Uncategorized – Jana Bacevic

To be fair, odds are I would have gone to any counter-demo in any city I happened to be in, even if it had been in front of a hotel I didn’t know, had never been to, and was unlikely to. This is just what I do. In fact, I initially thought this was a different Mercure in Bristol – one farther from the centre – which seemed more in line with the government policy towards asylum seekers, which is to get them out of sight and out of mind, so they can be usefully demonised. It was not until the day before the demo that I realised which Mercure it was, and that I had been there before.

Bristol held me. The first time I came to Bristol (save for a stopover in 2007, when I took a walk on the Quayside, saw a film at the Watershed, and was instantly hooked) was in 2014, for – initially – a seminar that was part of a job I hated and regretted taking. What sounded like a dream – tenure-track postdoc, secure, well-paid in a notoriously precarious academic environment, etc., with the possibility of staying on in what was billed as one of the bastions of social democracy – wasn’t; I was bullied and felt lonely and isolated in the sterile, conformist Danish social environment, ripped out from the precarious but dynamic, ever-changing, international, circle of friends and acquaintances at CEU. My primary relationship buckled under the pressure of another international move, combined with my disappointment in the job, and life, that everyone felt I should be settling down in. I felt very much the opposite, but struggled to see anything in the future that did not involve some version of the same. The only bright spots involved the possibility of extended research stays in Bristol and in Auckland, two of our project partners, so when a work event got scheduled in Bristol for February, I decided to bring a larger suitcase and not return until spring.

I still remember that first night. I don’t know why we were staying at the Mercury – I think the organisers at Bristol decided it was convenient for downtown and probably fitted the budget. I remember it being one of the nicer hotels I had stayed in – years of precarity combined with the desire to travel meant that I stayed in very cheap hostel and hotel accommodation well into my 30s; while Denmark was the first time my disposable income meant I did not have to worry about money, the country itself was prohibitively expensive, meaning that I was still having the more-or-less same lifestyle, just paying much more for it. It was not the hotel itself, however, but sitting outside it, on the Welsh back itself – I had snuck out for a cigarette (sorry!); the night was surprisingly mild, or at least that is how it appeared to me, my blood frozen by the unforgiving Danish northern winds – watching the glistening lights over the canal, that I felt happy for the first time in months.

Bristol melted me. It was not only my blood that had turned to ice over that first winter in Denmark; being in the southwest made me feel human again. It wasn’t only the casual smiles of staff in coffee shops*, or friends I (quickly, and thank you, you know who you are) made; it was also the fact that it was the only place (and to this day, even after more than ten years in the UK, even with the small exception of London) where I felt truly welcome. It was – still is – the only place where people would (occasionally, and casually) ask if I was from Bristol, rather than where I was from. In honour of that, one of my social media profiles still says I am from Bristol.

This, in sense, is true – I was born in Belgrade, but Bristol made me. The next time I came in autumn, I saw Nick Cave’s ’20,000 days on Earth’ – at the Watershed, where else** – went back to my room, and made a decision on how to live the next ten years. The rest, as they say, is history. While most of that history involved living elsewhere (Cambridge, London, and, for the past five years, the north-east), Bristol always felt like coming home.

It is not only that I came at the right time, at the cusp of the upswing of gentrification, but before the major part of the London fallout began. I lived everywhere – from a shared flat above a shop (yep) in Gloucester rd. (a lease I had taken over from a friend who has split up with her boyfriend) to a shared house in Horfield where I rarely saw anyone else to a horrible HMO in Clifton where they insisted the boiler room was an acceptable place to sleep; I stayed in friends’ flats, houses, gardens (usually lovelier than the boiler room). I went everywhere, walking, cycling, on the bus, and the railway. In between, I bid ny days in Copenhagen and elsewhere, waiting to return to Bristol.

It is also true that I was well-positioned as an outsider-in – I was doing research on how universities were engaging with local communities, so this gave me good access to both, at the time when impact had not yet begun to strangle the milder, less instrumentalised public engagement. This does not mean I did not witness, and was explicitly told about conflicts emanating from this; as elsewhere, universities (and particularly elite universities) are almost by definition conduits of gentrification. Even from this perspective, I (almost) always felt welcome; Bristol has no suspicion of ‘outsiders’ the way many other places in England do.

It is also not the proverbial ‘mildness’ of the southwest, memorialised in Banksy’s grafitti over Hamilton House. Yesterday, I watched that mildness scale up very quickly when crowds of angry, shouting men decked out in St. George’s flags showed up on either side of our lines, in front of the Mercure Brigstow. No pasaran.

As I said, I would’ve gone to any anti-fascist demo, anywhere. But the fact that someone is trying to prevent people who are, in a very different but very real way, seeking refuge at exactly the same spot where I found it*** – the Mercure Brigstow – meant there was no place I would have rather been yesterday.

*I write this with very much of an awareness of cultural expectations of emotional labour, especially in the so-called ‘hospitality industries’. While Denmark has a bit of a reputation for staff explicitly not performing it, which we can also attribute to decent labour conditions and thus absence of need to work for a tip, tipping (especially over-the-counter) was not a thing when I first got to Bristol either. People still chatted away in ways that, at least to my human-contact-starved Scandinavian eyes, seemed genuine.

** Of course, I also saw quite a few films at The Cube, including If a Tree Falls, another film that has been very influential on my orientation.

*** I’ve picked up on social media that one of Britain’s racism-loving publications has apparently used a similar angle to justify the far-right racist attacks on hotels hosting asylum seekers – apparently it’s “understandable” that people who have had their weddings there feel aggrieved to see the same places used to host migrants (as you can imagine, with the requisite set of adjectives/qualifiers added, incl. “off public purse” – despite the fact that it is explicitly the policy of the British government to ban asylum seekers from working – and “lounging”, despite extensive reports on how horrific conditions for asylum seekers in hotels actually are). I don’t think the kind of dour-faced conservatism that sees your ‘joyful’ occasion (= wedding) and someone else’s different kind of ‘joy’ (= being able to escape explicit oppression, persecution, starvation and likely death wherever it is you are escaping from) as mutually exclusive or even hierarchical (and if the latter, then in my view it certainly wouldn’t be the posh weddings that should be prioritised) is worth commenting on, but I do think there is another kind of resentment fuelling the far-right that does merit more attention. Given some things we know about the social composition of the British far-right (leaving aside for the time being the social composition of those who fund and direct it), I think it is more likely that their resentment stems from their own (perceived) inability to afford the exact posh weddings in the exact same hotels that the said article (which I won’t link to) is nostalgically referring to. Which only confirms what we already know, which is that one of the aims of far-right mobilisation in the UK is to divert attention of the working/exploited precarious class away from the (very needed) economic redistribution and onto attacking migrants and minorities.

On refusing to be a spectator

Blog, climate change, higher education, Philosophy of social science, Politics, psychoanalysis, Reviews, social theory, Uncategorized

I had a dream.

No, no the Martin Luther King kind of dream, by which I mean I do not think this one will be used to retroactively construct a politics of reconciliation where none are due.

A real dream, like, sleeping n’all. To clarify at the outset, this isn’t in and of itself a matter of particular exceptionality: I do dream relatively regularly, as long as I am not extremely stressed, which now happens rarely and only for very brief periods.

I also pay attention to dreams. This started when I was a child, and reading Freud‘s “Interpretation of dreams” gave me a sense that there is a world beyond our own that we are, nonetheless, (almost) unique authors of. This fascinated me, as it opened the question of existence and multiple planes of reality in ways different than fairytales and fantasy had, and also in ways different than physics (here’s something I’ve written on relational ontology in dreams).

I can also lucid-dream (this isn’t intentional, just something I picked up along the way, mostly as a way of waking myself up from nightmares).

I also learned to ask dreams for guidance.

Yet, my sleep has been surprisingly dream-free of lately. I noticed this about a week ago; I first attributed it to being on holiday (= in Britain, the accepted expression for an out-of-office email responder), which means I have more time for free-flowing thoughts and thus less processing ‘backlog’ to do while asleep, but then I realised it’s probably been close to a month, if not two.

Then I attributed it to the intensity of the events in Belgrade earlier in June (as I’ve described, this did involve a week of severely disrupted sleep), but that in and of itself should only increase the backlog, and thus the quantity of material for processing. More to the point (did I mention I can ask dreams for guidance?), I can ask – by which I mean induce (no, no drugs involved, in case this is what you’re thinking) – dreams, and my subconscious delivers. So I did.

Nada.

Until last night.

The second thing to note is that nothing happens in my dreams – they are usually elements of a conversation or interaction, fragments of a feeling, observations, but there is no major “plot”. I dream of the weather, of course – of storms, hurricanes, floods – but even that is increasingly rare; whatever prophetic meaning those dreams had has been either fulfilled or rendered obsolete. Now, we can talk about whether climate change is an “event” in the Badiousian sense, but at any rate it does not involve (in my dreams, at least) a large amount of conscious agency (I cannot control the weather, for instance).

Most of the time.

Jonathan Lear’s (2006) “Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation” opens with these words of Plenty Coups, a Crow elder:

When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.

Lear is exceptional (I mean by standards of white men in the Angloamerican academia) insofar as he refuses to see this as an expression of something else – a reflection of ‘depression’, a metaphor – and asks: what would it mean to take Plenty Coups’ words seriously? In other words, what does it mean for nothing to happen?

What kind of ontological disaster erases the possibility of history?

***

In this dream, I am queuing in a coffee shop. It is a nice place, one of the sort of places people like me tend to feel naturally good in – it’s decked out in wood, spacious, with lots of light & lots of plants. As I approach the counter, though, I realise I am signing up for a petition to obstruct/block a theatre performance – the petition is on a paper napkin and I am signing it in ink, but I already see a few other names (not clear which) above mine. I move back to the front room, as I learn that the venue/café workers are on strike. The tables on the front room are covered with sandwiches – stacks of white subs, mostly wrapped in clear film; these are here to avoid crossing the picket line by getting something from the café.

I don’t know if anything else happens in the dream; my recollection of it ends there.

At first, I was perplexed. I am not a huge fan of theatre – I occasionally see plays but it has certainly not played a major part of my life in any meaningful sense, real (compared to cinema or gigs/concerts, for instance) or symbolic (certainly, I’ve written on performativity and I’ve read my Shakespeare and blah blah but I do not, in fact, see the world – including the social world – as a “stage”).

Sure, I was able to recognise elements of direct organising, but sandwiches?

Digging into the associative chain, sandwiches reminded me of the food redistribution service I was part of while in San Diego; last night, I observed a similar street sleeper distribution service on the rainy, blustery streets of Belfast. Which brought to mind a question:

–> Why have we not organised something similar at Durham University, with food redistribution on the streets of Durham/Newcastle?

Sure, many people take part in different similar initiatives (e.g. Community Kitchen) across the region, but why are we not using the institution as a hub for this kind of thing? It would be a faster, better way to redistribute privilege than either vague gesturing at “widening participation” or feeling upset or guilty about the fact the social composition of the university is at odds with that of the town (something that, by the way, conveniently entirely erases ‘international’ students, who are apparently classless).

Which brought me to the following question:

What would it really mean to interrupt the performance?

–> What if we refused to reproduce the university in response to the human rights violations we see every day?

When students in universities across the UK last summer declared occupations in response to the institutional and national complicity in genocide, there has been some (in my mind, insufficient) support among university staff; but, for most part, the business of the university continued as usual.

What if we stopped the performance?

What if, instead of politely queuing to get our coffees and then sitting back and observing the show, we brought the whole damn thing to a halt?

What if nothing stopped happening, and something happened instead? Would our hearts lift off the ground? (I think so).

***

For a while, there has been – on and off – talk about ‘boycotting the REF’, but it seems that the principal reason (most) people would end the REF is because they do not like it, rather than because ranking and ordering is itself a practice run for ranking and ordering human beings.

Like grading (I’m sorry, Brits, marking).

Like “undeserving migrants”.

Like “sure, Gaza is so sad, but I have to worry about my kids’ scholarships and my mortgage and I’m afraid of getting it wrong if I say something, I mean, this cancel culture has really gone too far and and and”

Which, really, brings me to the following question:

–-> Why have we not declared indefinite strike and refused the reproduction of the university (which, of course, is the means of reproduction of classed, gendered [increasingly, with the new legislation, exclusively cis-gendered] subjects for inclusion into mechanisms and institutions for the (re)production of the militarised state which, as we can so clearly observe, is the guarantor/guardian of the continued extraction of capital, human, fossil, financial, near and far, at no matter what cost?

But anyway, that’s just analysing a dream.

***

One of the usual anarchist/organising principles is to respond with “well, why don’t you do it yourself”. Two observations.

Not everyone is equally positioned to act: as a migrant (and migrant rep), and someone who only recently acquired UK citizenship, I am starkly aware of the contrast between freedoms for those who have the privilege of “full”, meaning unqualified political membership, and those who do not (for instance: most migrants on General Work visas cannot afford to lose their jobs without at the same time losing the right to remain in the UK. In this case, they would also be ineligible for benefits – see “no recourse to public funds” – so much for the myth of the migrant benefits claimant, btw). In this sense, who can afford risking to lose their job, let alone who can afford to risk arrest/conviction, depends not only on financial security, but also – and primarily – on migration status. In this context, it is a durable shock to me that my British colleagues – or others with secure status – are often the most reluctant to act, and most likely to invoke different excuses (see above).
Earlier this summer, I spent a period in Serbia, where a full-scale popular anti-authoritarian revolution/movement has been happening since November (in case you missed it in the news, no idea why this would happen). The movement started as a series of student occupations, but university staff have – almost immediately, and almost unequivocally – expressed solidarity with students, including by stopping teaching (union laws are a bit different in Serbia, but I do not have time to get into this). In response, as a threat/retaliatory measure, the Serbian government (a significant chunk of public universities are financed dominantly, if not exclusively, from the budget) has stopped/curtailed their salaries (the equivalent of pay deductions in response to industrial action in the UK context). For some, this means that they have had 100% pay deductions for three months. Yes, that’s right, British comrades: not three days; not three weeks. Three months.

Excusez-moi, but this makes it a bit harder than usual to hear excuses from significantly better-paid university environments that “people just cannot afford to go on strike”.

For that matter, Serbian public universities are not composed uniquely of artistocracy (remember, we had communism) or plutocracy (they don’t work at universities, they run the country) who can safely afford to dispense with a three-month paycheck; of course, class privilege does exist, and is perhaps most obvious in higher education. What does make a difference is a more distributed/equalised access to housing (not necessarily equitable as such, but nothing compared to the classed horror that is British housing), more affordable childcare and, of course, a strategic and solidaristic approach: choosing when, who, and how can take risks, and of what sort, is a vital part of ensuring any action bears results.

But don’t mind me, I’m just recounting a dream.

***

Let me leave you with the words of CrimethInc, rather than my own:

For the civilian born in captivity and raised on spectatorship and submission, direct action changes everything. The morning she arises to put a plan into motion, she awakens under a different sun-if she has been able to sleep at all, that is- and in a different body, attuned to every detail of the world around her and possessed of the power to change it. She finds her companions endowed with tremendous courage and resourcefulness, equal to monumental challenges and worthy of passionate love. Together, they enter a foreign land where outcomes are uncertain but anything is possible and every minute counts.

***

This, for those of you who keep asking, is what it means to stop the performance. This is what it means to refuse to be a spectator, of your own life, of others’, or of deaths, others’ as well as, inevitably and eventually, your own.

All I am saying is: there should be more names on that sign-up sheet.

Revolutionary time

Blog, history, Politics, Uncategorized

I don’t recall when was the last time I slept throughout the night. The barricades are almost literally under my window; the fact I am between two occupied faculties means I spend most nights at one of the blockades, then being woken up intermittently by garbage trucks (which are sent to clear out the road blocks) and the police (which comes to break the blockades, beat and arrest people). There is also the general noise of a protest movement – whistles, cheers, slogans. I generally let the bin people do their work (in Serbia, these kinds of workers often don’t have a choice), not the police. I got used to the sound of protest, though not sufficiently to not wake up.

A month or even a few weeks ago, this would have been a problem.

For a long time, I’ve been reluctant to write about Serbia, or even answer questions about what is going on. For ethical reasons, I believe in platforming people who are on the ground, and while I am from Serbia – and from Belgrade – I have not lived there for a long time. I resisted being pinned down (domained, as I’ve called it a lifetime ago when I still cared about things such as knowledge production) as being ‘from Serbia’ or a ‘Balkans expert’ or even a ‘post-socialism scholar’ (despite the fact I’ve written a book on Yugoslavia and its successors). Whenever someone asked me for an interpretation or an opinion, I kindly pointed to people who are actually in the region and who I thought knew what they were talking about.

Almost equally importantly, I believe the usefulness of ‘interpretation’ is very limited. The intellectual tendency to focus on knowledge production – on writing, publishing, speaking – in crisis can contribute to the perpetuation of status quo; this isn’t to endorse a simplistic ‘words vs. deeds’ dichotomy nor to elevate action beyond the status of questioning (after all, we must think about what we are doing), but to note that, for most of the past decade, most contexts I have encountered have had an overabundance of critique, and a corresponding dearth of action. I have, in fact, written about that too – a whole PhD and some – but in the past year(s), I’ve become very reluctant to offer any interpretations, and have instead focused on calling upon people to act.

Now I must, though, not because I have an investment into the position of an ‘intellectual’ (you can read about my departure from that position here and here), but because the situation calls for it. Not because it needs interpretation, but because it exceeds it.

So, confession number one: this situation has exceeded my interpretative capacity.

I’m conversant in roughly five disciplines, so this isn’t for a lack of options. Sure, I can give you political philosophy names for what’s going on, and sure, I can also give you a Marxist perspective, or maybe a slightly longer-durée historical/political economy explanation. I can waffle on about semi-periphery, extractivism, necropolitics like a champion (I have). Like a retired lute player, my mind occasionally touches the floating signifiers of the concepts others have used: Badiou’s ‘event’…Žižek’s working through of Lacan’s subjective destitution with a ‘radical act’…Butler’s performative theory of assembly…Honig’s morphing of inoperativity (Agamben) and power of assembly (Butler)…and Clover, Osterweil, everyone on riot.

Unimportant.

None of the concepts match stuff I have seen.

Here, another confession.

Yes, as far as identities are concerned, I am an anarchist, and yes, I am an anthropologist, and yes, I am also a Buddhist, but I have always been ambivalent about the idea that people are inclined to do good in situations of crisis. I believe people are inherently capable of acting in any number of ways – selfish, altruistic, appropriative, non-proprietary, exploitative, generous – and that it is a complex set of circumstances and evaluations decides how they will act in specific situations. Hell, my current research – Uncategorical imperatives – was motivated by the belief we’d better find out how we tend to act (or: morally reason about action) in crises before climate change-driven exploitation and wars collapse into global disorder.

Whoops.

But (trigger warning: a Bladerunner ‘time to die’ monologue)

What I have seen on the barricades (blockades) in Belgrade surpasses what I know about social movements, informal organisation, or human behaviour. Don’t get me wrong – I was in protests since my mid-teens, including in 1996/7, 2000, and many, many other. I have been in protests in Budapest, the UK, the US. I also visited the occupied faculties in Belgrade this winter. I’ve been in protests in early June. I’ve watched, half-crazed with worry, the footage of the 15^th March and 28^th June protests.

This is different.

I have seen examples of mutual aid, solidarity, restraint, and self-organisation that go beyond what textbooks on mutual aid, self-organising, and community building tell you. I have seen examples of courage, protection of the weak, and having each other’s back that I have only seen intermittently before, except that they are now sustained and unquestioned. I have seen or heard, narrated, first-hand, forms of creativity, ingenuity, and resistance that I have read about, but never thought possible. I have seen anarchist theory, in practice.

Confession number three. I never thought this could happen.

Yes, I read the reports, and for a long time, all of that was encouraging, but not impossible. Everything fit the predictable range of human behaviour, one that follows identifying a common enemy, and organising around a similar cause. There was a foreseeable scope of outcomes.

This is different.

Please don’t try to explain, as I still can get angry. It’s different.

