[ecrea] TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, # 28 (Fall 2012)

 New issue of TOPIA offers a diagnosis of crisis in public education

In the early 1980s, French philosopher Jacques Derrida 
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/> deemed it impossible to 
disassociate the work we do in the humanities and the 
humanities-oriented social sciences from "a reflection on the political 
and institutional conditions of that work."
In the latest issue of /TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies/ 
<http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/issue/current>, 
co-editors York Professor Bob Hanke <http://bhanke.apps01.yorku.ca/> and 
Western University Professor Alison Hearn 
<http://www.fims.uwo.ca/peopleDirectory/faculty/fulltimefaculty/full_time_faculty_profile.htm?PeopleId=118708> 
take up this challenge in their introduction, they chart the 
transformation of universities that began in the 1990s, the emergence of 
a critical literature on the contemporary university, and the evident 
detachment of academics from their own institutional life worlds.
Through an array of critical perspectives, contributors to this issue of 
/TOPIA/ analytically and vigorously explore the idea, practices, 
organization, condition and institution of the university. These themes 
are of great importance to anyone who works in a university, from 
graduate students aspiring to have an academic career or reflecting on 
its difficulties, to indebted undergraduate students who might be 
inspired by events in Quebec known as the "Maple Spring"  to become more 
engaged, to citizens in Canada and around the world who have a public 
interest in changing higher-education affairs, said Hanke. Taken 
together, this theme issue makes a strong case that cultural studies 
needs to trouble the university.
This special issue contains six articles, six short essays or offerings, 
five review essays and six book reviews along with a gallery of voices 
and images from the Quebec student protests.
The co-editors have put together a multiperspectival issue that examines 
the transformation of publicly-funded post-secondary education in 
parallel to student struggles in Quebec.
"In Canada, as 'publicly funded' education is replaced by 'publicly 
assisted' education and the number of precarious professors swells along 
with the cost of tuition and student debt," note Hanke and Hearn in 
their introduction, "we have seen the longest and largest strike in 
history and tens of thousands of people in the streets for months in 
Quebec."
Contributors for this issue of /TOPIA/ are based in universities in 
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US.
To view the full Table of Contents, click here 
<http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/issue/view/2085/showToc>. To 
arrange for a subscription, click here 
<http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/about/subscriptions>.