[ecrea] CFP Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies "Out of the Ruins: The University to Come"

/*TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies*/

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* **CALL FOR PAPERS*

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*Out of the Ruins: The University to Come *

Guest Editors

Bob Hanke (York University) and Alison Hearn (University of Western Ontario)

/TOPIA /27, Fall 2012

This special issue of /TOPIA/ seeks contributions (articles, offerings, 
review essays and book reviews) that reflect on the contemporary 
university and its discontents. Fifteen years after the publication of 
Bill Readings’ seminal book /The University in Ruins/ and in the wake of 
the UK government’s new austerity budget, Nick Couldry and Angela 
McRobbie proclaim the death of the English university. In Italy students 
demonstrating against the Bologna Process protect themselves from police 
with giant books. On the heels of severe budget cuts and increasing 
privatization in the California state system, protesting students occupy 
university buildings, while in British Columbia and Quebec hundreds of 
students gather for rallies against spiraling student debt and 
increasing corporate influence on campus. Everywhere university systems 
are being eviscerated by neoliberal logics asserting themselves even in 
the face of economic recession. After decades of chronic under-funding 
and restructuring, public universities have ceded the university’s 
public role in a democracy and embraced “academic capitalism” as a 
“moral” obligation. Acting as venture capitalists, they pressure 
academics to transfer and mobilize knowledge and encourage research 
partnerships with private interests; acting as real estate developers, 
they take over neighbourhoods with callous disregard for established 
communities; acting as military contractors, they produce 
telecommunications software and light armoured vehicles for foreign 
governments; acting as brand managers, they open branch plant campuses 
around the world and compete for foreign students who can be charged 
exorbitant fees for access to a “first world” education. With tuition 
fees and student debt on the rise, academic labour is tiered, cheapened 
and divided against itself; two-thirds of classes in U.S. colleges and 
universities are taught by faculty employed on insecure, non 
tenure-track contracts. The casualization of academic labour and a plea 
for sustainable academic livelihoods were at the core of the longest 
strike in English Canadian university history. As collegiality, academic 
freedom, and self-governance recede from view, the university remains a 
terrain of adaptation and struggle.

We will need all the conceptual tools that cultural studies can muster 
to analyze the changing university as the foundation for our academic 
callings and scholarly practices. In addition to external influences 
such as globalization, technoscience, corporatization, mediatization, 
and higher education policy, internal managerial initiatives, 
bureaucratization, deprofessionalization, structural complicity between 
administration and faculty, and intellectual subjectivities must also be 
analyzed. All of us, no matter what our political position, must take 
the time to reflect on the broad questions raised by these changes. Is 
the site of the university worth struggling over or re-imagining? Can 
the neoliberal university be set against itself? Is it time for reform 
or exodus? What other practices of knowledge production, 
interpretations, modes of organization, and assemblages are possible? 
This special issue is designed to reflect upon, analyze and strategize 
about the past, present and future of the university.

In addition to these matters of concern, possible topics to further 
dialogue and enable further study include but are not limited to:

· analyzing and assessing the crisis of the public university

· implementing globalizations: theory, rhetoric and historical experience

· continuity and transformation in national academic cultures

· the position and role of the arts, humanities and social sciences

· university leaders and university making

· managerial theory/practice, academic ethics, and the symbolism of 
university finance

· university-private sector intermediaries and initiatives; “innovation” 
and “creativity” as alibis for academic capitalism; knowledge “transfer” 
and “mobilization”

· marketing, media relations and the promotional condition of the university

· space, time, speed and rhythm in the network university

· the professor-entrepreneur, research practice, and the imperative to 
produce

· academic labour, tenure, stratification and precarity

· faculty governance, unions and institutional democracy

· the indebted, student-worker and the decline of academic study

· scholarly disciplines and territories, infrastructure, information 
practices, communication and publishing

· the scholarly community of money: grant agencies, writing, committees 
and adjudication

· media/cultural production and critical/radical pedagogy

· the development of knowledge cultures and the expansion of the commons

· the university in relation to nearby communities and wider social 
movements

· resistance, common and counter-knowledge, alternative educational 
formations

· remaking the public university in Canada and in other national contexts

Submissions

To view the author guidelines, see 
http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/about/submissions#authorGuidelines.

To submit papers (with titles, abstracts and keywords) and supplementary 
media files online, you need to register and login to the /TOPIA 
/website at http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/user/register.

The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2012. Peer review and 
notification of acceptance will be completed by May 15, 2012. Final 
manuscripts accepted for publication will be due July 5, 2012. Comments 
and queries can be sent to Bob Hanke (bhanke /at/ yorku.ca) 
<mailto:(bhanke /at/ yorku.ca)> or Alison Hearn (ahearn2 /at/ uwo.ca) 
<mailto:(ahearn2 /at/ uwo.ca)>.

For more information about /TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural 
Studies/, visit

http://www.yorku.ca/topia/_._


--
Alison Hearn,
Associate Professor
Coordinator, Media Studies Graduate Program
Faculty of Information and Media Studies,
North Campus Building,
University of Western Ontario,
London, Ontario
Canada
N6A 5B7

Phone: 519-661-2111 ext. 81228
email: (ahearn2 /at/ uwo.ca)