One of the things I remember reading (can’t recall the reference – might’ve been Rosa Luxemburg?, and it anyway no longer matters) is that the revolution does not involve only changing the system; it involves changing you. You will, literally, not be the same person after the revolution. We are no longer the same selves, and this is coming from someone who already believes identities are an illusion, and not a very interesting one.

But it is still tangibly different.

I know people tend to lose themselves in historical moments. (Here is Badiou’s event again). I’ve read endless accounts of transformative experiences, from 1917 and 1968 (both in Yugoslav republics – also, my mum participated in it – and beyond), to Occupy, to first environmental protests, Seattle, Gezi Park, Tahrir, you name it. I understand that. But this isn’t a ‘change’, be it ‘regime’ or ‘social’, or even ‘system’. I’ve witnessed happenings – some personal, like love, some interpersonal, like death, some communal, like concerts, some spiritual – that have come close to transcendence. This is not it.

It is also not the (a)voidance of doubt, of incertitude, or anything that seems like discomfort. It is the realisation that this is what we do now. This is how we live. There is no ‘end’ or ‘goal’ or even ‘victory’. There is no teleology.

This is revolutionary time.

Confession number four. I am afraid.

Some days ago – I do not recall when, where, with whom – I was in a protest, and, as is my habit, tried to get the person with me to shift to the fringes. You see, I am uncomfortable in crowds, and my strategy – for close to 30 years now – is to avoid being kettled, so I can quickly run if the cops descend. It has kept me mostly safe, with one small exception.

Now I stand. Not because “the movement” or “the revolution” is transcendent, worth sacrificing for, or because I’ve lost myself in the adrenaline of the crowd. Because this is a choice. A choice that came earlier, and slightly differently, than I expected (I honestly thought I’d die fighting masked government agents in the UK or the US, but here we are). I stand because this is what we do now, and in perpetuity.

P.S. Thought it important to add a few remarks, lest people start thinking I’ve completely lost critical capacity: (no, I’m just very underslept :)) – critical in the sense of critical friend, not as someone who is looking to form an intellectual position. These are meant to highlight some of the areas for further work, especially if/when the blockades morph into more long-term forms of organising:

the fact homophobic language (crowds occasionally chant or spray “gay” as derogatory term for Vučić) regularly makes an appearance should be addressed immediately. homophobia is not funny, not even as a throwback to that mid-90s high-school playground vibe. the country should really move on from there, not only because nobody wants to go back to mid-90s, but also because homophobic violence is still alive in Serbia.
the resurgence of ethnic nationalism, not only in terms of rhetoric (which, even if it is your thing – it certainly isn’t mine – is entirely and utterly politically useless, given that the only national(ist) project Serbia could conceivably pursue entails trying to reclaim Kosovo, which no-one in their right mind would want to do), but also in terms of (again) shouts and slurs; e.g. shouting the derogatory term for Kosovar Albanians at police (reminder, the predecessors of those forces were actually engaged in committing crimes against Kosovar Albanians, so the slur is not only racist/chauvinist, it is self-defeating). Same goes for shouting at police to “go to Kosovo” – it should really go without saying that organising against police repression in your own country makes little sense if you are at the same time encouraging the police to go and repress the people in another.
glorifying masculinism and masculinity – while elements of this tend to be prominent in all protest movements that feature substantial physical labour/force (e.g., flipping over heavy garbage bins, etc.), it tends to erase (a) the fact that most of this work is *also* done collaboratively (in fact, the most recent one I’ve witnessed was performed by a very gender-mixed team) and (b) the relevance of organisational, logistical, and communication labour, most of which seems to be performed by women and non-binary folk. this has been accompanied by an unprecedented platforming of men (as ‘heroes’, speakers, leaders, experts, commentators, whatnot), often with names, while women mostly appear as generic category (“young women [devojke]”, “student [studentkinja]”). While there are good reasons to stick to anonymity in times like these, this should be equal across the board. There is a good lesson to learn from the Zapatistas here, whose ‘Revolutionary law of women’ was the first and integral part of the Chiapas rebellion, not an afterthought.

Three ghosts of British higher education

Blog, Conference presentations, higher education, Philosophy of social science, Politics, psychoanalysis, Reviews, Uncategorized

[These are the more-or-less unedited notes for my speech at the event Multiple Crises of Higher Education, held on 20 May 2025 at Queen Mary's Mile End Institute, and organised by the fantastic Accounting and Accountability Research Group. Queen Mary's branch of UCU have also been at the forefront of fighting and writing about redundancies in the sector, and maintain an excellent and well-organised webpage, so give them a follow alongside AARG (the best acronym in the sector?)]

To start, as philosophers do, from examining a concept, a crisis means a point of shattering; sense of rupture; breaking point, crack in the fabric of reality. To say something has reached a crisis is to recognise that from this point there is a division into multiple paths. From a personal perspective, to reach a crisis means we can no longer go on as before, or as usual; a crisis usually invokes a reconsideration of what the project (whatever project we are committed to – a movement; an ideology; a job; a relationship; an idea) is, and whether it is still worth doing or living.

So when we start from the diagnosis that higher education is in crisis, we are in fact acknowledging that multiple facets of what we thought higher education is are no longer viable. Some of these (also mentioned in the description for this event) include the sector’s funding model; its approach to academic labour, including benefitting from precarity (insecure, temporary contracts) and competition (for research funding, for prestige); and its relationship to other important sectors of society (government, the military, industry, and so on). But where do we go from here?

To foreground the question of where we go from here is also to acknowledge – or argue – that turning back is no longer possible. This is the starting point for my remarks today. I draw inspiration from Adam Phillips’ On Giving Up (am currently reading the book, but the link is to the – open access – essay in the LRB), which opens with Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms: “from a certain point there is not more turning back. That is the point that must be reached”. To say we are in crisis, among other things, is to say that we have reached that point. From here, Phillips asks: what are we willing to give up in order to go on living?

Philips’ question reframes giving up as a fundamental element of worth. As worth is the key of valuation and as such of any kind of counting, including acc-counting (sorry), I believe it is tantamount to understanding how we talk about value. In this sense, I intend to perform an analysis that sketches in more explicit terms this intersection between moral and economic; between what we give (and expect to receive in return), and what we give up on.

Giving up/going on

I want to argue that any analysis of a ‘crisis’ that harbours the illusion that turning back is a possibility is one that is fundamentally committed to maintenance of the status quo, and thus counterperformatively denies the very diagnosis is purports to establish. Indeed, it is quite possible to argue – in analogy with how some Marxist critics have described the 2008 economic crisis – that there is, in fact, no crisis at all, and that the system is working exactly as intended. The major thing I will be arguing we need to give up on, in this consideration, then, is our commitment to the system as it is, given that as it is it is a system working as intended.

So from there, we need to reorient ourselves, perhaps towards a different system, perhaps towards one working towards different ends. To do this, however, we need to rid ourselves of three ghosts. Three ghosts, a bit like in Dickens’ The Christmas Carol.

The first ghost is the ghost of the Empire. Now, some of you may be surprised by the appearance of this ghost. After all, haven’t we comprehensively purged this ghost by decolonising our curricula, by extensively renaming our halls and libraries, even – gasp! – in some cases, by enquiring into our links with slavery?

But this ghost rests barely disguised in the ideal of the superiority of British higher education, the idea of higher education as an ‘export’, and the almost unquestioned assumption that we should reap profit from international students. For what is the source of appeal of British higher education for (most) foreign students today if not the accessibility and usefulness of an education in English (the language of global trade, the fact we owe to the British Empire) combined with the opportunity to take endless photos in front of different vestiges, artefacts and similes of that very empire, from the Big Ben to Harry Potter-esque halls in Oxford, Cambridge and Durham? What is the ambition to be on top of league tables if not a transmogrification of the desire to sustain a hierarchy that was built on a monopoly on trade routes and cotton mills, and now continues through degree mills? Finally, what is the belief in the ‘superiority’ of British higher education but an inflated ego projection of our own (yes, I am British now) colonial past, which in turn enables if not validates the racialised and classed hierarchy of the UK immigration system, the system that requires people to prove their ‘worth’ in order to be exploited as much as (or more than) British nationals?

The second ghost is the ghost of welfare state. Now, quite contrary to the previous, the ghost of the Empire, this one is the kind of ghost we repeatedly and obsessively summon. We do this in ritual invocations of the famed social contract that created the NHS, or in the postwar (meaning WWII) expansion of higher education, enabled by the Education Act in 1944 but usually attributed to the Robbins report (1963), which opened higher education to “all who qualify, by ability or attainment”.

The most important contribution of the report, perhaps less visible because it was bordering on the obvious, was to, for the first time, conceptualise higher education as a system and thus a distinct domain of public policy. In 1964, the University Grants Committee officially became part of the newly created Department of Education and Science (DES). Instead of a set of disparate universities and colleges, with their histories, traditions (or lack thereof), and institutional trajectories, higher learning became a matter for the nation-state – and, consequently, its development deemed relevant for the well-being of its citizens (citizen-subjects) on the whole, not just for the (still small) proportion of those who attended the (equally relatively small) number of institutions. This is how the massification of higher education became the main ‘lever’ for state intervention into university governance. The essence of the ‘social compact’ between the university and the state, thus, was always a tradeoff between expansion and funding.

It is important to note that this social compact intentionally excluded international students, who were exempt from no tuition fees since 1962. It is also important to understand/acknowledge how it occurred in the first instance. The expansion of higher education was not some benevolent act of enlightenment (well, neither was the Enlightenment a benevolent act of enlightenment, after all 😊); it was a strategic investment into upskilling the workforce so as to enable UK – no longer an empire, at least by its own lights, though still very much keeping overseas territories – to compete in industrial production, including that of weapons and surveillance technologies. This is explicitly acknowledged in EP Thompson’s edited Warwick University Ltd., which documents the analyses and reactions to the revelations made during the student occupation of the Registry of the University of Warwick in 1970. The files students found revealed widespread labour surveillance and military contracting, including to Bristol Sideley Engines, the predecessor to British Aerospace Limited, which which provides jet engines to Saudi Arabia and Israel (if you’d like to see the continuing links between universities in the UK and arms manufacture/trade, I strongly recommend this). This critique, however – just like Thompson himself – stopped short of reimagining higher education that would not be beholden to national (and, increasingly, offshored) industry, even if that means arms industry.

This also tells us something about the vestigial dream of a Labour government restoring this ghost of a welfare state to its former glory. Recent policies suggest Labour has no intention of dusting off this model of the social compact. More importantly, however, it tells us something about the ethical tradeoff involved in the dream of higher education as part of a welfare state – whose welfare?

The third ghost, and this is going to be most difficult for some of you to hear, is the ghost of social mobility.

From this post.

This brings me to the diverging (or converging, if you’re a fan of strict visual metaphors) rates of graduate debt and graduate premium.

There are different policy solutions proposed to address this, and today we have heard some of them. What we fail to comprehend, however, is that the graduate premium itself is based on the idea that there should be an exploited and underpaid class of (under)labourers. It makes sense to remember that the concept of ‘social mobility’ assumes that there is a class to escape from (move out from), usually the working class, and a class to aspire to, usually the middle class.

The fact that the ‘graduate premium’ is stagnating or decreasing apart from in a few professions/sectors (and we know what those sectors are – finance, fossil fuels, big tech) tells us little about the intrinsic ‘value’ of higher education (as if there were a thing such as intrinsic value) and more about wage suppression across sectors.

After all, in an equal society, where we would all be paid the same, what would be the reason to have a graduate premium?

So that people can pay off debt; and this brings me to ‘the system is not in crisis, it is working as intended’.

Why should we expect a graduate premium?

Not long ago, I encountered the same question in a session on cooperatives.

It was run in the local community/anarchist centre, and I came by to hear what people thought setting up a cooperative would really be like. When it came to the distribution of income, I mentioned that I thought it fair that people be paid the same kind of money for the same kind of work, and that that was the principle I tried to institute in one of the collectives I had been part of (The Philosopher).

But what would people with PhDs do? Asked one participant.

Be paid as everyone else, I said. Independently of qualification? They asked. Of course, I said. (They did not know I had a PhD – two, in fact).

But why would people with PhDs agree to that, they protested. After all, they paid so much for their education, they surely have to earn more to pay that off!

And that, my friends, is why we cannot have nice things.

Because as long as we cannot accept – or even conceive – that knowledge (by which we mean tokens or credentials of knowledge) should not bestow material privilege, as long as we accept inequalities in employment, as long as we cannot even imagine that a ‘professor’ could be earning the same as a ‘lecturer’ and as a ‘teaching assistant’; let alone as a cleaner or a nurse, or, if we want to bring this closer to university contexts, as an IT technician – we are both naturalising and reproducing this hierarchy. This hierarchy tells us that of course higher education should confer a privilege, and of course there should be an (over)exploited and (under)paid class, and of course British higher education bestows that privilege (particularly luxuriously), so of course we have the right to ask people to pay for it, and foreigners to pay even more. Unless we are willing to give that up, we are not only tacitly but, what is I hope by now obvious, explicitly accepting that higher education is an instrument that serves to reproduce and maintain the status quo. If anything, it is intended to maintain graduates tied to low-paid, precarious, and exploitative jobs – think Starbucks – that they cannot get out of, even if they would want to, because they have too much debt. And there is one thing people like that are unlikely to do: create any kind of meaningful, longer-lasting, opposition.

So what we need to give up, in order to go on, is the fantasy of exceptionalism – institutional, sectoral, or personal. That universities (as institutions), higher education (as a sector), or the fact we are in them, makes us special. And even if we are committed to status quo – and it remains my belief that many academics who would call themselves ‘radical’ or ‘progressive’ are, in fact, deeply committed to it, not least because they cannot imagine alternatives – it is clearly breaking down. So we cannot go back. The question is, where shall we go forward?

P.S. Some people asked me about other stuff I had written on the topic. Most academic publications are listed (in chronological order) under Articles and books; I also blog and write invited op-eds. Some of the stuff directly relevant for this one are:

Recent speech at the British Sociological Association’s Presidential Event (2025)
This post from LSE Impact on the parallel crises in the US and UK HE, written during my visiting fellowship at University of California-San Diego in Winter/Spring 2025
Blog posts that mention higher education

On the relationship between academic freedom, autonomy, and the state:

Bacevic, J. (2024). No Such Thing as Free Speech? Performativity, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in the UK. Law and Critique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-023-09373-2
Bacevic, J. (2018). With or Without U? Assemblage theory and (de)territorializing the university. Globalisation, Societies and Education, https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2018.1498323 [pdf]
Bacevic, J. 2018. University under attack? Politics, contestation and agency beyond the neoliberal university. In: R. Barnett and M. Peters (eds). The Idea of the University: Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang. [pre-publication version, 2016]
Bacevic, J. 2017. Beyond the Third Mission: Toward an Actor-Based Account of Universities’ Relationship with Society. In: H. Ergül and S. Coşar, eds.: Universities in the Neoliberal Era: Academic Cultures and Critical Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 21-39.
Nokkala, T. and Bacevic, J. 2014. University Autonomy, Agenda Setting and the Construction of Agency: the case of the European University Association in the European Higher Education Area, European Educational Research Journal, Vol. 3 No. 16, 2014, pp. 699-714.

On political economy of higher education, including the relationship between extractivism and knowledge production:

Bacevic, J. (2020). Unthinking knowledge production: from post-Covid to post-carbon futures, Globalizations, 18(21),1206-1218. Open Access version: here. Publisher version: 10.1080/14747731.2020.1807855
Bacevic, J. (2019). Knowing Neoliberalism. Social Epistemology, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2019.1638990
Bacevic, J. and Muellerleile, C. (2017). The Moral Economy of Open Access. European Journal of Social Theory, SAGE Online First

On the relationship between social change, social inequalities, political subjectivities, and education policy:

Bacevic, J. 2016. “Education, Conflict, and Class Reproduction in Socialist Yugoslavia”, In: R. Archer, I. Duda and P. Stubbs, eds: Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism. London: Routledge, pp. 77-93.

Bacevic, J. 2015. “They had sex, drugs and rock’n’roll; we’ll have mini-jobs and loans to pay” – Transition, social change and student movements in the post-Yugoslav region, In: S. Horvat and I. Štiks, eds. Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism! Radical Politics After Yugoslavia. London: Verso.

Bacevic, J. 2015. ‘Divided Universities, Divided Societies? Higher Education, Elite Mobilisation, and Politics of Identity in the former Yugoslavia’, in F. Bieber and H. Heppner (eds) Universities and Elite Formation in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, Vienna: LIT Verlag, 267-283.

and, of course, my book:

Bacevic, J. 2014. From Class to Identity: Politics of Education Reforms in Former Yugoslavia. Budapest and New York, NY: Central European University Press.

Future of Higher Education: remarks for the 2025 British Sociological Association Presidential Event, 23 April, Manchester, UK

Blog, climate change, Conference presentations, higher education, Politics, social theory, theory teaching, Uncategorized

Hi all,

I want to start by thanking Rachel Brooks and the British Sociological Association for the invitation, as well as my co-panelists for being present. I want to thank all of you who have chosen to be here this afternoon, not only because, as we tend to say in a slightly facetious mode at conferences, there are so many other things you could be doing – by which we tend to mean, not only other panels you could be attending, but also taking a walk outside, catching up with friends, or sleeping – but because, in a slightly different way, there are other things you could be doing. At the very end of my remarks I will come back to what some of these things are.

There are, however, many other people and things that contributed to all of us being here today; the workers involved in organising this conference, from administrative staff to volunteers to cleaners and caterers; cooks making breakfast at the hotel this morning; the pickers at coffee plantations who make our coffee; workers in steel factories who smelted the material that goes into the rail tracks that carried the train that brought me to Manchester. Some of these things we tend to think about as being about higher education; others, less so.

This isn’t, if you were wondering, a covert argument for the ‘agency of things’ or STS-informed approach to higher education. Rather, it is to ask what we are doing when we talk about the future of higher education in a sociological language, in a space such as this, at a conference such as this? My work over the past decade has, among other things, been about how these forms of categorisation, domain-association and positioning – that is, the ‘aboutness’ of things – make certain forms of recognition and or/ignorance and invisibility (im)possible. My remarks today will be building on this.

When we talk about higher education, we tend to talk about funding, by which we mostly mean public, that is, tax-derived state funding, but we do not talk about the amount of funding UK universities are receiving from arms companies & other military technology manufacturers, including those currently involved in the bombing of Gaza, as research, investments and scholarships:

In the UK, the absolute champion in this category is the University of Glasgow, with £115,247,817.20 (value of partnerships with the world’s top 100 arms-producing companies in the last 8 years); Manchester is at £6,700,328.00 (see research from Demilitarise Education https://ded1.co/data/university). That is A LOT of scholarships for Palestinian students, as one of the people interviewed in the excellent documentary The Encampments says: I’d rather you didn’t bomb me, keep your scholarships.

Nor do we talk about the proportion of university staff pensions (yes, USS, the fund many of us defended so vigilantly in 2018 and have been defending since) still invested in fossil fuels.

We talk about the reproduction of social inequalities, by which we mostly mean, in Paul Willis’ perennially-relevant formulation, why working class kids get working class jobs (or why working class kids don’t make it to Oxbridge), but not about the fact that a lot of those other ‘prestigious’, ‘elite’, and non-working class jobs working class kids should presumably aspire to are in finance, digital technologies including surveillance (which I think Janja may be saying more about), or in fossil fuels. So is it OK then – as that butterfly meme says, “is this social mobility?”.

Not least, we talk of decolonising, by which we mostly mean making curricula a tiny bit more reflective of the diversity of knowledge production, usually by wedging in a few nonwhite people – the approach to teaching social theory I”ve described elsewhere as “white boys + DuBois” – but we do not talk about the continuing and new forms of extractive colonialism enabled, among other things, by treating international students as raw resources that can be mined for money (or sometimes money + cheap labour, as in the graduate to job market conversion), something I presume Aline will be addressing.

This, of course, is not a particular moral failure of ours. All forms of knowledge presuppose forms of ignorance. This does not make us ‘bad’ people, or at any rate much worse people than many similarly privileged. As the Buddhist thinker Pema Chödrön once I think said, we are like passengers in the backwards-facing seat on a moving train; we only see what we have just passed, never what is in front of us. Or, if you prefer a more familiar name, you can think of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, looking at the past but nonetheless propelled by the winds towards the future.

