"Beneath the University, the Commons"
A conference at the University of Minnesota
April 8-11, 2010
// Antioch 05.08 // Rome 10.08 // Athens 12.08 // New York City 12.08 //
Helsinki 03.09 // Zagreb 05.09 // Heidelberg 06.09 // London 06.09 //Santa
Cruz 09.09//?
Seemingly discrete struggles over the conditions of university life have
erupted around the world within the past year. These struggles share certain
commonalities: outrage over precarious and exploitative conditions, the
occupation of university spaces, and goals of reclaiming education from
state and corporate interests. It is becoming increasingly apparent that
recent struggles over the university are not merely discrete events. They
express a wider collective desire for direct control over the means of
production and forms of life; a desire to create relationships of learning,
collaboration, and innovation beyond the university?s attempts to quantify
and discipline them.
Although the modern university has served the interests of the state and
capital since its inception, the past thirty years have witnessed tightened
ties with corporate, financial, and geopolitical interests. The subsumption
of higher education under capital-driven business models has intensified the
expropriation of the products of cooperative labor. With the proliferation
of student-consumer and scholar-manager subjectivities, we increasingly find
ourselves uncomfortably and often unwittingly occupying the role of active
participants in these trends. As the global struggles over the past year
have illustrated, however,
opposition to these mechanisms of capture is mounting, as are creative
strategies for alternatives and exodus. Struggles against the corporate
university are linking up across borders; the slogan of the International
Student Movement, ?One World One Struggle : Education is Not for Sale,?
and the slogan of the Anomalous Wave, ?We Won?t Pay for Your Crisis,? appear
in actions across Europe, the Americas, and South Asia.
?Beneath the University, the Commons? builds on the work accomplished by
activists, organizers, artists, and academics at the ?Re-thinking? and
?Re-working? the University Conferences of 2008 and 2009 (
www.reworkingtheu.org), while expanding the scope of our discussions and
bringing together more international scholars in order to address an
increasingly volatile global situation. Our goal is to aggregate and
accelerate our knowledge of university conditions and our collective acts of
resistance to them, including alternative forms of engaging with each other
and with the world. To this end, the 2010 conference will draw together a
diverse set of people committed to exploring how we can understand, create,
and experiment with the commons beneath the university. Our questions
include but are not limited to:
//How do we enact and sustain occupations of the university in the
exceptional times and spaces of the everyday?
//How do we generate an international ?undercommons,? maintaining subversive
positions as actors within, rather than of, the spaces of the university?
//How can unionization projects and occupation struggles learn from and
collaborate with one another?
//How do we negotiate the line between stability and revolutionary
effectiveness?
//How do we open up sustainable and livable spaces for radical research,
education, and scholarship without being subsumed by the publish-or-perish
disciplinary apparatus?
//How can we collaboratively map and share research, information, tactics,
and cultures?
//In recognition that our conditions are a part of a larger set of global
occupations and injustices, how do we link with social movements outside of
and across the university?
This four-day event will consist of two days of conference sessions
bracketed by two days of workshops, writing collaborations, skill shares,
and plenty of time for sustained conversations among participants. We are
accepting proposals both for formal papers and for non-conventional forms of
participation.
-- If you would like to present a paper, please submit an abstract and a CV
or brief biographical statement.
-- If you would like to participate in another way (by leading a workshop,
facilitating a roundtable, presenting media, etc), please submit a brief
(1-2 pages) description of the proposed activity and include what kind of
resources we would need to provide, along with a CV or brief biographical
statement.
All proposals should be addressed to (conference /at/ beneaththeu.org), and must be
received by January 1, 2010.
