Striving 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

Creative militancy, militant creativity and the new student movement

The practical significance of critical theory, and student action leading to the hope of a new education, and a new politics

Cracking capitalist realism: the new student movement and its post-capitalist politics

There is much talk of =the crisis‘ in higher education, often expressed in fatalistic narratives about the (im)possibility of critical resistance or alternatives to the deepening domination of neoliberal rationality and capitalist power throughout social life. But how precisely are we to make sense of this situation? In what ways is it experienced? And what knowledges and practices may help us to respond? These questions form the basis for a series of explorations of the history and character of this crisis, the particular historical conjuncture that we occupy today, and the different types of theoretical analysis and political response it seems to be engendering. Our talk will explore the tensions between readings of the situation as a paralyzing experience of domination, loss and impossibility, on the one hand, and radical transformation and the opening of future possibilities, on the other. We will finally consider what implications new forms of political theory being created in the new student movements have for reconceptualising praxis in higher education today, and perhaps for a wider imagination of post-capitalist politics

Critical pedagogy/popular education group

Few today doubt that English Higher Education (HE), like the wider world in which it is located, is in crisis. This is, in part, an economic crisis, as the government response to the current recession seems to be that of introducing the kind of neoliberal ‘shock doctrine’ (Klein 2007) or ‘shock therapy’ (Harvey 2005) that previously resulted in swingeing cuts in public services in Southern nations. Our aim in producing this volume is that these contributions help develop a collective response to the seeming limits of these conditions. We view the strength of these contributions in part as providing palpable evidence of how we and our colleagues are acting with critical hope under current conditions so that we might encourage others to work with us to build, together, more progressive formal and informal education systems that address and seek to redress multiple injustices of the world today

The influence of curricula content on sociology students’ transformations: the case of feminist knowledge

Previous research identifies the importance of feminist knowledge for improving gender equity, economic prosperity and social justice for all. However, there are difficulties in embedding feminist knowledge in higher education curricula. Across England, undergraduate sociology is a key site for acquiring feminist knowledge. In a study of four English sociology departments, Basil Bernstein's theoretical concepts and Madeleine Arnot's notion of gender codes frame an analysis indicating that sociology curricula in which feminist knowledge is strongly classified in separate modules is associated with more women being personally transformed. Men's engagement with feminist knowledge is low and it does not become more transformative when knowledge is strongly classified. Curriculum, pedagogy and gender codes are all possible contributors to these different relationships with feminist knowledge across the sample of 98 students

“By ones and twos and tens”: pedagogies of possibility for democratizing higher education

This paper concerns the relationship between teaching and political action both within and outside formal educational institutions. Its setting is the recent period following the 2010 Browne Review on the funding of higher education in England. Rather than speaking directly to debates around scholar-activism, about which much has already been written, I want to stretch the meanings of both teaching and activism to contextualise the contemporary politics of higher learning in relation to diverse histories and geographies of progressive education more generally. Taking this wider view suggests that some of the forms of knowledge which have characterised the university as a progressive institution are presently being produced in more politicised educational environments. Being receptive to these other modes of learning can not only expand scholarly thinking about how to reclaim intellectual life from the economy within universities, but stimulate the kind of imagination that we need for dreaming big about higher education as and for a practice of democratic life

Measurement of the prompt J/psi and psi(2S) polarizations in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

The polarizations of prompt J/psi and psi(2S) mesons are measured in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV, using a dimuon data sample collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.9 inverse femtobarns. The prompt J/psi and psi(2S) polarization parameters lambda[theta], lambda[phi], and lambda[theta, phi], as well as the frame-invariant quantity lambda(tilde), are measured from the dimuon decay angular distributions in three different polarization frames. The J/psi results are obtained in the transverse momentum range 14 < pt < 70 GeV, in the rapidity intervals abs(y) < 0.6 and 0.6 < abs(y) < 1.2. The corresponding psi(2S) results cover 14 < pt < 50 GeV and include a third rapidity bin, 1.2 < abs(y) < 1.5. No evidence of large transverse or longitudinal polarizations is seen in these kinematic regions, which extend much beyond those previously explored