This connects to one of the main motifs of my academic work over the past decade, the question of non-prediction: what kind of futures do we become unable to see? As I have argued, it is particularly our embedding in institutions of knowledge production and the concomitant commitment to habitual ways of seeing, making, and relating to the world (among other things, by going to conferences) that makes us unable to see some kinds of futures. In the remaining two and a half minutes, I want to try and give you a brief view from the front seat.

The world is now firmly committed to at least 2 degrees C warming by the end of this century, and that is if we left all fossil fuels in the ground tomorrow. We are used to thinking of climate crisis as a crisis of nature, with images of melting ice caps and emaciated polar bears, but this is a social and political crisis. Rising authoritarianism, including Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy is climate crisis; the genocidal destruction of Gaza is climate crisis; and what is known as the refugee crisis is in fact a combination of famine- and industrial agriculture-induced migration combined with a broader drive towards retraditionalization in wealthy countries, including policing of reproduction and gender boundaries, amplifying anti-immigrant resentment and breeding more authoritarianism.

What is the future of higher education in this kind of world? When we talk about ‘higher education’, we have to acknowledge that the idea of higher education as a sector – as an organised and regulated activity distinct from specific institutions such as universities – is supervenient on the idea of a state (first, the imperial/colonial, then, increasingly, nation-state). In this context, the future of higher education involves reconsidering our relationship to the state. Clearly, in this context, just asking for more money from ‘the government’ won’t do. What is there to guarantee ‘higher education’ would not become handmaiden to authoritarianism, funnelling people into extractive jobs and positions (or ensuring their compliance by encapsulating them in cycles of debt), and amplifying racism and environmental degradation? Higher education institutions across the world will, increasingly, face a choice. Remaining part and parcel of the system that (re)produces it, that enables this to function – or?

So, to return to my initial remark, in this context, I want to ask – what else could you be doing? If you weren’t here, where else could you be – at a protest, an occupation, a community food distribution? Or ‘shopping’, digitally consuming/doomscrolling while performing reproductive labour at home? Because your answer to that will determine the future of higher education.

Five good things

Blog, climate change, Media, Politics, Reviews, Uncategorized

The day after the Conservative Party won the 2019 UK election, I came up with a trick. It was the culmination of several weeks (if not months) of prolonged exhaustion and creeping despair, as I watched parts of the UK’s supposed ‘left’ systematically tear away at the country’s only progressive political current in years, and its only shot at creating a vaguely decent society – you know, a society that would not systematically humiliate its members – dissolve in the toxic concoction of incurable conservatism (small c, this time), parochialism rendered even more obsolete by a self-aggrandizing belief in the centrality of the UK to the world (historical or contemporaneous, irrelevant), and genuflection at the tiniest display of power, authority, or hierarchy so absolute that you would be forgiven for thinking it genetic. In other words, this set of nasty gammonish tendencies – to my surprise, seemingly equitably distributed across the political spectrum – proved a fertile ground for a campaign whose ostensible target was to prove Jeremy Corbyn was unelectable, and the actual to make sure he would not be elected. Add to this that many of us were fighting on several fronts – in one of the rare moves I explicitly disagreed with, my union (UCU) decided to run another round (third or fourth? in two years) of strike action, thus making sure we would have to split time, energy, and resources between election campaigning and picket lines (for why it is impossible to unify the two causes – even in such an obvious case – see above). For me, it was the beginning of a very dark period of five years – of fear (of what was going to happen), of anger (for the fact so many people, including those I believed I shared basic ideological affinities with, allowed it to happen), and disappointment, not so much because Corbyn didn’t get elected but because I saw, possibly for the first time, in such stark terms: most people would rather suffer in a world they know than risk the chance of building a different one. In that moment – the day after, still sniffly from the downpour I got caught in during the last desperate attempt at canvassing the evening of the election – I Tweeted something along the lines of “whatever else you do today, go out and look at some trees. Stand by the river. There are things bigger than politics. There are things older than the Conservative Party.” (I’m paraphrasing, not only because I have no desire to log back into Twitter but also because the actual formulation is not particularly important.)

I remember being slightly surprised by the volume of positive reactions (kindness and self-care, to put it politely, not being exactly my default style of interaction on social media back in the day – the platform has its own dynamics and patriarchy failed spectacularly at instilling in me the tendency to please other people), but mostly because what seemed to me amalgamated commonsensical advice – decenter your own feelings; step away from social media; in times of great turmoil, seek solace in things you know are eternal – seemed to strike a chord with so many people. It was probably the first time I truly understood how many people were never taught basic self-soothing and regulation skills, but also how much of a difference prior experience of system breakdown/state collapse made in terms of knowing how to cope (together with a group of other ex-Yu scholars, we reflected on this here).

Five years later, I know better than to offer unsolicited advice :). I am also aware that people, especially people in the US, have long traditions (obviously, most of these reaching way before settler colonialism) of sacralization and reverence for nature. Hence, it is not my intention to share this particular trick, not least because I tend to think people who are receptive to this mode of relating to the world either already do it and practice in similar (even if superficially or nominally different) ways, or would otherwise need to change perception in order to avoid this becoming yet another ‘trick’ to allow them to stay, in fact, deeply plugged into the circuit of capitalist (over)production, including affective (a bit like fintechbros using mindfulness to continue building extractive infrastructures whereas being actually ‘mindful’ would inevitably lead to the realisation your mode of living is directly harmful to many beings). However, the memory of many positive reactions to that original Tweet in 2019 – at a time that was a time of anger, and disappointment, and despair for many in the UK – made me want to share a different technique, one that I hope can not only help people dealing with anger and despair but which I also believe will come in handy in knowing how to orient ourselves in the future, especially as the world burns.

Why this isn’t a practice of gratitude

The technique is a related one, but different in terms of its orientation. It is called ‘five good things’, and, true to its name, it asks you to think of five things. Do not be tempted, however, to think this is about your life, or what you have, or ‘things’ in the sense of material objects. In other words, you are not meant to name ‘things’ such as “well, I at least have a job” or “my child is healthy” or “I ate a really good burrito yesterday”. All of these examples – while important – are either cases that are meant to invoke gratitude (so, basically, either outsourcing responsibility to a different/higher power, or, in some forms, acknowledging the fundamentally underdetermined nature of the universe and the role of luck – in other words, all of these things could have turned out differently) or to affirm your own capabilities, usually expressed in and measured by money or equivalents/proxies – power, prestige, admiration (under present circumstances, chances are that the burrito you ate is a burrito you bought, in which case your sense of satisfaction comes from your purchasing power. This is somewhat different if the burrito was e.g. part of a community kitchen or food-sharing event, which would hopefully lead you to recognize your relation to and interdependence with others, but this is not clear-cut either – not least because of the often disproportionate amount of cooking/caring labour performed by women in some of these settings).

Instead, think of five things that are beautiful, and good, and true.

It’s really important that they are all three. Many things are beautiful (at least by culturally dominant/conventional standards) without being either good or true. True in the sense of being true to form, rather than correspondent to the actual state of affairs; for instance, it is almost impossible for a rose as a flower to not be ‘true’ (unless it’s an artificial rose), but it is quite possible for a rose being given as a gesture to not be ‘true’ (as in not being motivated by genuine feeling). Similarly, it is possible for a plant to not be ‘good’ – for instance, if it is a plant introduced to eradicate other plants in the area, or to eliminate sources of food for diverse other organisms.

(There is, of course, a humongous philosophical background literature on defining each of these terms, and especially their interrelation/combination. If you are not familiar with it, I could probably suggest starting with Schopenhauer and Kant, or even Plato, but I do not think this is either necessary or helpful. Every human is capable of reflecting on what it means to say something is beautiful, good, and true; namedropping dead white men can sometimes distract from it, and in most cases under present circumstances turns into an exercise of academic prowess, rather than a way to think with others).

You can think about concrete instances as well as things, generically; sometimes, one will be more appropriate, sometimes the other. For instance, I tend to think that bunnies, in general, are good, and beautiful, and true; I may see a particular bunny for which I will think this, but given that bunnies in the form in which I encounter them are relatively hard to individuate, odds are I will continue thinking this for the bunny kind, rather than a particular bunny. Equally, I tend to think friendships are a good thing, but odds are that if I think of any friendship (or relationship) at any point as beautiful, good, and true, I will be thinking about a concrete relation.

(Again, masses of philosophical, theoretical, and empirical work – my own included – on how we categorise groups, genera, members, and how we form judgments based on inclusion/exclusion, derivation, and boundary categories. Much interesting if you are a social ontologist. Possibly less if you’re not).

Have you thought of five things that are beautiful, and good, and true?

Now fight like hell for those things.

Not to ‘have’ them or to keep them; but to enable them to exist in exactly that form, in their own goodness, and truth, and beauty.

If you ever find yourself in a period of despair, think of these five things. At the end of each week, see if you can come up with five. Sooner rather than later, you will begin to realize that the things worth fighting for are not those the majority of the people are taught to fight about.

I may publish my list from time to time.

Further inspiration:

Maria Popova shared at the start of this week Louise Erdrich’s poem “Resistance” – I love Erdrich but I have not read this one before. It is also related to another project I am developing, so seemed perfectly resonant.

Another element of resonance – as I was finishing this blog post I tuned into The Philosopher conversation between Isabelle Laurenzi and Lida Maxwell on Maxwell’s new book, “Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love“. It seems that the awe with the world that Maxwell traces in the relationship between Carson and Dorothy Freeman as well as much as their relationship to the natural world very much resonates with the feeling I hope these exercises will inspire – the combination of wonder, dedication, and a commitment to change the (human) world. I’m yet to read the book (as I found out recently, living in the UK while being temporarily in the US creates massive issues in terms of e-book licensing), but very much looking forward to it.

Speaking of books that are about the sense of wonder, this book – “A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship With Nature” by James William Gibson (2009) – is probably among the nicest, most beautiful (both in terms of style and in terms of content) books I’ve read recently. I also learned many things (not least, that Paul Watson, the founder of Sea Shepherd, volunteered as a medic for the American Indian Movement protesters at Wounded Knee, as well as about RFK’s environmentalist past, which makes his public health policies even more bizarre); the book is a remarkable feat of sociological analysis that manages to not be condescending. This book is definitely one of the things that are beautiful, and good, and true.

Incidentally, I also ended up watching again Sarah Polley’s Women Talking (2022), which has a scene in which August is asked to make a list of good things. I think this is a good list! It is also one of the best films made about the process of turning anger and frustration into collective will/self-determination; while depicting a truly dark incident, it is a good example of things beautiful, good, and true.

Soundtrack:

Moby ft. Benjamin Zephaniah – Where is your pride?

Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) – New World Water

Reading (on) resistance

Blog, Politics, Reviews, Uncategorized

I’ve been in the US for about a week. The feeling of utter shock, panic, and disarray among people – qualitatively different from what could be discernible back when I was across the pond, qualitatively different from the previous Trump regime, qualitatively different from many previous instances of ‘unprecedentedness’ I had written on (the Covid-19 pandemic, the Brexit referendum, Trump’s 2016 election victory, the breakup of former Yugoslavia) – is tangible. Good centrist liberals and their projections are falling like planes out of the sky, the latter, by the way, not a metaphor at all.

It is easy to be both dismayed and cynical, but both are, ultimately, defense mechanisms. To give into collective panic/despair is (I guess) to at least temporarily redistribute anxiety by letting it dissolve into a collective feeling. To knowingly smirk with a “we have, in fact, told you so” may be easy for someone like me, who works on the politics of non-prediction, and is relatively protected from dismissal, deportation, or incarceration, but it is a way of insulating yourself from the collapse that is very real, and very present, for a lot of people. Given that I am, for better or worse, in a plethora of social networks that are dominated by academics, and give that academics are more

likely to be like this

than like this

let alone like this

the least I can do, then, is to offer some resources for resistance, from the perspective I have (east-central European/transnational, UK-domiciled migrant; woman*; educated, middle-class; some experience of movement, organising, etc.) and with the resources (and constraints) I currently have. None of this is meant to be exhaustive (maybe just exhausted :)) and hopefully only adds to the bountiful and excellent resources, networks and initiatives comrades in the US have been building for years.

The Emperor is truly naked – but still an Emperor

I think what most people are experiencing now is best described as cognitive dissonance about the state. On the one hand, they are becoming rapidly aware that what they believed are the stalwarts of liberal democracy (the rule of law, checks & balances, accountability and the like) are barely scarecrows that can be blown away overnight, and the crows are no longer scared. On the other hand, they are beginning to realise — if they had not before — what truly unchecked power looks like. (Every leader, potentially, is a dictator; the fact the US has a presidential system, with high weighting on executive power, just makes it more likely there will eventually be one not bound by convention to hide it). This means that, for a lot of people, the state is simultaneously all of a sudden very absent (FAA being just the most obvious, and immediately high-risk, case) *and* very present (both in terms of intrusion into domains most Americans are taught to associate with ‘privacy’ – finances – and in terms of threats of further deportation, incarceration, and retaliatory dismissal).

For those lucky enough to be able to think about (rather than just react to) these developments, this poses a problem because it places them in the uncomfortable zone most people have been politely educated out of: thinking about what to do when the state fails in a way that does not entail asking for more state. Surprise! There is a whole group of political theories that engages with exactly this problem. It starts with an A, ends with an M, and is not animism. Even better, many of the classical (and more recent) works in this line of thinking just end up being magically available, online, for free. Two particularly good websites for this are here and here. I know, wild. Worth thinking about, if nothing else, because it also turns out many of these will probably give you good ideas for how to face the next couple of years.

In addition to or beyond this, or if you just want to get the hang of self-organising without having to confront your own ideological limits (but if you do: try here, here, or here), these are some of the handy reading tools I’ve selected a few from the list of my favourite books in 2024, and added a few I believe to be most useful for the present situation.

For brief inspiration: To change everything (CrimethInc)
To see the work done by collectives across the world, including during the previous Trump administration: Constellations of care: anarchafeminism in practice (ed. by Cindy Barukh Milstein)
To remember that anti-neoliberalism does not equal nationalist protectionism: Fields, factories and workshops (Petr Kropotkin)
To learn from organisers who have been doing it for a long time: Shut it down: stories from a fierce, loving resistance (Lisa Fithian)
To learn how to organise and not burn out (and also not be terrible to other people if you do!): Let this radicalize you: organizing and the revolution of reciprocal care (Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba)
To not forget that there is no way to address a political crisis without addressing the climate crisis (and, of course, capitalism as the root cause) – but that there are so many ways (already tried and tested) to do it: The solutions are already here: strategies for ecological revolution from below (Peter Gelderloos)
To recall that some people have, in fact, foreseen this: The Parable of the Sower & The Parable of the Talents (Octavia Butler)
To acknowledge that when you say “someone should do something” that someone is, in fact, you: Mass Action (Rosa Luxemburg)
To remember that there are many other places where this, and worse, had been true for a long time: We are not pawns, we are people who rose against the regime (Jwana Aziz)
Again, CrimethInc: tools and tactics

This should be more than enough to start from. Get reading.

*I realized, upon reflection, that this term is a bit inaccurate – I am comfortable with ‘woman’ or ‘she’ in languages where gender is primarily grammatical (so where chairs, stones, and concepts have a ‘gender’), both for convenience and because it is more difficult (but not impossible) to associate grammatical gender with hierarchical difference; but I have never felt any degree of affinity with the cluster of ideas around supposed feminine ‘essence’, even if they do not veer into biological determinism, reductionism, or transphobia. It is thus that in these languages – and contexts, UK being one of them – that I tend to use ‘they’ or ‘she/they’.

Refuse, restrict, redirect

Blog, climate change, higher education, history, Philosophy of social science, Politics, social theory, Uncategorized

On stepping away from the academic treadmill

This post is written at the start of the academic year 24/5, another year that everyone in academia is approaching with a sense of dread. This is the year in which we are facing institutions’ inability or unwillingness to condemn the genocide that we’ve spent the past year witnessing; their lack of capacity to divest from companies and systems that enable and perpetrate it; their, conversely, willingness and readiness (kudos to exceptions!) to crack down on students and staff who dare to stand up and at least call out the violent collapse of all political norms. Speaking of collapses, we are also witnessing the acceleration of climate collapse, which institutions sometimes pay lip service to, but do little to stop or challenge.

In the UK, what has been described as financial but should in fact be dubbed higher education’s crisis of legitimacy becomes apparent, as institutions introduce redundancies, including cutting the same staff whose publications, careers, or successes they proudly displayed on their home pages; burnout and what has (in another British penchant for euphemism) been dubbed the mental health crisis but in fact should be called necropolitics of academic labour continues to take those ‘lucky’ to escape the cuts; and there is no, absolutely none, conversation about what is it exactly we are doing, how and why, nor where we hope to be in 5, 10, 25 years.

It is also the academic year I will begin working part-time. The reasons for this decision (as for any decision) are complex, but they mostly have to do with coming to terms with what I believe to be the moral, political and, if you wish, ontological implications of the above. The assumption that you should always want more – money, status, publications, prestige – goes by so unquestioned even in parts of the academia that like to think of themselves as critical that willingly and visibly choosing less of any or all of these things tends, at best, to elicit incomprehension; at worst, fantastical hypotheses. In lieu of this, I thought I could share some useful or adaptable¹ ideas how to create space between yourself and this context, to enable you to survive it – and, hopefully, generate alternatives that are healing, constructive, and revolutionary, rather than harmful, destructive, and reproductive of the exact same systems of oppression. This means I hope these ideas can be repurposed for whatever circumstances you find yourself in. They are, however, generated from my specific positionality, values, and experience; this means they are unlikely to apply to your situation verbatim, even if we occupy structurally similar positions.

Refuse forms of recognition and validation that tie you to or make you dependent on exploitative² institutions.

There are reams and reams of paper written on the neoliberal techniques of measuring, (e)valuating, and fostering competition between people. Somewhat less on the degree to which academics internalize them. We are all guilty of this. I as well, despite investing a lot of effort to counter this tendency, as well as literally having written a PhD on why it happens, and why we cannot see it (yes, academia makes you stupider). The first step in moving away from the grind, then, is refusing to be judged solely or primarily by these optics and metrics, and developing alternative forms of valorisation, justification or, simply, reasons to exist (and I mean, especially for women, forms of valorisation other than care labour).

For my part, refusing institutional (de)valuation was not exactly a choice: my own institution made it perfectly clear where in their hierarchy of human beings I belonged (about 4 spine points or roughly £4,000/annum below men), and then persisted with differential (de)valuation over the next few years. In this kind of situation, you basically have two options. One, you can accept/internalize norms of the institution even when they are arbitrary and discriminatory (as my research demonstrates, intersectional bias will persist even in ‘soft’ evaluations), and either doubt your own competence, or work yourself to death by trying to overperform to reach the standard that differently-bodied, -accented, and/or -skinned (select combo) colleagues satisfy just by existing. Or you can choose to develop an internal (moral, intellectual, whatever you wish to call it) compass and decide what kinds of work, output, and engagement you truly value and find compelling; what kind of topics, causes, and individuals merit your time, and you really have something to contribute to; and, perhaps, what kind of work will make the world a better place. Of course, no-one (or close to no-one) is lucky enough to be able to do only this sort of work; but you can certainly make the decision to limit your dedication to the mechanisms of your own exploitation and channel that energy into something else. Which brings me to (2):

Restrict the access of exploitative institutions (and individuals) to your time and energy.

This, for the purposes of this post, can primarily be coded as time and energy invested in intellectual labour, but the logic is transposable to emotional labour (hint: that one friend who always expects you to help them navigate life’s dramas) or cognitive labour (hint: the amount of time you spend scrolling on social media, both generating income for digital platforms and training their or third-party algorithms – hence labour – and literally expanding energy, both by directing attention and actually consuming resources, from electricity to food and water).

As Marxist political economy teaches us, the nature of capitalism is such that it must generate profit (something it is increasingly failing at). In order to do this, it must extract more and more of your work for at least the same if not lower wage. This means that, even if nominally your working hours remain the same, you are – quite likely – working more. Furthermore, due to the nature of academic labour, it is relatively easy for this work to colonize other aspects of your life. As I’ve written before, your interest in, say, disability justice may be objectively independent of your relationship to your employer. But if a) your increasing awareness of disability justice can be converted into ‘EDI’; b) you will be using it to teach, publish, or cite in any way that reproduces academic capital (for instance, by publishing in peer-reviewed journals, or citing academic publications); c) you will be reading in your own spare time (does your workload feature an allowance for reading or ‘scholarship’?); in other words, if any or all of these apply – congratulations, your employer is benefitting from free labour. Yours.

As the example(s) above demonstrates, it is almost impossible to remain in a paid relationship and not be subject to this form of exploitation. This is why this is about restricting, not refusing entirely; of course, if you are entirely independent of paid (or waged) labour, that’s great, but is not the reality for most people. Restricting can take a variety of forms (needless to say, they are not mutually exclusive). One pretty standard form is so-called ‘working to contract’, where employees refuse to perform work or tasks outside of those specified in their contract. Members of UCU in the UK have practised working to contract as part of Action Short of A Strike in a series of recent industrial actions pertaining to pay and pensions (viciousness with which some universities have responded to ASOS is a sad reflection of how much working above contractual obligations has become normalized). Another is ‘quiet quitting’, which had become a buzzword reflecting the growing realization that, to borrow the title of Sarah Jaffe’s brilliant book, work won’t love you back (on why not to quit quietly on some other occasion).

But even just (‘just’) saying no assiduously to demands that overstep that boundary works. This isn’t about being ‘selfish’, or prioritizing own gain (academia gives you plenty of opportunities for that). Very simply, when faced with a demand, ask: who does this serve? What purpose does it serve? Is this a purpose I can get behind? What is the best way in which I can contribute to this purpose? My guess is that, in some contexts at least, you will begin to see that the purpose you believe you are contributing to – for instance, making the world a better place – is better served through other forms of engagement (if it’s not, great, you’re lucky). Which brings me to (3):

Redirect the labour time, resources, and energy into something else – ideally something that does not serve the reproduction of capitalism.

Now, of course, many people do work two jobs – including two full- (or close to full-) time jobs – either because this is the only way they can make ends meet or because what they are actually passionate or care about does not really pay (or not yet, or not enough). Equally revered and reviled – depending which side of neoliberalism you fall on – this approach is often contrasted with the security of a full-time job. Under traditional conditions of industrial capitalism, this, of course, makes some sense: a full-time permanent job equalled protections for pay through collective bargaining, benefits, pension and sick leave (and even health insurance, in some cases); in socialism, it even meant collective holidays or access to specific holiday sites (known as ‘corporate perks’ in capitalism); and, of course, it also meant – at least for those working in organizations that are not authoritarian or top-down – the possibility to work together for a future, in other words, to collectively decide what the organization was meant to be about (the meaning of co-op).

I certainly do not need to rehash all the reasons why this is no longer the case. But in addition to oft-repeated diagnoses like ‘neoliberalism’, “Thatcher” or “Toreeeys”, another element appears: the fact that even absent some of these conditions (neoliberalism is visibly dying, though it is hell-bent on taking you with it) few people have the energy, willingness or vision to build a world that’s more than just a dusted-off version of the old one with, you know, slightly better tech (NHS with in-app prescriptions or good pensions with access to online banking).

This has been the slowest and possibly most painful realization for me since moving permanently to the UK, some ten years ago. Most people’s imagination of alternatives is so depleted that the best it can come up with is a slightly less terrible version of the existing order, if not a return to its earlier form (something proponents of geoengineering and other technosolutions realize). Mark Fisher, who had the quirk for being a canary in the mine, encapsulated it well in the sentence “capitalist realism”. But it’s not (even) that the steady colonization of the lifeworld by forms of economic exchange has proceeded to the degree that few people are able to imagine alternatives; it’s that I strongly suspect they would not know what to do with them.

The problem with alternatives, as you learn if you grow up in (real) socialism and/or live in communities that share labour equitably, is that they are not perfect, and they also require hard work. Visions of a post-capitalist utopia where all work is performed by machines are both ludicrous and unsustainable (if nothing else, in terms of climate-wrecking resource extraction). This work, at times, can feel as uninspiring and as gruelling as in capitalism (let’s be honest, no-one likes cleaning toilets); if it is just and equitable, there are no unseen ‘others’ – migrants, women, underpaid research assistants, good citizens – to offload it to. For a lot of people, the preferred option then begins to be selectively shutting your eyes and pretending not to see your own implication in reproducing these systems, whilst making meek pronouncements about commitments to social justice or equality or even the good of non-human others, providing it can be safely done from the safety of your own home, Netflix and Amazon accounts, and Deliveroo meals.

What I want to propose as an antidote to this loss of a world-building capacity is a version of what James Scott dubbed a while ago ‘anarchist calisthenics’, but with a twist. Instead of imagining challenges to authority/status quo, I believe we must, every single day, engage in practising existing differently. I also think this need not (necessarily) take the form of ‘transgression’ or violation; many ways of existing differently are not explicitly proscribed. Perhaps we could dub this ‘existentialist calisthenics‘.

One way to start practising existing differently is engaging in simple acts of not contributing to capitalist reproduction. For instance: instead of going ‘shopping’, go for a walk, but not with an intention or purpose or to ‘exercise’ or to ‘think better’. Just walk. Or do nothing: as Jenny Oddell among others has written, not succumbing to the dictate of constant busyness can be surprisingly difficult for people who got used to being constantly plugged into the digital capitalist machinery (I recently learned that zoomers have become so unaccustomed to, as Pascal would have put it, coexisting with their own thoughts that apparently there is a term for not distracting yourself endlessly during car or plane rides – ‘rawdogging’.)

For instance: instead of spending the weekend preparing for the work ahead, or doomscrolling in an attempt to postpone this work, sleep. Or hang out with friends. Or go to a library and pick up a random book, spend ten minutes reading it, and then return it to the shelf. Do this several times over. Do not do this in order to “select one to take out” or “inform yourself about” or “see what else is new in”. Do it without purpose. The whole point is to break the cycle of ‘usefulness’ or ‘purposefulness’, which has, for most people, come to stand for ‘service to the capitalist economy’. You don’t necessarily need to go to the lengths of spending the weekend painting banners or distributing meals to the homeless or protesting the war in Palestine (though, as you learn to reclaim some of your personal time from the circuits of production, you may find out that there are more worthy ways of investing it than doomscrolling or spending money).

Making a conscious decision not to invest your energy and time into something that feeds the system, and to redirect it into something that does not, is the first step off the treadmill. It is, of course, even better if you do something that helps other people, non-humans, and causes, even if it’s a tiny thing: plant some flowers, pet a cat, chat to a person in the street. These small acts of redirection – out and away from the circuit of capitalism and into something else – will help sustain your ‘world-building capacity’, your ability not only to dream about a different world (which we are all prone to doing, given how terrible the one we inhabit is), but to begin to create it.

P.S. It’s important to note that I believe these three steps need to go together, and in sequence: just refusing the validation systems, methods and ceremonies of capitalism (How much do you earn? How many followers do you have? How thin, or coiffed, or made-up – by which we mean, how much money have you spent on looking it – are you? How successfully do you perform the usually unpaid labour of care, either by parenting, or cleaning, cooking, or just making capitalism look nicer?) will probably leave you feeling empty or lacking purpose (plus, possibly, deflated, once you realize how much of your life has been dedicated to them). Just restricting your expenditure on capitalist forms of (re)production will probably leave you with a much larger volume of time and energy, which is obviously fine – most of us have been so wrung out by constant competitive demands of capitalist overwork that everyone can benefit from a bit of extra time to recover, heal, and care for oneself. After that, however, you will probably feel the need to channel that energy somewhere. Old work demands will be quick to offer you relief from the shocking freedom of your own time. Redirecting this time and energy – even if it’s 10 minutes each day or one hour every month – into something that serves dismantling these oppressive systems, or helps other humans/non-humans, or the planet – will both make it easier for other people to exit them, and for you to resist being sucked back in.

More about how to do that in some future post. For the time being, start practising.

I would ask you to suspend, if only for the time it takes you to read this post, the impulse to think about all the ways in which we are different (“easy for you, you don’t have children” or “maybe you can do that, you don’t have a student loan” or even “ah but it’s different for those in Russell Group institutions”), and focus on what we might have in common – or what, despite differences, you can use to create your own version. I move to these, however, I want to clarify two major structural affordances, which we do not discuss enough: migration status and finance.

Migration status: migrants on Skilled Worker (Tier 2) visa in the UK are required to work full time, for a single employer. This is the visa I have been on since I started working at Durham, having switched from Tier 4 (Doctoral Extension Scheme, which has a similar set of rules).
On a Tier 2 visa, your right to reside in the country is dependent on your employment status, which is dependent on your employer. So, for instance, if you lose your job – or for any reason, for instance, injury or partial disability, become unable to perform it on a full-time basis – your right to exist in the UK is automatically terminated. You are also not eligible for benefits, as the little sentence “no recourse to public funds” reminds you. In the eventuality that, say, you contracted Covid in the course of doing your job, developed long Covid, and as a consequence became incapable of working full-time, you would receive a kind letter from the Home Office giving you about ten days to leave the country. This, obviously, puts migrant workers into a slightly disadvantaged position. This is in addition to financial inequality (visa application fees, which few academic employers cover, plus the Immigration Health Surcharge, which, to the best of my knowledge, none do, mean that every single migrant worker is by definition between £2,500 and £5,000 poorer than their hypothetical non-migrant counterpart hired on the same salary – and that’s if they don’t have dependents). It also, needless to say, makes the stakes in retaining our jobs – assuming they even meet the minimum income threshold for Tier 2 visas – quite high.

In 2023, I switched to the Global Talent visa, which has a wider scope of flexibility in terms of employment (in itself a telling reflection of UK’s tiered immigration system), after which I became eligible for Indefinite Leave to Remain, the legal resident status that gives one similar rights to full citizens. The sheer feeling of relief came as a surprise even to me – I had not realized, up until that point, how much anxiety I had carried around my immigration status; as a relatively privileged, white, highly educated and securely employed person, I always compared myself with migrants in significantly less secure positions. Now, as anyone who has worked with me will testify, I am hardly the type to not raise their voice when something is unjust or can be made more equitable. But the difference that knowing I am not legally indentured to my employer made came as a shock, not least because it really made me re-appraise the absence of agency among people who did not have the same kind of legal constraint.

Financial. In summer of 2024, I was promoted to Associate Professor. This meant I was able to drop my working hours without a significant loss of income (though, of course, I did not know this would happen at the point when I chose to reduce my working hours). It also, of course, means I forfeited the additional salary. I had done similar things before, on several occasions; one included leaving a prestigious tenure-track postdoc (in Denmark) to pursue a second PhD (on a doctoral stipend); the other involved leaving a tenured position (in Belgrade) for, initially, a visiting fellowship (at an international university in Hungary). On how to plan for this, what to do, or what not to do, on some other occasion. At this point, one thing worth remembering is that a chunk of your expenditure is probably oriented towards mitigating the effects of (over)work. As Benjamin Franklin has said, whenever faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty; otherwise, you end up with neither. ↩︎
We could spend another 10,000 words just on discussing the meaning of ‘exploitative’ (as with any other term, which I use casually, this being a blog post). If you’re interested in exegesis of concepts, try my academic work. Given that this isn’t academic work, I would say that ‘exploitative’ does not apply to just about any relationship where you give more than you receive (clearly – in some cases, such as parenting, reciprocity is impossible), but to any relationship that tries to extract more than you had committed to, are contractually obliged to, and had agreed to give (of course, ‘agreed to’ involves a lot of variation, depending whether we see choice and consent in purely liberal or a bit more nuanced terms).

In this sense, exploitative institutions are institutions that, for instance, normalize invisible labour and keep it invisibilized (see: care). Exploitative systems are systems that make your participation in them (for instance, capitalist economy) conditional on willingness to accept some forms of exploitation, regardless of whether done by you or to you, or, frequently, both (see: white feminism and outsourcing of care to migrant, often ethnically-minoritised women, for instance).

Let me be clear: I don’t think all forms of labour – perhaps even under capitalism, which is a system based on exploitation – need to be exploitative. But I think most are. I also do not think (despite the academic tendency to allocate all responsibility to “management”) that exploitative relations are limited (or necessary) to explicitly hierarchical relationships. You can have non-exploitative supervisors, and you can have exploitative peers and even (though this is rare in hierarchical systems) ‘juniors’. Nor are organizations, institutions or collectives exploitative by necessity. However, under contemporary capitalism, many are. It should also, at least by now, go without saying that certain characteristics mean you are more likely to be seen as exploitable, including by people who may nurture perfectly equitable relations with others. ↩︎

Climate change and the paradox of inaction

Blog, climate change, higher education, Politics, social theory, theory teaching, Uncategorized

One of the things I most often hear when talking to people about climate change is “but what to do?” This, in and of itself, is good news. Perhaps owing to evidently extreme weather patterns¹, perhaps owing to the concentrated efforts of primary/secondary school teachers², perhaps owing to unceasing (though increasingly brutally repressed, even in the UK & the rest of Europe) efforts of activists, it seems the question whether climate change is ‘real’ has finally taken the back seat to “and what shall we do about it?”.

While climate denialism may have had its day, challenges now come from its cousins (or descendants) in the form of climate optimism, technosolutionism, or – as Linsey McGoey and I have recently argued – the specific kind of ignorance associated with liberal fatalism: using indeterminacy to delay action until certain actions are foreclosed. In the latter context in particular, the sometimes overwhelming question “what to do” can compound and justify, even if unintentionally, the absence of action. The problem is that whilst we are deliberating what to do, certain kinds of action become less possible or more costly, thus limiting the likelihood we will be able to implement them in the future. This is the paradox of inaction.

My interest in this question came from researching the complex relationship between knowledge (and ignorance) and (collective or individual) action. Most commonsense theories assume a relatively linear link between the two: knowing about something will lead you to act on it, especially in the contexts of future risk or harm. This kind of approach shaped information campaigns, or struggles to listen to ‘the science’, from early conversations around climate change to Covid-19. Another kind of approach overrides these information- or education-based incentives in favour of behavioural ‘nudges’; awareness of cognitive processing biases (well-documented and plenty) suggested slightly altering decisional infrastructure would be more efficient than trying to, effectively, persuade people to do the right thing. While I can see sense in both approaches, I became interested instead in the ambiguous role of knowledge. In other words, under what conditions would knowing (about the future) prevent us from acting (on the future)?

There are plenty of examples to choose from: from the critique of neoliberalism to Covid-19 (see also the above) to, indeed, climate change (free version here). In the context of teaching, this question often comes up when students begin to realize the complexity of global economy, and the inextricability of questions of personal agency from what we perceive as systemic change. In other words, they begin to realize that the state of the world cannot be reduced either to individual responsibility nor to the supposedly impersonal forces of “economy”, “politics”, “power” etc. But this rightly leaves them at an impasse; if change is not only about individual agency nor about large-scale system change, how can we make anything happen?

It is true that awareness of complexity can often lead to bewilderment or, at worst, inaction. After all, in view of such extraordinary entanglement of factors – individual, cultural, economic, social, political, geological, physical, biological – it can be difficult to even know how to tackle one without unpicking all others. Higher education doesn’t help with this: most people (not all, but most) are, sadly, trained to see the world from the perspective of one discipline or field of study³, which can rightly make processes that span those fields appear impossible to grasp. Global heating is one such process; it is, at the same time, geological, meteorological, ecological, social, political, medical, economic, etc. As Timothy Morton has argued, climate change is a ‘hyperobject’; it exceeds the regular boundaries of human conceptualization.

Luckily, social theory, and in particular social ontology, is particularly good at analysing objects. Gender – e.g. the notion of ‘woman’ – is an example of such an object. This does not mean, by the way, that ‘deconstructing’ objects, concepts, or notions needs to reduce from the complexity of their interrelation; in some approaches to social ontology, a whole is always more than the sum (or any deducible interrelation) of its parts. In other words, to ‘deconstruct’ climate change is not in any way to deny its effects or the usefulness of the concept; it is to understand how different elements – which we conventionally, and historically, but not-at-all necessarily, associate with disciplines or ‘domains’ – interact and interrelate, and what that means. Differently put, the way disciplines construct climate change as an object (or assemblage) tells us something about the way we are likely to perceive solutions (or ways of addressing it, more broadly). It does not determine what is going to happen, but it points to the venues (and limitations) humans are likely to see in doing something about it.

Why does this matter? Our horizon of agency is limited by what we perceive as subjects, objects, and forms of agency. In less weighty parlance, what (and whom) we perceive as being able to do stuff; and the kind of stuff it (they) can do. This, also, includes what we perceive as limitations on doing stuff, real or not. Two limitations apply to all human beings; time and energy. In other words, doing stuff takes time. It also consumes energy. This has implications for what we perceive as the stuff we can do. So what can we do?

As with so many other things, there are two answers. One is obvious: do anything and everything you can, and do it urgently. Anything other than nothing. (Yes, even recycling, in the sense in which it’s better than not recycling, though obviously less useful than not buying packaging in the first place).

The second answer is also obvious, but perhaps less frequent. Simply, what you aim to do depends on what you aim to achieve. Aiming to feel a bit better? Recycle, put a poster up, maybe plant a tree (or just some bee-friendly plants). Make a bit of a difference to your carbon emissions? Leave the car at home (at least some of the time!), stop buying stuff in packaging, cut on flying, eliminate food waste (yes, this is fact very easy to do). Make a real change? Vote on climate policy; pressure your MP; insulate your home (if you have one); talk to others. Join a group, or participate in any kind of collective action. The list goes on; there are other forms of action that go beyond this. They should not be ranked, not in terms of moral rectitude, nor in terms of efficiency (if you’re thinking of the old ‘limitations of individual agency’ argument, do consider what would happen if everyone *did* stop driving and no, that does not mean ambulance vehicles).

The problem with agency is that our ideas of what we can do are often shaped by what we have been trained, raised, and expected to do. Social spaces, in this sense, also become polygons for action. You can learn to do something by being in a space where you are expected to do (that) something; equally, you learn not to do things by being told, explicitly or implicitly, that it is not the done thing. Institutions of higher education are really bad at fostering certain kinds of action, while rewarding others. What is rewarded is (usually) individual performance. This performance is frequently framed, explicitly or implicitly, as competition: against your peers (in relation to whom you are graded) or colleagues (with whom you are compared when it comes to pay, or promotion); against other institutions (for REF scores, or numbers of international students); against everyone in your field (for grants, or permanent jobs). Even instances of team spirit or collaboration are more likely to be rewarded or recognized when they lead to such outcomes (getting a grant, or supporting someone in achieving individual success).

This poses significant limitations for how most people think about agency, whether in the context of professional identities or beyond (I’ve written before about limits to, and my own reluctance towards, affiliation with any kind of professional let alone disciplinary identity). Agency fostered in most contemporary capitalist contexts is either consumption- or competition-oriented (or both, of course, as in conspicuous consumption). Alternatively, it can also be expressive, in the sense in which it can stimulate feelings of identity or belonging, but it bears remembering these do not in and of themselves translate into action. Absent from these is the kind of agency I, for want of a better term, call world-building: the ability to imagine, create, organize and sustain environments that do more than just support the well-being and survival of one and one’s immediate in-group, regardless how narrowly or broadly we may define it, from nuclear family to humanity itself.

The lack of this capacity is starkly evident in classrooms. Not long ago, I asked one of the groups I teach for an example of a social or political issue they were interested in or would support despite the fact it had no direct or personal bearing on their lives. None could (yes, the war on Gaza was already happening). This is not to say that students do not care about issues beyond their immediate scope of interest, or that they are politically disenchanted: there are plenty of examples to the contrary. But it is to suggest that (1), we are really bad at connecting their concerns to broader social and political processes, especially when it comes to issues on which everyone in the global North is relatively privileged (and climate change is one such issue, compared to effects it is likely to have on places with less resilient infrastructure); and (2), institutions are persistently and systematically (and, one might add, intentionally) failing at teaching how to turn this into action. In other words: many people are fully capable of imagining another world is possible. They just don’t know how to build it.

As I was writing this, I found a quote in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (excellent) As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance that I think captures this brilliantly:

Western education does not produce in us the kinds of effects we like to think it does when we say things like ‘education is the new buffalo’. We learn how to type and how to write. We learn how to think within the confines of Western thought. We learn how to pass tests and get jobs within the city of capitalism. If we’re lucky and we fall into the right programs, we might learn to think critically about colonialism. But postsecondary education provides few useful skill sets to those of us who want to fundamentally change the relationship between the Canadian state and Indigenous peoples, because that requires a sustained, collective, strategic long-term movement, a movement the Canadian state has a vested interest in preventing, destroying, and dividing.

(loc 273/795)

It may be evident that generations that have observed us do little but destroy the world will exhibit an absence of capacity (or will) to build one. Here, too, change starts ‘at home’, by which I mean in the classroom. Are we – deliberately or not – reinforcing the message that performance matters? That to ‘do well’ means to fit, even exceed, the demands of capitalist productivity? That this is how the world is, and the best we can do is ‘just get on with it’?

The main challenge for those of us (still) working in higher education, I think, is how to foster and stimulate world-building capacities in every element of our practice. This, make no mistake, is much more difficult than what usually passes for ‘decolonizing’ (though even that is apparently sometimes too much for white colonial institutions), or inserting sessions, talks, or workshops about the climate crisis. It requires resistance to reproducing the relationship to the world that created and sustains the climate crisis – competition-oriented, extractive, and expropriative. It calls for a refusal to conform to the idea that knowledge should, in the end, serve the needs of (a) labour market, ‘economy’, or the state. It requires us to imagine a world beyond such terms. And then teach students how to build it.

Hi, philosophy of science/general philosophy/general bro! Are you looking to ~~explain~~ mansplain stochastic phenomena to me? Please bear in mind that this is a blog post, and thus oriented towards general audience, and that I have engaged with this problem on a slightly different level of complexity elsewhere (and yes, I am well aware of the literature). Here, read up. ↩︎
One of the recent classes I taught that engaged with the question of denialism/strategic ignorance (in addition to a session on sociology of ignorance in Social Theory and Politics of Knowledge, an undergraduate module I taught at Durham in 21-23, and sessions on public engagement, expertise and authority, and environmental sociology in Public Sociology: Theory and Practice, which is a core MSc module at Durham, I teach a number of guest lectures on the relationship between knowledge and ignorance, scientific advice, etc.) was a pleasant surprise insofar as most students were well aware of the scale, scope, and reality of climate change. This is a pronounced change from some of my experiences in the preceding decade, when the likelihood of encountering at least the occasional climate skeptic, if not outright denialist (even if by the virtue of qualifying for the addressee of fn 1 above), was high(er). When asked, most of the students told me they learned about climate change in geography at school. Geography teachers, I salute you. ↩︎
The separation of sociology and politics in most UK degree programmes, for instance, continues to baffle me. ↩︎

In dreams begin responsibilities

Blog, Media, Politics, psychoanalysis, Uncategorized

Dreams are dangerous places. The control and awareness we tend to ascribe to what is usually referred to as ‘dreams’ in the waking state (ambitions; aspirations) is the exact opposite of the absence of control we tend to assume of dreams in the unconscious (sleeping) state, but neither is, strictly speaking, true; we do not choose our ambitions or orientations with full awareness, much like it is ridiculous to fully outsource authoriality when we sleep.

Psychoanalysis, of course, knows this. But, much like other disciplines and traditions that take dreams seriously, it is all-too-often equated with treating dreams as epistemology; that is, using dream logic to deduce something about the person who dreams, as if exiting from the forces generating the unconscious (in Freud’s formulation, following Ariadne’s thread) is ever truly possible. Sociology, needless to say, hardly does a better job, instead placing dreams at the uncomfortable (all boundaries, for sociology, are uncomfortable) boundary between collective and individual, as if the collective (unconscious) somehow permeates the individual, but always imperfectly (everything, in sociology, is imperfect, except its own imperfections).

Bion describes pathology as the inability to dream and inability to wake up; but is this not another (even if relaxed) call for discreteness, ushering in Freud’s Reality principle through the back door? This seems relevant given the relevance of the ability to dream (and dream differently) for any progressive movement or politics. What if elements of reality become so impoverished that there is nothing to dream about? This is one of the things I remember most clearly from reading Cormac McCarthy’s’s The Road – good, happy, and peaceful dreams usually mean you are dying. Reality, in other words, has become so unbearable that there is nothing but retreat into personal, individualized fantasy as a bulwark against this (this is also, though in a more complicated tone, a motif in one of my favourite films, Wenders’ Until the End of the World).

There are several possible ways out of this. One is to see dreams as shared; that is, to conceptualize dreaming as a collective, rather than solitary activity, and dreams as a possession of more than a single individual. Yet, I fear this too-easily slips into platitudes; as much as dreams (and beliefs, and feelings, and thoughts) can be similar and communicated, it is unlikely they can literally be co-created: individual mental states remain (and, in some cases, are indistinguishable from) individual.

(I’m aware that the Australian Aboriginal concept of Dreamtime may challenge this, but I’m reserving that for a different argument).

Instead of imagining some originary dream-state in which we are connected through other minds as if via a umbilical cord, I’m increasingly thinking it makes sense to conceptualize dreams as places; that is, instances of timespace with laws, sequences, and sets of actions and relations. In this sense, we can be in others’ dream(s), as much as they can be in our(s); but within this place, we are probably still responsible to ourselves. Or are we?

How free are you to act in someone else’s dream?

Public talks, invited lectures, media engagements

Uncategorized

(note that these are only updated occasionally and often retrospectively, so easiest to check my Twitter and/or Mastodon for upcoming event announcements)

Keynotes & invited lectures

2023

Talking across political divisions (breakout room with Angel Adams Parham), Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities’ annual conference “Friendship and Politics“, October 2023

How to think together: the social life of the mind, Bard College, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, May 2023 (Youtube)

2022

Epistemic what? Positioning, injustice, and political economy of knowledge production, Political Epistemology Network, Amsterdam, December 2022 (keynote lecture)

Epistemic positioning and the Merton Effect, School of Sociology and Social Policy, Leeds University, October 2022 (invited lecture)

Where is a university? Praxis Symposium IV: Post-pandemic higher education, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, May 2022 (keynote)

What is theory for? Department of Sociology, University of Hamburg, January 2022 (invited lecture)

2021

Epistemic positioning and epistemic injustice, University of Cambridge, Department of Sociology seminar series, October 2021 (invited lecture) (Youtube)

Doing (with) theory: beyond theory and practice, Hannover University, Leibniz Center for Science and Society, September 2021 (keynote)

In science we trust? Fatalistic liberalism, public risk, and ‘following the science’, Harvard University, July 2021 (guest lecture)

Authority and the politics of expertise (with Federico Brandmayr), The Philosopher seminar series, May 2021 (invited talk) (Youtube)

Identifying the unprecedented: knowledge production “in these unprecedented times”, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, May 2021 (invited talk)

Covid-19 and systemic risk, Cambridge Disasters Research Network series, March 2021 (invited talk) (Youtube)

On not knowing the future, Stanford University, Yugosplaining and Beyond, February 2021 (invited talk)

2020

On ‘following the science’, Imperial College, Network of Science Communication Professionals, August 2020 (invited talk)

Performing social science? Disciplines, expertise, and the Corona crisis, Politics of Economics seminar series, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, July 2020 (invited lecture) (Youtube)

What was neoliberalism and what comes next? A political economy of predicting the end, European Sociological Association’s Critical Political Economy mid-term conference, June 2020 (invited presentation)

2019

Who knows? Positioning and epistemic judgment in knowledge production, Centre for Discourse Analysis Seminar Series, University of Essex, December 2019 (invited talk)

Political economy of academic mobility in a post-carbon world, Academic Institutions and Communities in the Times of Ecological and Climate Disruption, Czech Academy of Arts and Sciences, October 2019 (invited talk)

Neoliberalism and the limits of critique in contemporary universities, Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) seminar series, Institute of Education, University of London, May 2019 (invited lecture)

More than a feeling? Neoliberalism and the emotional logic of critique, Critical Theory seminar series, University of Nottingham, April 2019 (invited talk)

2018

Writing our way out of neoliberalism?, Undisciplining: conversations at the edges, Gateshead, June 2018 (invited panel)

Reclaiming collective spaces for academic resistance, BSA Early Career Event, University of Newcastle, May 2018 (keynote lecture)

How to use social media, UCU Activists Day School, London, April 2018 (invited talk)

Who acts and what matters in the neoliberal university?, Department of Education Research Seminar Series, University of Lancaster, January 2018 (invited talk) (Youtube)

2015-17

Who Acts and What Matters in the Neoliberal University? Digital University in a Neoliberal Age, Contemporary Philosophy of Technology seminar series, University of Birmingham, November 2017 (invited talk) (Youtube — note that only the first half of the talk is recorded!)

Feminist epistemology, Philosophy of social science graduate course, Manchester Metropolitan University, November 2017 (guest lecture)

What does a university do? From purposes to uses of the university, and back, Central European University, Budapest, September 2017 (keynote lecture)

Neoliberalism on the periphery? Higher education and knowledge production after Yugoslavia, University College London (UCL), February 2016 (invited talk)

Higher education, conflict, and social justice beyond the neoliberal university, School of Social Justice seminar series, University College Dublin, May 2015 (invited talk)

Tár, or the (im)possibility of female genius

Blog, Politics, psychoanalysis, Reviews, social theory, theory teaching, Uncategorized

“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius;”, wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex; “and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.”

Of course, the fact that the book, and its author, are much better known for the other quote on processual/relational ontology – “one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman” – is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the first. A statement about geniuses cannot be a statement about women. A woman writing about geniuses must, in fact, be writing about women. And because women cannot be geniuses, she cannot be writing about geniuses. Nor can she be one herself.

I saw Tár, Todd Field’s lauded drama about the (fictional) first woman conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, earlier this year (most of this blog post was written before the Oscars and reviews). There were many reasons why I was poised to love it: the plot/premise, the scenario, the music (obviously), the visuals (and let’s be honest, Kate Blanchett could probably play a Christmas tree and be brilliant). All the same, it ended up riling me for its unabashed exploitation of most stereotypes in the women x ambition box. Of course the lead character (Lydia Tár, played by Blanchett) is cold, narcissistic, and calculating; of course she is a lesbian; of course she is ruthless towards long-term collaborators and exploitative of junior assistants; of course she is dismissive of identity politics; and of course she is, also, a sexual predator. What we perceive in this equation is that a woman who desires – and attains – power will inevitably end up reproducing exactly the behaviours that define men in those roles, down to the very stereotype of Weinstein-like ogre. What is it that makes directors not be able to imagine a woman with a modicum of talent, determination, or (shhh) ambition as anything other than a monster – or alternatively, as a man, and thus by definition a ‘monster’?

To be fair, this movement only repeats what institutions tend to do with women geniuses: they typecast them; make sure that their contributions are strictly domained; and penalize those who depart from the boundaries of prescribed stereotypical ‘feminine’ behaviour (fickle, insecure, borderline ‘hysterical’; or soft, motherly, caring; or ‘girlbossing’ in a way that combines the volume of the first with the protective urges of the second). Often, like in Tár, by literally dragging them off the stage.

The sad thing is that it does not have to be this way. The opening scene of Tár is a stark contrast with the closing one in this regard. In the opening scene, a (staged) interview with Adam Gopnik, Lydia Tár takes the stage in a way that resists, refuses, and downplays gendered stereotypes. Her demeanor is neither masculine nor feminine; her authority is not negotiated, forced to prove itself, endlessly demonstrated. She handles the interview with an equanimity that does not try to impress, convince, cajole, or amuse; but also not charm, outwit, or patronize. In fact, she does not try at all. She approaches the interviewer from a position of intellectual equality, a position that, in my experience, relatively few men can comfortably handle. But of course, this has to turn out to be a pretense. There is no way to exist as a woman in the competitive world of classical music – or, for that matter, anywhere else – without paying heed to the gendered stereotypes.

A particularly poignant (and, I thought, very successful) depiction of this is in the audition scene, in which Olga – the cellist whose career Tár will help and who will eventually become the object of her predation – plays behind a screen. Screening off performers during auditions (‘blind auditions’) was, by the way, initially introduced to challenge gender bias in hiring musicians to major orchestras – to resounding (sorry) success, making it 50% more likely women would be hired. But Tár recognizes the cellist by her shoes (quite stereotypically feminine shoes, by the way). The implication is that even ‘blind’ auditions are not really blind. You can be either a ‘woman’ (like Olga, young, bold, straight, and feminine); or a ‘man’ (like Lydia, masculine, lesbian, and without scruples). There is no outside, and there is no without.

As entertaining as it is to engage in cultural criticism of stereotypical gendered depiction in cinemas, one question from Tár remains. Is there a way to perform authority and expertise in a gender-neutral way? If so, what would it be?

People often tell me I perform authority in a distinctly non-(stereotypically)-feminine way; this both is and is not a surprise. It is a surprise because I am still occasionally shocked by the degree to which intellectual environments in the UK, and in particular those that are traditionally academic, are structurally, relationally, and casually misogynist, even in contexts supposedly explicitly designed to counter it. It is not a surprise, on the other hand, as I was raised by women who did not desire to please and men who were more than comfortable with women’s intellects, but also, I think, because the education system I grew up in had no problems accepting and integrating these intellects. I attribute this to the competitive streak of Communist education – after all, the Soviets sent the first woman into space. But being (at the point of conception, not reception, sadly) bereft of gendered constraints when it comes to intellect does not solve the other part of the equation. If power is also, always, violence, is there a way to perform power that does not ultimately involve hurting others?

This, I think, is the challenge that any woman – or, for that matter, anyone in a position of power who does not automatically benefit from male privilege – must consider. As Dr Autumn Asher BlackDeer brilliantly summarized it recently, decolonization (or any other kind of diversification) is not about replacing one set of oppressors with another, so having more diverse oppressors. Yet, all too frequently, this kind of work – willingly or not – becomes appropriated and used in exactly these ways.

Working in institutions of knowledge production, and especially working both on and within multiple intersecting structures of oppression – gender, ethnicity/race, ability, nationality, class, you name it – makes these challenges, for me, present on a daily basis in both theoretical and practical work., One of the things I try to teach my students is that, in situations of injustice, it is all too appealing to react to perceived slight or offence by turning it inside out, by perpetuating violence in turn. If we are wronged, it becomes easy to attribute blame and mete out punishment. But real intellectual fortitude lies in resisting this impulse. Not in some meek turning-the-other-cheek kind of way, but in realizing that handing down violence will only, ever, perpetuate the cycle of violence. It is breaking – or, failing that, breaking out of – this cycle we must work towards.

As we do, however, we are faced with another kind of problem. This is something Lauren Berlant explicitly addressed in one of their best texts ever, Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy: most people in and around institutions of knowledge production find authority appealing. This, of course, does not mean that all intellectual authority lends itself automatically to objectification (on either of the sides), but it does and will happen. Some of this, I think, is very comprehensively addressed in Amia Srinivasan‘s The Right to Sex; some of it is usefully dispensed with by Berlant, who argues against seeing pedagogical relations as indexical for transference (or the other way around?). But, as important as these insights are, questions of knowledge – and thus questions of authority – are not limited to questions of pedagogy. Rather, they are related to the very relational nature of knowledge production itself.

For any woman who is an intellectual, then, the challenge rests in walking the very thin line between seduction and reduction – that is, the degree to which intellectual work (an argument, a book, a work of art) has to seduce, but in turn risks being reduced to an act of seduction (the more successful it is, the more likely this will happen). Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory, which I’m reading at the moment (shout out to Phlox Books in London where I bought it), is a case in point. Despentes argues against reducing women’s voices to ‘experience’, or to women as epistemic object (well, OK, the latter formulation is mine). Yet, in the reception of the book, it is often Despentes herself – her clothes, her mannerisms, her history, her sexuality – that takes centre stage.

Come to think of it, this version of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ applies to all women’s performances: how many times have I heard people say they find, for instance, Judith Butler’s or Lauren Berlant’s arguments or language “too complex” or “too difficult”, but on occasions when they do make an effort to engage with them reduce them to being “about gender” or “about sexuality” (hardly warrants mentioning that the same people are likely to diligently plod through Heidegger, Sartre or Foucault without batting an eyelid and, speaking of sexuality, without reducing Foucault’s work on power to it). The implication, of course, is that writers or thinkers who are not men have the obligation to persuade, to enchant readers/consumers into thinking their argument is worth giving time to.

This is something I’ve often observed in how people relate to the arguments of women and nonbinary intellectuals: “They did not manage to convince me” or “Well, let’s see if she can get away with it”. The problem is not just the casualized use of pronouns (note how men thinkers retain their proper names: Sartre, Foucault, but women slip into being a “she”). It’s the expectation that it is their (her) job to convince you, to lure you. Because, of course, your time is more valuable than hers, and of course, there are all these other men you would/should be reading instead, so why bother? It is not the slightest bit surprising that this kind of intellectual habit lends itself too easily to epistemic positioning that leads to epistemic erasure, but also that it becomes all too easily perpetuated by everyone, including those who claim to care about such things.

One of the things I hope I managed to convey in the Ethics of Ambiguity reading group I ran at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023 is to not read intellectuals who are not white men in this way. To not sit back with your arms folded and let “her” convince you. Simone Weil, another genius – and a woman – wrote that attention is the primary quality of love we can give to each other. The quality of intellectual attention we give to pieces we read has to be the same to count as anything but a narrow, self-aggrandizing gesture. In other words, a commitment to equality means nothing without a commitment to equality of intellectual attention, and a constant practice and reflection required to sustain and improve it.

Enjoyed this? Try https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00113921211057609

and https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/philosophy-herself

Does academic freedom extend to social media?

higher education, Philosophy of social science, Politics, social theory, Uncategorized

There is a longer discussion about this that has been going on in the US, continental European, and many other parts of the academic/policy/legal/media complexes and their intersection. Useful points of reference are Magna Charta Universitatum (1988), in part developed to stimulate ‘transition’ of Central/Eastern European universities away from communism, and European University Association’s Autonomy Scorecard, which represents an interesting case study for thinking through tensions between publicly (state) funded higher education and principles of freedom and autonomy (Terhi Nokkala and I have analyzed it here). Discussions in the UK, however, predictably (though hardly always justifiably) transpose most of the elements, political/ideological categories, and dynamics from the US; in this sense, I thought an article I wrote a few years back – mostly about theorising complex objects and their transformation, but with extensive analysis of 2 (and a half) case studies of ‘controversies’ involving academics’ use of social media – could offer a good reference point. The article is available (Open Access!) here; the subheadings that engage with social media in particular are pasted below. If citing, please refer to the following:

Bacevic, J. (2018). With or without U? Assemblage theory and (de)territorialising the university, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 17:1, 78-91, DOI: 10.1080/14767724.2018.1498323

——————————————————————————————————–

Boundary disputes: intellectuals and social media

In an analogy for a Cartesian philosophy of mind, Gilbert Ryle famously described a hypothetical visitor to Oxford (Ryle 1949). This astonished visitor, Ryle argued, would go around asking whether the University was in the Bodleian library? The Sheldonian Theatre? The colleges? and so forth, all the while failing to understand that the University was not in any of these buildings per se. Rather, it was all of these combined, but also the visible and invisible threads between them: people, relations, books, ideas, feelings, grass; colleges and Formal Halls; sub fusc and port. It also makes sense to acknowledge that these components can also be parts of other assemblages: for instance, someone can equally be an Oxford student and a member of the Communist Party, for instance. ‘The University’ assembles these and agentifies them in specific contexts, but they exist beyond those contexts: port is produced and shipped before it becomes College port served at a Formal Hall. And while it is possible to conceive of boundary disputes revolving around port, more often they involve people.

The cases analysed below involve ‘boundary disputes’ that applied to intellectuals using social media. In both cases, the intellectuals were employed at universities; and, in both, their employment ceased because of their activity online. While in the press these disputes were usually framed around issues of academic freedom, they can rather be seen as instances of reterritorialization: redrawing of the boundaries of the university, and reassertion of its agency, in relation to digital technologies. This challenges the assumption that digital technologies serve uniquely to deterritorialise, or ‘unbundle’, the university as traditionally conceived.

The public engagement of those who authoritatively produce knowledge – in sociological theory traditionally referred to as ‘intellectuals’ – has an interesting history (e.g. Small 2002). It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that intellectuals became en masse employed by universities: with the massification of higher education and the rise of the ‘campus university’, in particular in the US, came what some saw as the ‘decline’ of the traditional, bohemian ‘public intellectual’ reflected in Mannheim’s (1936) concept of ‘free-floating’ intelligentsia. Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals (1987) argues that this process of ‘universitisation’ has led to the disappearance of the intellectual ferment that once characterised the American public sphere. With tenure, he claimed, came the loss of critical edge; intellectuals became tame and complacent, too used to the comfort of a regular salary and an office job. Today, however, the source of the decline is no longer the employment of intellectuals at universities, but its absence: precarity, that is, the insecurity and impermanence of employment, are seen as the major threat not only to public intellectualism, but to universities – or at least the notion of knowledge as public good – as a whole.

This suggests that there has been a shift in the coding of the relationship between intellectuals, critique and universities. In the first part of the twentieth century, the function of social critique was predominantly framed as independent of universities; in this sense, ‘public intellectuals’ were if not more than equally likely to be writers, journalists, and other men (since they were predominantly men) of ‘independent means’ than academic workers. This changed in the second half of the twentieth century, with both the massification of higher education and diversification of the social strata intellectuals were likely to come from. The desirability of university employment increased with the decreasing availability of permanent positions. In part because of this, precarity was framed as one of the main elements of the neoliberal transformation of higher education and research: insecurity of employment, in this sense, became the ‘new normal’ for people entering the academic profession in the twenty-first century.

Some elements of precarity can be directly correlated with processes of ‘unbundling’ (see Gehrke and Kezar 2015; Macfarlane 2011). In the UK, for instance, certain universities rely on platforms such as Teach Higher to provide the service of employing teaching staff, who deliver an increasing portion of courses. In this case, teaching associates and lecturers are no longer employees of the university; they are employed by the platform. Yet even when this is not the case, we can talk about processes of deterritorializing, in the sense in which the practice is part of the broader weakening of the link between teaching staff and the university (cf. Hall 2016). It is not only the security of employment that is changed in the process; universities, in this case, also own the products of teaching as practice, for instance, course materials, so that when staff depart, they can continue to use this material for teaching with someone else in charge of ‘delivery’.

A similar process is observable when it comes to ownership of the products of research. In the context of periodic research assessment and competitive funding, some universities have resorted to ‘buying’, that is, offering highly competitive packages to staff with a high volume of publications, in order to boost their REF scores. The UK research councils and particularly the Stern Review (2016) include measures explicitly aimed to counter this practice, but these, in turn, harm early career researchers who fear that institutional ‘ownership’ of their research output would create a problem for their employability in other institutions. What we can observe, then, is a disassembling of knowledge production, where the relationship between universities, academics, and the products of their labour – whether teaching or research – is increasingly weakened, challenged, and reconstructed.

Possibly the most tenuous link, however, applies to neither teaching nor research, but to what is referred to as universities’ ‘Third mission’: public engagement (e.g. Bacevic 2017). While academics have to some degree always been engaged with the public – most visibly those who have earned the label of ‘public intellectual’ – the beginning of the twenty-first century has, among other things, seen a rise in the demand for the formalisation of universities’ contribution to society. In the UK, this contribution is measured as ‘impact’, which includes any application of academic knowledge outside of the academia. While appearances in the media constitute only one of the possible ‘pathways to impact’, they have remained a relatively frequent form of engaging with the public. They offer the opportunity for universities to promote and strengthen their ‘brand’, but they also help academics gain reputation and recognition. In this sense, they can be seen as a form of extension; they position the universities in the public arena, and forge links with communities outside of its ‘traditional’ boundaries. Yet, this form of engagement can also provoke rather bitter boundary disputes when things go wrong.

In the recent years, the case of Steven Salaita, professor of Native American studies and American literature became one of the most widely publicised disputes between academics and universities. In 2013, Salaita was offered a tenured position at the University of Illinois. However, in 2014 the Board of Trustees withdrew the offer, citing Salaita’s ‘incendiary’ posts on Twitter (Dorf 2014; Flaherty 2015). At the time, Israel was conducting one of its campaigns of daily shelling in the Gaza Strip. Salaita tweeted: ‘Zionists, take responsibility: if your dream of an ethnocratic Israel is worth the murder of children, just fucking own it already. #Gaza’ (Steven Salaita on Twitter, 19 July 2014). Salaita’s appointment was made public and was awaiting formal approval by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, usually a matter of pure technicality once it had been recommended by academic committees. Yet, in August Salaita was informed by the Chancellor that the University was withdrawing the offer.

Scandal erupted in the media shortly afterwards. It turned out that several of university’s wealthy donors, as well as a few students, had contacted members of the Board demanding that Salaita’s offer be revoked. The Chancellor justified her decision by saying that the objection to Salaita’s tweets concerned standards of ‘civility’, not the political opinion they expressed, but the discussions inevitably revolved around questions of identity, campus politics, and the degree to which they can be kept separate. This was exacerbated by a split within the American Association of University Professors, which is the closest the professoriate in the US has to a union: while the AAUP issued a statement of support to Salaita as soon as the news broke, Cary Nelson, the association’s former president and a prolific writer on issues of university autonomy and academic freedom, defended the Board’s decision. The reason? The protections awarded by the principle of academic freedom, Nelson claimed, extends only to tenured professors.

Very few people agreed with Nelson’s definition: eventually, the courts upheld Salaita’s case that the University of Illinois Board’s decision constituted breach of contract. He was awarded a hefty settlement (ten times the annual salary he would be earning at Illinois), but was not reinstated. This points to serious limitations of the using ‘academic freedom’ as an analytical concept. While university autonomy and academic freedom are principles invoked by academics in order to protect their activity, their application in academic and legal practice is, at best, open to interpretation. A detailed report by Karran and Malinson (2017), for instance, shows that both the understanding and the legal level of protection of academic freedom vary widely within European countries. In the US, the principle is often framed as part of freedom of speech and thus protected under the First Amendment (Karran 2009); but, as we could see, this does not in any way insulate it against widely differing interpretations of how it should be applied in practice.

While the Salaita case can be considered foundational in terms of making these questions central to a prolonged public controversy as well as a legal dispute, navigating the terrain in which these controversies arise has progressively become more complicated. Carrigan (2016) and Lupton (2014) note that almost everyone, to some degree, is already a ‘digital scholar’. While most human resources departments as well as graduate programmes increasingly offer workshops or courses on ‘using social media’ or ‘managing your identity online’ the issue is clearly not just one of the right tool or skill. Inevitably, it comes down to the question of boundaries, that is, what ‘counts as’ public engagement in the ‘digital university’, and why? How is academic work seen, evaluated, and recognised? Last, but not least, who decides?

Rather than questions of accountability or definitions of academic freedom, these controversies cannot be seen separately from questions of ontology, that is, questions about what entities are composed of, as well as how they act. This brings us back to assemblages: what counts as being a part of the university – and to what degree – and what does not? Does an academic’s activity on social media count as part of their ‘public’ engagement? Does it count as academic work, and should it be valued – or, alternatively, judged – as such? Do the rights (and protections) of academic freedom extend beyond the walls of the university, and in what cases? Last, but not least, which elements of the university exercise these rights, and which parts can refuse to extend them?

The case of George Ciccariello-Maher, until recently a Professor of English at Drexel University, offers an illustration of how these questions impact practice. On Christmas Day 2016, Ciccariello-Maher tweeted ‘All I want for Christmas is white genocide’, an ironic take on certain forms of right-wing critique of racial equality. Drexel University, which had been closed over Christmas vacation, belatedly caught up with the ire that the tweet had provoked among conservative users of Twitter, and issued a statement saying that ‘While the university recognises the right of its faculty to freely express their thoughts and opinions in public debate, Professor Ciccariello-Maher’s comments are utterly reprehensible, deeply disturbing and do not in any way reflect the values of the university’. After the ironic nature of the concept of ‘white genocide’ was repeatedly pointed out both by Ciccariello-Maher himself and some of his colleagues, the university apologised, but did not withdraw its statement.

In October 2017, the University placed Ciccariello-Maher on administrative leave, after his tweets about white supremacy as the cause of the Las Vegas shooting provoked a similar outcry among right-wing users of Twitter.¹ Drexel cited safety concerns as the main reason for the decision – Ciccariello-Maher had been receiving racist abuse, including death threats – but it was obvious that his public profile was becoming too much to handle. Ciccariello-Maher resigned on 31st December 2017. His statement read: ‘After nearly a year of harassment by right-wing, white supremacist media and internet trolls, after threats of violence against me and my family, my situation has become unsustainable’.² However, it indirectly contained a criticism of the university’s failure to protect him: in an earlier opinion piece published right after the Las Vegas controversy, Cicariello-Maher wrote that ‘[b]y bowing to pressure from racist internet trolls, Drexel has sent the wrong signal: That you can control a university’s curriculum with anonymous threats of violence. Such cowardice notwithstanding, I am prepared to take all necessary legal action to protect my academic freedom, tenure rights and most importantly, the rights of my students to learn in a safe environment where threats don’t hold sway over intellectual debate.’.³ The fact that, three months later, he no longer deemed it safe to continue doing that from within the university suggests that something had changed in the positioning of the university – in this case, Drexel – as a ‘bulwark’ against attacks on academic freedom.

Forms of capital and lines of flight

What do these cases suggest? In a deterritorialised university, the link between academics, their actions, and the institution becomes weaker. In the US, tenure is supposed to codify a stronger version of this link: hence, Nelson’s attempt to justify Salaita’s dismissal as a consequence of the fact that he did not have tenure at the University of Illinois, and thus the institutional protection of academic freedom did not extend to his actions. Yet there is a clear sense of ‘stretching’ nature of universities’ responsibilities or jurisdiction. Before the widespread use of social media, it was easier to distinguish between utterances made in the context of teaching or research, and others, often quite literally, off-campus. This doesn’t mean that there were no controversies: however, the concept of academic freedom could be applied as a ‘rule of thumb’ to discriminate between forms of engagement that counted as ‘academic work’ and those that did not. In a fragmented and pluralised public sphere, and the growing insecurity of academic employment, this concept is clearly no longer sufficient, if it ever was.

Of course, one might claim in this particular case it would suffice to define the boundaries of academic freedom by conclusively limiting it to tenured academics. But that would not answer questions about the form or method of those encounters. Do academics tweet in a personal, or in a professional, capacity? Is it easy to distinguish between the two? While some academics have taken to disclaimers specifying the capacity in which they are engaging (e.g. ‘tweeting in a personal capacity’ or ‘personal views/ do not express the views of the employer’), this only obscures the complex entanglement of individual, institution, and forms of engagement. This means that, in thinking about the relationship between individuals, institutions, and their activities, we have to take account the direction in which capital travels. This brings us back to lines of flight.

The most obvious form of capital in motion here is symbolic. Intellectuals such as Salaita and Ciccariello-Maher in part gain large numbers of followers and visibility on social media because of their institutional position; in turn, universities encourage (and may even require) staff to list their public engagement activities and media appearances on their profile pages, as this increases visibility of the institution. Salaita has been a respected and vocal critic of Israel’s policy and politics in the Middle East for almost a decade before being offered a job at the University of Illinois. Ciccariello-Maher’s Drexel profile page listed his involvement as

… a media commentator for such outlets as The New York Times, Al Jazeera, CNN Español, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor, and his opinion pieces have run in the New York Times’ Room for Debate, The Nation, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Fox News Latino.⁴

One would be forgiven for thinking that, until the unfortunate Tweet, the university supported and even actively promoted Ciccariello-Maher’s public profile.

The ambiguous nature of symbolic capital is illustrated by the case of another controversial public intellectual, Slavoj Žižek. Renowned ‘Elvis of philosophy’ is not readily associated with an institution; however, he in fact has three institutional positions. Žižek is a fellow of the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory of the University of Ljubljana, teaches at the European Graduate School, and, most recently has been appointed International Director of the Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities. The Institute’s web page describes his appointment:

Although courted by many universities in the US, he resisted offers until the International Directorship of Birkbeck’s Centre came up. Believing that ‘Political issues are too serious to be left only to politicians’, Žižek aims to promote the role of the public intellectual, to be intellectually active and to address the larger public.⁵

Yet, Žižek quite openly boasts what comes across as a principled anti-institutional stance. Not long ago, a YouTube video in which he dismisses having to read students’ essays as ‘stupid’ attracted quite a degree of opprobrium.⁶ On the one hand, of course, what Žižek says in the video can be seen as yet another form of attention-seeking, or a testimony to the capacity of new social media to make everything and anything go ‘viral’. Yet, what makes it exceptional is exactly its unexceptionality: Žižek is known for voicing opinions that are bound to prove controversial or at least thread on the boundary of political correctness, and it is not a big secret that most academics do not find the work of essay-reading and marking particularly rewarding. But, unlike Žižek, they are not in a position to say it. Trumpeting disregard for one’s job on social media would, probably, seriously endanger it for most academics. As we could see in examples of Salaita and Ciccariello-Maher, universities were quick to sanction opinions that were far less directly linked to teaching. The fact that Birkbeck was not bothered by this – in fact, it could be argued that this attitude contributed to the appeal of having Žižek, who previously resisted ‘courting’ by universities in the US – serves as a reminder that symbolic capital has to be seen within other possible ‘lines of flight’.

These processes cannot be seen as simply arising from tensions between individual freedom on the one, and institutional regulation on the other side. The tenuous boundaries of the university became more visible in relation to lines of flight that combine persons and different forms of capital: economic, political, and symbolic. The Salaita controversy, for instance, is a good illustration of the ‘entanglement’ of the three. Within the political context – that is, the longer Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and especially the role of the US within it – and within the specific set of economic relationships, that is, the fact US universities are to a great degree reliant on funds from their donors – Salaita’s statement becomes coded as a symbolic liability, rather than an asset. This runs counter to the way his previous statements were coded: so, instead of channelling symbolic capital towards the university, it resulted in the threat of economic capital ‘fleeing’ in the opposite direction, in the sense of donors withholding it from the university. When it came to Ciccariello-Maher, from the standpoint of the university, the individual literally acts as a nodal point of intersection between different ‘lines of flight’: on the one hand, the channelling of symbolic capital generated through his involvement as an influential political commentator towards the institution; on the other, the possible ‘breach’ of the integrity (and physical safety) or staff and students as its constituent parts via threats of physical violence against Ciccariello-Maher.

All of this suggests that deterritorialization can be seen as positive and even actively supported; until, of course, the boundaries of the institution become too porous, in which case the university swiftly reterritorialises. In the case of the University of Illinois, the threat of withdrawn support from donors was sufficient to trigger the reterritorialization process by redrawing the boundaries of the university, symbolically leaving Salaita outside them. In the case of Ciccariello-Maher, it would be possible to claim that agency was distributed in the sense in which it was his decision to leave; yet, a second look suggests that it was also a case of reterritorialization inasmuch as the university refused to guarantee his safety, or that of his students, in the face of threats of white supremacist violence or disruption.

This also serves to illustrate why ‘unbundling’ as a concept is not sufficient to theorise the processes of assembling and disassembling that take place in (or on the same plane as) contemporary university. Public engagement sits on a boundary: it is neither fully inside the university, nor is it ‘outside’ by the virtue of taking place in the environment of traditional or social media. This impossibility to conclusively situate it ‘within’ or ‘without’ is precisely what hints at the arbitrary nature of boundaries. The contours of an assemblage, thus, become visible in such ‘boundary disputes’ as the controversies surrounding Salaita and Ciccariello-Maher or, alternatively, their relative absence in the case of Žižek. While unbundling starts from the assumption that these boundaries are relatively fixed, and it is only components that change (more specifically, are included or excluded), assemblage theory allows us to reframe entities as instantiated through processes of territorialisation and deterritorialization, thus challenging the degree to which specific elements are framed (or, coded) as elements of an assemblage.

Conclusion: towards a new political economy of assemblages

Reframing universities (and, by extension, other organisations) as assemblages, thus, allows us to shift attention to the relational nature of the processes of knowledge production. Contrary to the narratives of university’s ‘decline’, we can rather talk about a more variegated ecology of knowledge and expertise, in which the identity of particular agents (or actors) is not exhausted in their position with(in) or without the university, but rather performed through a process of generating, framing, and converting capitals. This calls for longer and more elaborate study of the contemporary political economy (and ecology) of knowledge production, which would need to take into account multiple other actors and networks – from the more obvious, such as Twitter, to less ‘tangible’ ones that these afford – such as differently imagined audiences for intellectual products.

This also brings attention back to the question of economies of scale. Certainly, not all assemblages exist on the same plane. The university is a product of multiple forces, political and economic, global and local, but they do not necessarily operate on the same scale. For instance, we can talk about the relative importance of geopolitics in a changing financial landscape, but not about the impact of, say, digital technologies on ‘The University’ in absolute terms. Similarly, talking about effects of ‘neoliberalism’ makes sense only insofar as we recognise that ‘neoliberalism’ itself stands for a confluence of different and frequently contradictory forces. Some of these ‘lines of flight’ may operate in ways that run counter to the prior states of the object in question – for instance, by channelling funds, prestige, or ideas away from the institution. The question of (re)territorialisation, thus, inevitably becomes the question of the imaginable as well as actualised boundaries of the object; in other words, when is an object no longer an object? How can we make boundary-work integral to the study of the social world, and of the ways we go about knowing it?

This line of inquiry connects with a broader sociological tradition of the study of boundaries, as the social process of delineation between fields, disciplines, and their objects (e.g. Abbott 2001; Lamont 2009; Lamont and Molnár 2002). But it also brings in another philosophical, or, more precisely, ontological, question: how do we know when a thing is no longer the same thing? This applies not only to universities, but also to other social entities – states, regimes, companies, relationships, political parties, and social movements. The social definition of entities is always community-specific and thus in a sense arbitrary; similarly, how the boundaries of entities are conceived and negotiated has to draw on a socially-defined vocabulary that conceptualises certain forms of (dis-)assembling as potentially destructive to the entity as a whole. From this perspective, understanding how entities come to be drawn together (assembled), how their components gain significance (coding), and how their relations are strengthened or weakened (territorialisation) is a useful tool in thinking about beginnings, endings, and resilience – all of which become increasingly important in the current political and historical moment.

The transformation of processes of knowledge production intensifies all of these dynamics, and the ways in which they play out in universities. While certainly contributing to the unbundling of its different functions, the analysis presented in this article shows that the university remains a potent agent in the social world – though what the university is composed of can certainly differ. In this sense, while the pronouncement of the ‘death’ of universities should be seen as premature, this serves as a potent reminder that understanding change, to a great deal, depends not only on how we conceptualise the mechanisms that drive it, but also on how we view elements that make up the social world. The tendency to posit fixed and durable boundaries of objects – that I have elsewhere referred to as ‘ontological bias’⁷ – has, therefore, important implications for both scholarship and practice. This article hopes to have made a contribution towards questioning the boundaries of the university as one among these objects.

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If you’re interested in reading more about these tensions, I also recommend Mark Carrigan’s ‘Social Media for Academics’ (Sage).

Modern and contemporary sociological theory, AY 21/22

Uncategorized

This is a shorter version of the draft syllabus for the Modern and Contemporary Sociological Theory module (course) that I am teaching at Durham’s Department of Sociology. MCST is a 20-credit mandatory undergraduate module in Year 2, covering the period from mid-20th century (roughly, end of World War II) until the present. I run only half the module, so these are 10 sessions.

Disclaimer/FAQ:

This is a sample of the syllabus and teaching material. The full and updated version, including preparatory, mandatory and extended reading, seminar activities, and lecture notes/powerpoints are available only to registered Durham students. Please note that the version here is provided for public use under CC_BY_NC_ND 4.0 license, which means you are free to share it with proper attribution, but not use it or any its derivatives for commercial or profit-generating activity, including your own for-profit teaching.

Q1: Why are there only 10 sessions for a year-long, 20-credit course?

A1: Because I teach only half of it.

Q2: Why is there so much content?

A2: Because I want students to get a grasp of the width and breadth of contemporary sociological theory, rather than just focus on a few theorists.

Q3: Why are so few theorists mentioned by name?

A3: Because I teach an approach to theory that is explicitly anti-canonical, which means it aims to encourage thinking theoretically and working with concepts/problems, rather than learning theologically about sociological thinkers, even if they are made a little more diverse than before.

Q4: Why are X, Y, Z absent?

A4: See A3 (it’s possible they’re not) and A1.

Q5: Why is there not more about A, B, C?

A5: See A1, A4. Also, it’s work in progress, suggestions are always welcome.

Q6: Where is Marx?

A6: In Year 1. Also, everywhere.

Q7: Where are Marxist bros?

A7: In Hell, I hope.

Michaelmas Term (Dr Bacevic)

Introduction: what is theory?
What is theory for? Critical theory
What is theory for? Decolonial and postcolonial theory
Agency and freedom: existentialism, existentialist feminism, and race
Structure and reproduction: structuralism, structural Marxism, post-structuralism
Theories of social reproduction: practice theory, reflexivity, social reproduction
Power and oppression: knowledge, ideology, hegemony
Power and oppression: gender, race, intersectionality
What acts? Pragmatist sociology, performativity and affect
What acts? Posthumanism, necro/ontopolitics and the Anthropocene

This term gives an overview of the development of social theory from the end of World War II until the present. It focuses on the intersections between social and political processes (decolonization and independence movements, crises of social reproduction, new forms of inequality, climate change) and theory as mode of thinking about these processes.

Introduction. What is theory?

This session explores the concept of social/sociological theory and its different meanings. To some people, ‘theory’ primarily consists of reading and understanding the work of a selected body or group of theorists, also known as ‘the canon’. To others, ‘theory’ primarily consists of ideas or statements about different elements that make up the social world, their relations, and how they shape our lives – and how, in turn, we can shape them. To others, yet, the role of theory includes thinking how to shape these elements to make life as liveable for the greatest number of people; others think this is not the role of theory, or disagree on the kind of objects and actors that should be included in this group. In this session, we will examine the history and examples of these different approaches, and explain the specific approach to theory taken in this part of the module.

Readings

Preparatory

Essential (at least two of the following):

Krause, M. (2016). The meanings of theorizing’, British Journal of Sociology 67 (1) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.12187_4 [OA]

Abend, G. (2008) The Meaning of Theory, Sociological Theory 26 (2), 173-199 [26]

Haslanger, S. (2012) Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, Introduction (pp. 3-32).

Additional:

Swedberg, R. (2016). Before Theory Comes Theorizing, or How to Make Social Sciences More Interesting. https://doi-org.ezphost.dur.ac.uk/10.1111/1468-4446.12184

Bacevic, J. (2017). Theory as practice: for a politics of social theory, or how to get out of the theory zoo. https://janabacevic.net/2017/06/12/theory-as-practice-for-a-politics-of-social-theory-or-how-to-get-out-of-the-theory-zoo/

Connell RW (1997) Why is Classical Theory Classical? American Journal of Sociology, 102(6): 1511-1557. [you have encountered this text already in Classical Sociological Theory in Year 1).

What is theory for? Critical theory, social theory, and social change

In this session we introduce the body of theories usually known as ‘critical’. While many kinds of theory can be said to offer a critique of different social conditions, the epithet ‘Critical’ (with a capital C) has most often been applied to the strands of Marxist theory associated with what is known as the Frankfurt School, and its successors. In this session, we discuss the origins of critical theory as an attempt to come to terms with the destruction of World War Two, its post-war focus on the role of ideology and mass media in the maintenance of capitalist and American hegemony, as well as discussions around public spheres, the role of democracy, and the crisis of the European Union. Secondly, we engage with the most recent contributions of critical theory, including attempts to deal with the rise of populism and renewed forms of nationalism, fascism, and violence, including that against women, migrants and refugees, and the environment.

What is theory for? Postcolonial and decolonial theory

This session introduces postcolonial and decolonial challenges to the canon of sociological theory. Focusing on both ‘theory from the South’ and theory developed in the ‘Global North’ that sought to challenge the Eurocentric ‘canon’ of sociology and associated disciplines, it asks: (1) What kind of sociological concepts, ideas and processes are foregrounded or, conversely, omitted when ‘theory’ is written from a Eurocentric perspective? (2) How can we think about the work of theorizing in ways that incorporate non-Western(-centric) ‘ways of seeing’ and thinking about the social?

Agency and freedom: existentialism, existentialist feminism, and race

In this session, we begin to explore one of the key questions 20^th-century social theory: what does it mean to act? Are humans free to act, or is what we do a product of largely impersonal structural forces outside our control? Furthermore, are all humans equally free to act?

We will be approaching these questions through the encounter with a form of philosophy that profoundly shaped European social and political thought leading up to and after World War II: existentialism. While applied to thinkers who both supported and opposed the project of Nazism (Martin Heidegger stands as a clear example of the former, Hannah Arendt of the latter), existentialist thinking was crucial to the development of post-war social theory as it approached human existence as always already social, and thus fundamentally defined by our relationships with and duties towards others. While for Marxism (with which existentialist thinkers maintained a productive dialogue, though not always agreed), these relations were primarily those of production, and thus inequality stemmed primarily from being embedded in capitalism as a fundamentally exploitative mode of production, existentialism highlighted the relevance of mutuality and freedom in the reproduction of some of these relations. In existentialist terms, we are ‘thrown into the world’ which is not of our choosing; however, what we do in that world – how we choose to act – matters. This, of course, does not mean that existentialism ignored differences in power or the historical constitution of conditions for action; but it highlighted the role of responsibility, as well as its abandonment (‘bad faith’).

In this session, we will examine early post-war reflections on agency through the work of three thinkers: Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon. The work of all three can be read as an attempt to understand the consequences of World War II, but they emphasized different elements. Arendt was primarily concerned with political and social conditions, such as totalitarianism, under which human beings give up on their freedom. De Beauvoir became famous for reading of inequality through the reproduction of patriarchy, locating the source of constraints to agency in the construction of gendered difference, and women as the ‘Second Sex’. Fanon, meanwhile, developed an analysis of the conditions of unfreedom and oppression that were rooted in racism, colonial exploitation, and capitalism. Their work, which remains enormously influential to this day, asked some of the key questions that would shape 20^th-century theorizing: are all of us equally free to act? Are the choices we make an expression of free will, or cultural and social conditioning? Most importantly, how would we know the difference?

Structure and reproduction: structuralism, structuralist Marxism, post-structuralism

In the 20^th century, the question of freedom and agency was pitted against the other fundamental question of social theory: if humans are free to act, how come are some social formations surprisingly stable? While functionalist thinkers (many of which you will encounter in Term 2) argued social elements can be explained through their ‘function’ or ‘purpose’, structuralists focused on the question: what is the origin of these formations? Where do they come from? Are they material, or are they just ‘in our heads’? Do they serve everyone equally, or do they serve to maintain social inequality? In this session, we discuss sociological and anthropological answers to these questions known, variously, as structuralism, structural/cultural Marxism, and poststructuralism.

Structuralism built extensively on structural linguistics and semiotics (the study of meaning), as well as on anthropological research in European colonies, which enabled the construction of an enormous comparative ‘archive’ of human cultures and customs – in which researchers were (sometimes willing, sometimes not) partners in the project of colonial expansion and administration. Scholars in the late 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century were mostly inclined to study human variation from an evolutionary-historical perspective (with different forms of social and cultural organization supposedly representing different stages of ‘development’, which was often synonymous with licensing the exploitation of those who were seen as less ‘developed’). Structuralists had a different idea: there existed a universal, cross-cultural and transhistorical set of universal characteristics shared across all human societies in time and space, which took different forms – in languages, rituals, customs, organization of space, and other ways of living – but could, with sufficient analytical skill, be ‘excavated’ and studied comparatively.

In social sciences, structuralism is usually associated with the name of Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist who constructed interpretative schemata for systems of meaning governed by ‘binary opposites’ – concepts like male/female, raw/cooked, and nature/culture. Structuralists, of course, didn’t claim these binaries existed in ‘pure form’ anywhere in nature, but rather that it is through perception of opposites that humans establish categories, boundaries, and other phenomena relevant to the ‘social’. In addition to linguistics, structuralism was profoundly shaped by Freudian psychoanalysis, from which it inherited the notion of psychic unity of humankind – the idea that all humans shared a fundamental psychological ‘makeup’. In this sense, while still in some ways complicit in the colonial project, structuralism was crucial in discrediting the racist notions of ‘superiority’ or ‘inferiority’ of human groups as an outcome of biological or ‘natural’ factors.

Similarly to existentialism, structuralism was fundamentally shaped by the experience of two World Wars, colonialism and postcolonialism. The attention to the unconscious (or, in Lacan’s later formulation, sub-conscious) factors shaping human action furnished an alternative explanation for the horrors of WWII that departed both the pessimism of the Frankfurt School and from existentialism’s particular form of humanism. The notion of deep, shared, underlying structures chimed with the idea of universal human rights, developed precisely as bulwark against the repetition of large-scale conflicts like WWII (we can, obviously, discuss how well that worked out in the later parts of the 20^th century). But it also legitimized forms of knowledge production built on the colonial encounter, with native populations and cultures providing ‘raw’ material for the analytical work conducted, almost exclusively, by academics in the West.

Post-structuralism shared the focus on the role of unconscious determinants of human action, but with a deeper and more sustained engagement with relations and practices of production in the ‘West’. This was in part through a sustained dialogue with Marxism (evident in the structural Marxism of e.g. Louis Althusser as well as what is sometimes known as ‘Cultural Marxism’ of e.g. Stuart Hall and the British School of Cultural Studies) and feminism (through work of theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, and many others). The boundary between structuralism and post-structuralism is not clear-cut; there are authors who could fall into both categories (Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Mary Douglas), and those who share post-structuralist precepts while not always being classified as such (Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Angela Davis). Overall, poststructuralism is defined by the attention to culture as both the locus of meaning and signification and a potential source of power relations, rather than just ‘superstructure’ supervening on economic relations at the ‘base’, as some interpreters of Marx were likely to claim.

Structure and agency: practice theory, reflexivity, social reproduction

The relationship between structure and agency in 20^th century social theory came to be known as the structure/agency debate. If humans have free will, how can we explain the reproduction of inequality, injustice and exploitation? At the same time, if structures are all-encompassing or determining, how can we explain resistance, social change, and cultural variation? In this session, we will be examining this problem from the perspective of three theoretical schools. One is the theory of practice, most often associated with the name of Pierre Bourdieu, which focuses on practices as embedded and embodied forms of relating to the world. These forms are mediated through what Bourdieu dubbed ‘habitus’ – dispositions often attained early in life and largely unreflexive – which frame choices people see as available to them. By contrast, Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic theory emphasized reflexivity – the ‘internal conversation’ through which people think about and narrate their choices – as the key vector of social reproduction. Last, but not least, social reproduction theory presented an influential challenge to Marxist theories of production by re-centering questions of gender and race in the context of the historical divisions of labour, and thus paved the way for the recasting of these questions in the arena of late 20th and early 21st century social struggles.

Power and oppression: knowledge, ideology, hegemony

What people can do depends not only on where they are born, but also on relations of power. It is not difficult to notice that power is unequally distributed within societies, as well as across social categories. But what is power? Where does it reside? Can we conceive of social life without power? Finally, is it possible to have power without oppression?

In this session, we encounter some of the most influential theoretizations of power and its sources in 20^th and 21^st-century social theory. We start by discussing Michel Foucault and his knowledge/power nexus, including the role of the state in identifying, classifying, and ordering citizens. Second, we discuss Judith Butler and her interpretation of the way discourses constitute the power to act, including collectively. Last, but not least, we discuss late Marxist or neoGramscian notions of ideological power, including the reproduction of discursive-ideological hegemony in the work of e.g. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.

Power and oppression: gender, race, intersectionality

Questions of power cannot be separated from the question of classification, measurement, and comparison of human populations. Historically, these forms of classification have often been used to justify privileging some humans (men, White people, owners of property) over others. In this session, we discuss three theoretical lenses that have critically engaged with the positioning of human beings in relation to their embodiment: gender, race, and their intersection.

While gender has been a preoccupation of theories of society from the very start of social and political thought, a major reconsideration of the relationship between sex, gender, and social structure came with 20^th-century feminist theorists. Starting from Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal ‘The Second Sex’, theorists sought to engage the ways in which perception and negotiation of gendered difference shaped how social relations were structured, negotiated, and reproduced. In this session, we will be surveying the evolution and contestation of feminist theories throughout the 20^th and 21^st century – from early focus of liberal feminism to ‘second-wave’ feminism and questions of labour, care, and social reproduction, to contemporary challenges to feminist theorizing, including the rise of ‘post’ and anti-feminist discourses, and their intersection with populism and the far Right.

Late 19^th- and early 20^th-century theorists, like W.E.B. Du Bois, argued that race as a social category was systematically constructed in ways that positioned non-White, non-Western people as inferior. This led to the recognition of the concept of ‘race’ as in itself a racialized discourse, rather than a scientific, ‘neutral’ category. In the second half of the 20^th century, however, attention increasingly turned towards the ways in which racialized categories, and racialized experience, shaped not only the ‘lives of Black folk’, but the very fabric of society – including the tools and concepts of social theory. One important theoretical strand to come out of this reconsideration is known as Critical Race Theory.

Principally developed in the US, Critical Race Theory engages with the ways in which race and racism permeate social institutions and relations – from policing and prisons, to access to high-esteem professions such as universities and the judiciary. Theories of race formation emphasised the role of ‘race’ as, at the same time, a cultural, economic, and political signifier. A significant engagement in CRT is with the legal system, and issues such as affirmative action/proportional representation, but its implications for social theory go beyond that: they suggest that forms of understanding power, inequality and oppression cannot be ‘transposed’ from the experience of Whites to the experience of people of colour, and other differently marginalized ‘Others’.

The concept of intersectionality builds further on this insight. Black feminist scholars such as bell hooks, Audre Lord, and Angela Davis argued existing theories universalized the experience of a specific group (e.g., liberal feminism that of white, educated, upper-middle-class women; some theories of racism that of straight, black, men). Using Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work as spring-board, Patricia Hill Collins argues that power and social stratification cannot be understood from a singular perspective (class, gender, ‘race’/ethnicity), but have to take into account how multiple social positions intersect to create specific conditions of oppression.

Intersectionality has both a political and a theoretical, or epistemological, side. In other words, we can see it as a critique of dominant modes of engaging with injustice, power and privilege; or we can see it as a critique of dominant models of conceptualizing them, including in social theory. This includes the very notion of ‘society’. Jamaican philosopher Charles W. Mills, for instance, argued that the idea of ‘social contract’– an idea that is at the centre of Durkheimian sociology – is itself a racialized construct: that is, predicated on the (unacknowledged) division of humans into ‘races’, and exploitation based on this. Indigenous thinkers in Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the US have drawn on a similar argument to emphasize the role of settler colonialism in constructing native inhabitants of colonies as ‘other’ – ontologically, culturally, and morally – thus enabling the exploitation of both natural and human resources.

What acts? Pragmatist sociology, performativity and affect

In this section, we engage with some of late 20^th and early 21^st century reconsiderations of power and agency that seek to disrupt the relationship between structure and agency. The theory of performativity, initially developed by the Oxford school of ordinary-language philosophy, sees social reality as constituted through a series of ‘speech-acts’ – statements that enact and reproduce relations, including relations of power. In this session, we will be introducing three major theoretical frameworks that built on this insight: pragmatic sociology, theories of performativity, and affect theory.

Theories of performativity are principally associated with Judith Butler, as well as with Jeffrey Alexander’s revision of 20^th century sociology. Butler initially developed her concept of performativity in relation to questions of power, sexuality, and gender. Butler argued that there are no ‘fixed’ gender categories; rather, gender is learned through behaviour – certain kinds of agency are seen as ‘gendered’, and in turn become identified with certain kinds of bodies. The necessity of agency for the constitution of structural categories means that there is no ontological (‘natural’) category of ‘sex’ vs. the ‘social’ category of gender; the distinction itself is an outcome of social performance. Performativity further builds on this insight to ask how social categories are constituted through action. Though in some ways converging with Goffman’s micro-sociology, the important distinction here is that most theorists of performativity do not assume social categories (including gender, race, and class) pre-date or exist independently of social performance.

Pragmatist sociology shares a common set of assumptions, and considers not only how social categories are constituted, but also how social interaction – relations and events – constitute ‘sites’ of both material and symbolic creation of categories and norms. In this session, we will be engaging with post-Bourdieusian pragmatic sociology of Michèle Lamont, Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thévenot, Eve Chiapello, as well as with the STS-inspired work of theorists like Donald Mackenzie, Michel Callon and Anne-Marie Mol.

Theories of affect address another important aspect of the social: the question of how structures and relations (including relations of power) shape the emotional and affective life of individuals and collectives. Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’, for instance, argues that capitalism works through a displacement of the framework of hope and striving. Sara Ahmed’s work engages in particular with the gendered and raced politics of affect in institutions, including the ways in which anger, ‘complaint’, and unhappiness are channelled in ways that reproduce social inequalities.

Affect theory intersects with the earlier Marxist-feminist critique of labour of social reproduction through an emphasis on affective, emotional, and care labour – that is, ways in which gender inequality shapes expectations of affective conduct (for instance, women are expected to be ‘nice’, or ‘kind’, or told to smile). While liberal and early Marxist feminists were mostly critical of care as a gendered expectation, more recent calls for a rethinking of the politics of care – including in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic – emphasise possibilities for reframing social relations, both between humans and between humans and non-human environment, with this in mind.

What acts? Posthumanism, necro/ontopolitics, and the Anthropocene

This session brings our journey through social theory to a close by reconsidering what happens if we extend our theorization of power, structure and agency in ways that recognize that not only humans have power to act. While the traditional concept of ‘society’ pitted human societies as opposed to ‘nature’, late 20^th and early 21^st-century social theorizing has significantly challenged this notion. In this session, we engage with three main contributions to this reframing. One comes from the concept of bio-, necro-, and ontopolitics, as developed by Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe, and Elizabeth Povinelli. These notions build and intersect with feminist research into sexual and reproductive politics to highlight the fact that what is recognized as life – and, thus, as a potential agent – depends on political and juridical decisions and processes. This reaches an apex with the concept of ‘Anthropocene’ as a distinct geological epoch, which recognizes the fundamental (but also unequally distributed) impact humans have on changing the climate, and thus shaping the life chances and odds of survival of different human populations. This concept, however, can be criticized from multiple persectives – including that of the hierarchies implied in giving primacy to ‘the human’, something that the broad group of approaches known as posthumanism tend to question. By engaging with these notions, we consider how contemporary social problems – including neonationalist mobilization, the refugee crisis, and the multifaceted impacts of climate change – challenge what we call ‘the social’, and thus call for an extension of both the practice and object of theorizing.

For an Online University of the Left

higher education, Politics, Uncategorized

This proposal started from an observation I made on Twitter this morning about the A-level results ‘scandal’: the fact many working-class and underprivileged students are finding themselves turned away from institutions that they were their first choice because their grades – being from state schools – were algorithmically predicted in ways that made it less likely they will have sufficient scores for elite universities. For many students (and their parents), this is an obvious disappointment – among other reasons, because inferring actual scores from previous grades is both imprecise and unfair. For many of my colleagues in higher education, it was yet another sign of the classism of British HE, which, predictably and consistently, privileges those from more advantaged socio-economic backgrounds. Both are true, but both avoid engaging with the potentially bigger problem that awaits.

The bigger problem, in this case, is that a large number of angry, disappointed young people, stuck either at home behind the screens, or in shit jobs, during a pandemic and a recession, is a recipe for breeding hate and resentment. My guess is that alt-right recruiters are on it as we speak – indeed, have been on it for a while now. The Left has been atrociously slow and on the back foot ever since the December election; we need to step up. Thus, this proposal is brief and necessarily rather general; I do try to address two biggest pitfalls (credentials and funding) but other than that, if people want to try this, details can be worked out as we go along.

The point is not to create a perfect institution that would at the same time solve the problem of social inequality in Britain, neoliberalism and precarity in higher education, and the rise of the far right; no policy can do that anyway. The idea is to move, start doing something now, and then adjust if necessary – or just give up.

Ignore the typos.

What is Online University of the Left?

Simply, it would be a platform offering enrolment/attendance in a number of courses, which could take the form of a ‘foundation year’ degree that some students enrol in before starting ‘official’ uni. My proposal on Twitter was some combination of liberal arts and practical skills, but that’s mostly because my own background is in social sciences and humanities, and I’ve found that most students, if left to their own devices, tend to choose something along these lines (this is much more evident in the US, where students are encouraged and often required to acquire at least some ‘credits’ from a field other than their own, so it’s not uncommon to encounter e.g. biologists taking social science credits in sociology, or poetry students taking science credits in astronomy). In all cases, it could be something that many of us know and would like to teach, and that we also believe would be useful for young people’s future lives, employment, and study: how about a course in British history, but the kind that *actually* engages with colonialism and slavery? How about a course in social and political thought that includes thinkers that are not White men? How about a course in basic statistics, so that even students who are very far from A-level maths could potentially understand figures like R? How about introductory economics, so next time students go to the voting booth they know what ‘GDP’ actually stands for?

In addition to this, we could offer talks (or online chat sessions!) on really practical skills: for instance, how to write a CV? How to search for literature? How to conduct interviews? Etc.

As I had mentioned, Tom Sperlinger, Richard Pettigrew, and Josie McLelland of the University of Bristol ran something not too far off from this (obviously, before the pandemic), and wrote about it in their book ‘Who Are Universities For?‘. There are many other places and experiences we can learn from.

So who teaches at this university?

The best part is, no-one needs to do much. All you need to do is think up a topic/course, propose a lecture, and coordinate with a few people who’d like to do something similar. Students could literally pick & choose topics, creating their own courses. If you want to run a series of lectures by yourself, even better, but odds are that we’ll all find out there are many people out there we’d love to develop courses with, given the opportunity. One way in which universities monopolize their staff’s labour is by making sure we cannot collaborate in this way across institutional boundaries; here’s a way to change that.

But who does all the work of preparation and delivery?

Odds are, we are all teaching online at least this term, right? Even if you’re super-strapped for time and cognitive space, nothing prevents you from making one of your lectures available outside your uni’s platform. Clearly I can’t get into more details, but let’s say that even if your recording software is proprietary and the platform is as well, you can always do a slightly different version of the slides and record yourself on your mobile phone. As far as the literature/reading lists are concerned, while it is true that students with access to libraries are enormously privileged in this respect, there are plenty of websites that often this kind of literature for free. Most of us are not able to use them or direct our students to them in our uni teaching, but nothing prevents students from discovering them, um, anyway.

Assuming you do have some time and extra cognitive space, you could use this chance to develop your dream introductory course to…anything, and make it available online, and for free, for ever. For instance, I always say I wished my students had a better understanding of the basic philosophy of science (as in, what is a hypothesis, what is proof, what is an observation, what is the difference between causation and correlation, etc.). Their background, in most cases, provides none; yet this makes most arguments in social theory more difficult to get across, and turns methods teaching into a nightmare. So, I’d be thrilled for an opportunity to develop a series of talks on this.

But who puts this online?

There are a number of free platforms for this type of content that can be used; Pat Lockley, who is one of most talented (and experienced!) developers I know, has already offered to help. I am sure I know many learning technologists who would. This isn’t about running a super-complicated multi-sited real-time collaborative simulation of secrets of the universe; it’s basically a series of Ted talks with some links to further reading.

Where does the money come in?

Here’s another part of the proposal. Imagine parents were saving, taking out loans etc. for their children to go to college. Odds are, they are saving some of this money anyway, because due to pandemic children are probably staying at home. So if they would be willing to pay some of that – really, a tiny portion of what they would be giving towards tuition and living costs anyway – it could pay precarious colleagues who would be teachers, teaching assistants or supervisors, offering one-to-one or small group online tuition to students. Private tuition, I hear, is anyway a massive business, and also one of the reasons why students with rich parents tend to get better grades and score better at admissions. So this would be an opportunity for more students to access this kind of supervision, thus also – and this is an argument for parents, primarily – increasing their future academic success and employment skills. This isn’t, clearly, to condone this system – it’s awful – nor is it to ignore the fact that graduate students and other precarious colleagues are getting massively shafted over in the current pandemic. This isn’t a way to solve this problem; it is a way to offer a stopgap/livelihood to those who were counting on income from supervisions and are not getting it this year.

It goes without saying that those of us who are permanently employed would need to be teaching for free; if you have a problem with volunteering your labour (I don’t), think of it as an opportunity for public engagement and impact. For those who would be getting paid, there would be fiscal/economic elements to figure out, obviously (tax? Insurance?), but I’m guessing something like a flat-rate per hour + centralized payment platform (Patreon?) could work. Anyway, I’m sure people will have ideas about this.

So this is basically a mini-MOOC?

Nope. See above for supervisions – this isn’t just a series of Youtube clips you can watch in your spare time. Also, it’s not run by a single institution (like Harvard or Stanford), which means that prestige does not accrue to a university.

But what about credits? Why would anyone want to attend this?

This is the tricky bit, of course – in the current situation most students wouldn’t want to waste their time (and parents their money) on something that is not recognized as a degree or at least as counting towards a degree. The first is a long and formal process, so there’s certainly no way to do the accreditation now; the second, however, is not impossible. A little policy excursion below.

Most education systems have something along the lines of ‘recognition of prior experience’. (Imagine you were a self-taught violinist who’s played in a local band for 20 years, but never had any formal qualification, and that you wanted for whichever reason to get a degree in composition: this is the route you would take). You would submit evidence of experience relevant to the topic of your studies, and odds are, it would get recognized. So while it would be overtly optimistic to claim the Online University of the Left would count as a formal degree, it could, certainly, be recognized as other qualification or training.

Wouldn’t students rather go to any university – even not their first, second, or third choice – that offers them a formal degree, rather than watch online lectures?

On the one hand, probably, and that’s a great thing – it might save many non-elite institutions from premature closures (and their employees from redundancy!), not to mention (hopefully) disrupt the perception that not getting into Oxford, Cambridge or the LSE means you (or your future degree) are worthless (this, in itself, is a terrible perception, but again unfortunately one very resistant to change). On the other, regardless of where students choose to enrol ‘formally’, post-clearing, nothing prevents them from attending a few ‘extra’ courses online – and taught by academics from all, including ‘elite’ institutions, for free! Imagine that. So again, sadly, while this would not in itself ‘disrupt’ the hallowed place Oxford and Cambridge hold in the national imagination, it would (1) give students access to (hopefully) high quality teaching (for free) and high quality supervision (for a small fee) (2) create income for precariously employed colleagues (3) teach us to collaborate across institutional boundaries (4) get us thinking about how to organize and own our labour in ways that do something other than generate profit for our employers.

Oh, also, Online University of the Left is a bit lame; let’s call it the National Higher Education Service. 🙂

Edit, 17/08/2020:

Just going through a host of lovely responses this proposal’s had since posting yesterday (570 views since last night, which is pretty good), but one thing that worries me is the amount of people who said they’d be quite happy to participate as long as I did all the organizing labour. But no single person can do that (even if she weren’t a recently employed, immigrant academic). As they say in the policy world, I’ve given you the ideas; I’ve also pointed to some of the existing experience and additonal expertise out there (thank you to people in the thread who mentioned precursors I didn’t have time to in this hastily written post, like AntiUniversity, Social Science Centres etc. and some I didn’teven know about!). Only you can put them into practice.

Or, in more labour-specific lingo, it took about two hours of labour to produce that post (I am counting mostly writing, possibly another hour or so of thinking); if everyone could match that, we’ll be very far ahead already.

Two more edits (17/08, evening):

Got reminded that there has been a very similar initiative in place since 2012 with the Free University of Brighton

and there is also the Online University of the Left, mostly US-based

— Which means that all we need to do is bring these initiatives together/expand further! Easy 🙂

The King’s Two(ish) Bodies

Blog, Politics, social theory, Uncategorized

Contemporary societies, as we know, rest on calculation. From the establishment of statistics, which was essential to the construction of the modern state, to double-entry bookkeeping as the key accounting technique for ‘rationalizing’ capitalism and colonial trade, the capacity to express quality (or qualities, to be more precise) through numbers is at the core of the modern world.

From a sociological perspective, this capacity involves a set of connected operations. One is valuation, the social process through which entities (things, beings) come to (be) count(ed); the other is commensuration, or the establishment of equivalence: what counts as or for what, and under what circumstances. Marion Fourcade specifies three steps in this process: nominalization, the establishment of ‘essence’ (properties); cardinalization, the establishment of quantity (magnitude); and ordinalization, the establishment of relative position (e.g. position on a scale defined by distance from other values). While, as Mauss has demonstrated, none of these processes are unique to contemporary capitalism – barter, for instance, involves both cardinalization and commensuration – they are both amplified by and central to the operation of global economies.

Given how central the establishment of equivalence is to contemporary capitalism, it is not a little surprising that we seem so palpably bad at it. How else to explain the fact that, on the day when 980 people died from Coronavirus, the majority of UK media focused on the fact that Boris Johnson was recovering in hospital, reporting in excruciating detail the films he would be watching. While some joked about excessive concern for the health of the (secular) leader as reminiscent of the doctrine of ‘The King’s Two Bodies’, others seized the metaphor and ran along with it – unironically.

Briefly (and somewhat reductively – please go somewhere else if you want to quibble, political theory bros), ‘King’s Two Bodies’ is a concept in political theology by which the state is composed of two ‘corporeal’ entities – the ‘body politic’ (the population) and the ‘body natural’ (the ruler)*. This principle allows the succession of political power even after the death of the ruler, reflected in the pronouncement ‘The King is Dead, Long Live the King’. From this perspective, the claim that 980 < 1 may seem justified. Yet, there is something troubling about this, even beyond basic principles of decency. Is there a large enough number that would disturb this balance? Is it irrelevant whose lives are those?

Formally, most liberal democratic societies forbid the operation of a principle of equivalence that values some human beings as lesser than others. This is most clearly expressed in universal suffrage, where one person (or, more specifically, one political subject) equals one vote; on the global level, it is reflected in the principle of human rights, which assert that all humans have a certain set of fundamental and unalienable rights simply as a consequence of being human. All members of the set ‘human’ have equal value, just by being members of that set: in Badiou’s terms, they ‘count for one‘.

Yet, liberal democratic societies also regularly violate these principles. Sometimes, unproblematically so: for instance, we limit the political and some other rights of children and young people until they become of ‘legal age’, which is usually the age at which they can vote; until that point, they count as ‘less than one’. Sometimes, however, the consequences of differential valuation of human beings are much darker. Take, for instance, the migrants who are regularly left to drown in the Mediterranean or treated as less-than-human in detention centres; or the NHS doctors and nurses – especially BAME doctors and nurses – whose exposure to Coronavirus gets less coverage than that of politicians, celebrities, or royalty. In the political ontology of contemporary Britain, some lives are clearly worth less than others.

The most troubling implication of the principle by which the body of the ruler is worth more than a thousand (ten thousand? forty thousand?) of ‘his’ subjects, then, is not its ‘throwback’ to mediaeval political theology: it is its meaning for politics here and now. The King’s Two Bodies, after all, is a doctrine of equivalence: the totality of the body politic (state) is worth as much as the body of the ruler. The underlying operation is 1 = 1. This is horribly disproportionate, but it is an equivalence nonetheless: both the ruler and the population, in this sense, ‘count for one’. From this perspective, the death of a sizeable portion of that population cannot be irrelevant: if the body politic is somewhat diminished, the doctrine of King’s Two Bodies suggests that the power of the ‘ruler’ is somewhat diminished too. By implication, the current political ontology of the British state currently rests not on the principle of equivalence, but on a zero-sum game: losses in population do not diminish the power of the ruler, but rather enlarge it. And that is a dangerous, dangerous form of political ontology.

*Hobbes’ Leviathan is often seen as the perfect depiction of this principle; it is possible to quibble with this reading, but the cover image for this post – here’s the credit to its creator on Twitter – is certainly the best possible reflection on the shift in contemporary forms of political power in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Never let a serious virus go to waste: solidarity in times of the Corona

Blog, Politics, Reviews, Uncategorized

[Please note that nothing in this post is a replacement for public health advice: if in doubt, refer to official guidelines].

I’m not going to bang on about neoliberal origins of the current crisis. To anyone remotely observant, it is obvious that pandemics are more likely to spread quickly in a globalized world, and that decades of underfunding public health services are going to create systems that are unable to deal when one, like the current Covid_19, hits. I’ll leave such conclusions to sufficiently white, British, and hyphenated writers in The Guardian; I’ve written about neoliberalism elsewhere, and a whole host of other people have too. But there is another reason why crises like these are almost a godsend for the kind of authoritarian neoliberalism that seems to be dominant today.

Self-isolation is useful health strategy, especially in the first phases of trying to stem the spread of the disease, but a nation of people boarded up in their homes staring suspiciously at anyone who seems ‘foreign’ or ‘an outsider’, with contact with the ‘outside world’ reduced to television (hello, BBC!) or social media is a perfect breeding ground for fear, hate, and control. In other words, the neoliberal dream of ‘no such thing as society – only individual men, women, and their families’, made flesh. In this sort of environment, not only does paranoia, misinformation, and mistrust abound, it becomes very difficult to maintain progressive movements or ideas. This post, therefore, is intended as a sort of checklist on how to keep some sort of social solidarity going under possible prolonged period of social isolation*.

It is a work in progress, and I didn’t have time to edit and proofread it, which means it is probably going to change. Feel free to adapt and share as necessary.

Maintain social networks: build new ones, and reinforce the old.

Maintain networks and links with people whenever safe. You can spend time with people while keeping a decent distance, and obviously staying at home if you do develop symptoms. If mobility or public transport are limited, try to connect with people from the neighbourhood. Ask your neighbours if they need something. Use technology and social media to reach out to people. Text your friends. Call them on Skype: face-to-face contact, even if you are not physically in the same space, is really important.

Set up mutual aid networks (current link for Cambridge here). You can help distribute food (see more below), skills, and care – from childminding to helping those who are less able to provide for themselves. If you are worried, wear a mask and keep safe distance. Meet in open spaces. Spring is coming, at least on the North hemisphere. This is what parks and community gardens are for. Remember public spaces? Those.

Develop alternative networks of provision and supply chains. SHARE THEM.

I know this doesn’t come naturally to people in highly consumerist societies, but think very carefully about your actual needs, and about possible replacements. Most shortages are outcomes of the combination of inadequate planning and the (surprise!) failure of ‘markets’ to ‘self-regulate’. Not having enough to eat is not the same scale of crisis as not being able to get exactly the brand of beer you prefer. Think about those who may need help with provisions: from simple things like helping the elderly or disabled people reach something on the upper shelf of a supermarket, to those who will inevitably be too ill to go out. Ask them if they need anything. Offer to make a meal and share it with them.

If possible, develop alternative means of providing food and other necessities. Grow vegetables or herbs; borrow and repair items (not that that’s not what you should be doing anyway). Many products that are bought ready-made can be assembled from common household items. Vinegar (white, 5%), for instance, is a relatively reliable disinfectant (this doesn’t mean you should use it on an operating table, but you can use it in the kitchen – listen to doctors, not to Tesco ads; remember your Chemistry lessons). So is vodka, but I didn’t tell you that. And FFS, stop hoarding toilet paper.

Keep busy.

In the first stages, you may be thinking: ‘Lovely! I’ll get to watch all of those Netflix documentaries!’. However, as experience of people in self-isolation with relatively little to do – think long-distance sailors, monks and nuns – shows, you will get bored and listless. Limited range of mobility and/or actual illness will make it worse. It is actually very, very important to maintain at least a minimal amount of daily discipline. Don’t just think ‘oh, I’ll just read and maybe go out for a walk’. Make a schedule for yourself, and for your loved ones. Stick to it.

It is very likely that schools and universities are going to shut down, or at least shift most of instruction online. This may sound like the least of your worries, but it is incredibly important to keep some form of education going – for yourself, and for others. The immediate reason is that it keeps people occupied; the more distant one is that educational contexts are also opportunities for discussing thoughts and feelings, which may otherwise be scarce. It is also an opportunity to think about education outside of the institutional framework. When my school closed early in spring of 1999, our literature teacher kept up weekly seminars, which were completely voluntary. Best of all, it allowed us to read and discuss books that were not on the syllabus.

Obviously, we will have to think about ways to create meaningful discussions and forms of interaction in a mixture of online and offline environments, but it should not stop at technical innovation. That narrative about developing education that is not about the needs of the market? This is your opportunity to build it.

Keep active.

Self-isolation does not mean you have to turn into a couch potato (trust me, there is rarely such a wealth of solitude as experienced on a long walk in nature). Keep moving – it’s fine to go out if you’re feeling healthy, just avoid enclosed and crowded spaces. Apparently, swimming pools are still OK, but even if you do not do swimming there are many forms of physical activity you can enjoy outdoors – from running and cycling to, for instance, doing Tai Chi or yoga out in the open, weather permitting. And walk, walk, walk. If you are unsure of your health or level of fitness, take shorter walks first. Go with a friend or in small groups. Take water and a snack. Stay safe.

The museums, galleries, cinemas, or shopping malls may be closed, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to see. Look around. Take a map and explore your local area. Learn names of plants, birds, or local places. There is a multitude of lovely books on how to do this – from Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost to Oddell’s How to Do Nothing, not to mention endless resources on- and offline on local history, wildlife, or geology.

Do not give up politics.

In this sort of moment, politics can rightly feel like a luxury. When you are increasingly reliant on the Government for medical care or emergency rations, criticizing it may seem ill-advised. This is one of the reasons dictators love crises. Crises stifle dissent. Sometimes, this is aided by the designation of a powerful external (or internal) enemy; sometimes, the enemy is invisible – like a virus, or the economic crisis. Unlike wars, however, which tend to – at least in the long run – provoke resistance, invisible sources of the crisis, especially when connected to health, can make it much more difficult to sustain any sort of political challenge.

This is why it is incredibly important to keep connecting, discussing, and supporting each other in small and big ways. Make sure that you include those who are most vulnerable, who are most likely to be excluded from state care (that includes migrants, rough sleepers, and some people with long-term mental health problems or other illnesses). Remember, building solidarity and alternative networks is not only vital for the community to survive, but will also help you organize more efficiently in the future. Trust me, these skills will come in handy.

Stay safe.

*You are probably wondering what makes me qualified to write about these things. I have grown a bit tired of the fact that, as an Eastern European woman, I constantly have to justify my epistemic authority, but this time it does actually have to do with the famous Where (Do) I Come From. During the 1999 NATO bombing in Serbia, most public services were closed, there were shortages and a curfew. I was part of the opposition to the Serbian regime, which put me (and many other people) in a slightly odd situation of being opposed to what the regime had been doing (meaning waging war for close to a decade at that point against different parts of former Yugoslavia, which was also the ostensible cause of the NATO intervention) but, obviously, also not very happy about being bombed. Obviously, many things from that period are not scalable: I was 18. It was socialism. A lot of today’s technology wasn’t there (for instance, I remember listening to the long sound of dial-up modem whenever the air raid sirens would go off – it was easier to connect as most people went offline and into bomb shelters). But some are. So use as necessary.

Why you’re never working to contract

Blog, higher education, Politics, social theory, Sociological fiction, Uncategorized

During the last #USSstrike, on non-picketing days, I practiced working to contract. Working to contract is part of the broader strategy known as ASOS – action short of a strike – and it means fulfilling your contractual obligations, but not more than that. Together with many other UCU members, I will be moving to ASOS from Thursday. But how does one actually practice ASOS in the neoliberal academia?

I am currently paid to work 2.5 days a week. Normally, I am in the office on Thursdays and Fridays, and sometimes half a Monday or Tuesday. The rest of the time, I write and plan my own research, supervise (that’s Cambridgish for ‘teaching’), or attend seminars and reading groups. Last year, I was mostly writing my dissertation; this year, I am mostly panickedly filling out research grant and job applications, for fear of being without a position when my contract ends in August.

Yet I am also, obviously, not ