctioned operations of professional critique and opposition. In this essay, I suggest that some of the recent work of student activists demonstrates both the contingency of this position and the possibility of cultivating new political subjectivities and critical-experimental modalities of resistance, within and beyond the university