4:00-4:20pm |
Gather Yourself Up
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4:20-4:30pm |
Connect
Zoom room opens so that we can say hello and enter as fully as possible in such a space. |
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TOPIC #1:
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"A Third University is Possible" |
Presentations
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5:25-5:30: Write One Comment in the Chat
What's your lasting impression of A Third University is Possible (the text itself or tonight's discussion)?
What's your lasting impression of A Third University is Possible (the text itself or tonight's discussion)?
BREAK: 5:30-5:45pm
Post-Break
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1. General Announcements & Reminders
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TOPIC #2:
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"On Being Included" |
Presentations
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OPEN DISCUSSION:
How do we connect A Third University is Possible (the text itself or tonight's discussion), Ahmed's critiques of DEI, and last week's focus on abolitionist university studies? Thank you, Cody, for sending us Tamika Carey's new article in Rhetoric Review. Keep Carey's lens of white temporal hegemony in our discussions tonight!
[Yes, Carmen is taking notes for ideas for further discussions next week--- no worries, she is not daydreaming or sleeping or texting her triflin friends since that's only for department meetings!]
How do we connect A Third University is Possible (the text itself or tonight's discussion), Ahmed's critiques of DEI, and last week's focus on abolitionist university studies? Thank you, Cody, for sending us Tamika Carey's new article in Rhetoric Review. Keep Carey's lens of white temporal hegemony in our discussions tonight!
[Yes, Carmen is taking notes for ideas for further discussions next week--- no worries, she is not daydreaming or sleeping or texting her triflin friends since that's only for department meetings!]
Reminder of Our Last Meeting: Abolitionist University Studies
Carmen's Favorite Quotes from
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Look at opening up to 1:34
Start at 2:55 ("non-reformist reform" at 8:00)
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More practically, to think the university through an abolitionist mode entails approaching our study of and relationship to such institutions through a combination of social critique and a willingness to struggle to think and build the impossible. We have chosen this name, a name that positions the university as the object of abolition, in an effort to short-circuit the university’s claims of a priori goodness, as a way of making the university newly available for thinking. (p. 3)
2) The Romantic Un-thinking
[We] steal the sheen from the university’s romanticized history... the dominant popular and scholarly narratives about U.S. universities [that] tend to portray “progress” with linear distinctions between past, present, and future... An abolitionist approach unearths the counter-memories of people who have been buried in the dominant histories, people who have resisted the dominant worldmaking project and created alternatives. (p. 4)
[We] steal the sheen from the university’s romanticized history... the dominant popular and scholarly narratives about U.S. universities [that] tend to portray “progress” with linear distinctions between past, present, and future... An abolitionist approach unearths the counter-memories of people who have been buried in the dominant histories, people who have resisted the dominant worldmaking project and created alternatives. (p. 4)
3) "Post-Slavery University" [post-slavery does NOT mean abolition... it is simply the fact of what we are in]
We argue for the importance of understanding the “post-slavery university.” By centering this new concept, we aim to emphasize the unfinished work of the abolitionist movement by situating US universities after the Civil War as continuous with a broader terrain of struggles pitting what Du Bois called the “counter-revolution” of capital and property against abolitionism and Reconstruction. In other words, with the formal end of slavery, capital aspired to use the post-slavery university for accumulation by other means. Bringing our periodization up to the present, we analyze the university’s dominant modes of accumulation within the broader contemporary accumulation regime: individual accumulation (and individualization itself) through education, institutional accumulation, the circulation of capital, the expropriation of labor, and the non-circulation of wages (i.e., from the perspective of students’ wageless labor). (emphasis , mine) (pp. 4-5)
We argue for the importance of understanding the “post-slavery university.” By centering this new concept, we aim to emphasize the unfinished work of the abolitionist movement by situating US universities after the Civil War as continuous with a broader terrain of struggles pitting what Du Bois called the “counter-revolution” of capital and property against abolitionism and Reconstruction. In other words, with the formal end of slavery, capital aspired to use the post-slavery university for accumulation by other means. Bringing our periodization up to the present, we analyze the university’s dominant modes of accumulation within the broader contemporary accumulation regime: individual accumulation (and individualization itself) through education, institutional accumulation, the circulation of capital, the expropriation of labor, and the non-circulation of wages (i.e., from the perspective of students’ wageless labor). (emphasis , mine) (pp. 4-5)
4) The Chic of Scholarly Critique & Its Service to Capital
Critique is not simply a practice but a mode of institutional reproduction. It allows us to experience ourselves as if we are outside of the institution while remaining firmly ensconced in its liberal narrative of self-valorization. Unconvinced of the university’s beneficence, abolitionist university studies makes visible the university’s practices of self-valorization and seeks to short-circuit them. (p. 5)
Critique is not simply a practice but a mode of institutional reproduction. It allows us to experience ourselves as if we are outside of the institution while remaining firmly ensconced in its liberal narrative of self-valorization. Unconvinced of the university’s beneficence, abolitionist university studies makes visible the university’s practices of self-valorization and seeks to short-circuit them. (p. 5)
It valorizes detachment and dialogue with well-meaning liberals where we prioritize the abolition of the existing order through militant organizing.... Moreover, critique is too easily recuperated into universities’ production of surplus value in the form of prestige, faculty activity reports, grades, and credentialed subjects... Part of the point here is to untether theory, as situated practice, from critique, as the product of commodified intellectual labor, in order to make some space beyond the mode of institutional reproduction that critique entails. (p. 7)
5) Anxious Self-Study of Slavery as New Brand Management
Many recent efforts by a number of well-resourced and elite universities to acknowledge their historical complicities (and in some cases active involvement) in slavery and the slave trade have taken the form of public relations campaigns. Partly because they are able to take for granted the progress narrative put into play by the Golden Era university narrative—in which the university’s social function is taken for granted as ameliorative—these efforts are able to presume a university past that is radically discontinuous with the university present. Through reports, public statements, special task forces on university history, and the renaming of buildings, the knowledge form itself is thus called upon to do the work of redress. Brand management, today’s university officials understand, involves “owning” one’s institutional history. (pp. 8-9)
Many recent efforts by a number of well-resourced and elite universities to acknowledge their historical complicities (and in some cases active involvement) in slavery and the slave trade have taken the form of public relations campaigns. Partly because they are able to take for granted the progress narrative put into play by the Golden Era university narrative—in which the university’s social function is taken for granted as ameliorative—these efforts are able to presume a university past that is radically discontinuous with the university present. Through reports, public statements, special task forces on university history, and the renaming of buildings, the knowledge form itself is thus called upon to do the work of redress. Brand management, today’s university officials understand, involves “owning” one’s institutional history. (pp. 8-9)
[We] refuse the university’s constant and obliviating self-absolution. Toward these ends, we need critique, certainly, but we need also to be unsettled by critique’s privileged place in the institutional epistemology of the university, in which the status it enjoys as a good in itself is enshrined by the same logic deployed by the university’s public relations wing. Public critique and public apology share in common their probative value in demonstrating the university’s commitment to the subject of self-consciousness. (p. 11)
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