[ecrea] Exit Strategies | TOPIA: The University to Come | April 20, 2013

Exit Strategies
A Letters & Handshakes event
www.lettersandhandshakes.org

Celebrating the launch of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 
(28) "Out of the Ruins, the University to Come," edited by Bob Hanke and 
Alison Hearn

Irfan Ali (The Academy of the Impossible) | Maria Alejandrina Coates, 
Rodrigo Hernandez-Gomez, and Arlan Londoño (Decolonial Aesthetics from 
the Americas) | Nick Dyer-Witheford (University of Western Ontario) | 
Sandra Jeppesen (Lakehead University) | Justin Langlois (Broken City 
Lab) | Maiko Tanaka (The Grand Domestic Revolution)

Sat. April 20, 2013
3:00-5:00pm
Onsite [at] OCAD U
230 Richmond St. West
Toronto, ON

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/120010221527156/

Accumulation by student debt. Precarization of education workers. 
Dependence on corporate donations. Emphasis on research 
commercialization. Intensification of academic managerialism... 
Neoliberal transformations of the university coincide with growing 
interest in co-research, free schools, and education-oriented art 
practice. Bringing together individuals working within and across 
educational, activist, and artistic fields, Exit Strategies assesses 
some of the fault lines in universities today—but also links that 
conversation to a counter-current of experimentation in research, 
pedagogy, and institution formation occurring at the margins of the 
university system.

As sites of knowledge production become increasingly enclosed, what new 
practices of education are unfolding simultaneously in neighbourhoods, 
in homes, and in classrooms?

How is pedagogical possibility enabled and constrained by the setting in 
which we teach, learn, and research?

Refusing to romanticize a 'lost' university or idealize 'alternative' 
practices, here exit strategies are about evicting neoliberal 
imperatives from educational institutions; affirming commitments to 
radical pedagogy, basic research, and critical inquiry that continue to 
animate the university; constructing autonomous education projects and 
pursuing disruptive pedagogies that strive to forefront non-capitalist 
sociality and anti-oppression; amplifying transversal relays across 
diverse sites for action-oriented research; and sharing insights between 
those voicing a critique of the university from within and those 
inventing new institutions and pedagogies from without.

Speakers

Irfan Ali is a writer, educator, and the operations manager of the 
Academy of the Impossible. The Academy is an open source social 
enterprise in west-end Toronto that opened in December 2011. Ali works 
primarily with Impossible Arts, the organization's arts wing, 
coordinating and leading writing and art programs for Toronto youth and 
adults. In just over one year the Academy has become a hub for 
workshops, events, and groups that focus on innovative educational 
techniques. Impossible Arts runs four main programs: Toronto Street 
Writers (a writing group), Sound Poets' Circle (a hip hop and spoken 
word workshop), Impossible Words (a literary salon), and Fright Film 
Academy (a film workshop). Ali's background is in commerce and education 
and he has previously worked with organizations such as the Children's 
Aid Society of Toronto, Pathways to Education - Regent Park, and the 
Christie-Ossington Neighbourhood Centre.

Maria Alejandrina Coates, Rodrigo Hernandez-Gomez, and Arlan Londoño are 
the organizers of Decolonial Aesthetics from the Americas, a 
multidisciplinary and collaborative symposium for artists and scholars 
of the Americas and the Caribbean, featuring performances, artist 
presentations, workshops, online components, and papers. In 
collaboration with FUSE Magazine, a special issue, to be published in 
September 2013, will serve as a reader for this event.

Nick Dyer-Witheford is Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the 
Faculty of Information and Media Studies at University of Western 
Ontario. He is author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in 
High-Technology Capitalism (University of Illinois, 1999), and 
co-author, with Stephen Kline and Greig de Peuter, of Digital Play: The 
Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (McGill-Queen's, 
2003), and with Greig de Peuter of Games of Empire: Global Capitalism 
and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). He 
is currently working on a manuscript provisionally titled The Global 
Worker and the Digital Front.

Sandra Jeppesen is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies, and the 
creator of the new Media Studies for Social Change program in the 
Interdisciplinary Studies Department at Lakehead University in Orillia. 
With Holly Nazar, she contributed the essay "Beyond Academic Freedom: 
Canadian Neoliberal Universities in the Global Context" to TOPIA (28).

Justin Langlois is the co-founder and research director of Broken City 
Lab, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and 
Social Sciences at the University of Windsor. In the fall, he will join 
the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University of Art and 
Design.

Maiko Tanaka collaborates on curatorial projects at the intersections of 
art, pedagogy, and collective action. Since 2010 she’s been working on 
The Grand Domestic Revolution with Casco (Utrecht) where she co-curated 
projects with ASK!, a collective of art workers in affinity with 
domestic workers, Our Autonomous Life?, a cooperatively produced sitcom 
on the Dutch squatting movement, and Read-in, a nomadic reading group 
that goes door to door searching for hosts for their reading sessions. 
During her residency at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery she organized 
Extra-curricular, an international conference presenting lectures, 
workshops and architectures that mobilize radical pedagogical art 
practices. Currently Maiko writes a column for FUSE on the political 
economies of public programming and serves as a board member of Gendai.

Acknowledgements

Letters & Handshakes gratefully recognizes support from the Cultural 
Studies Program, Wilfrid Laurier University | Onsite [at] OCAD U | 
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies



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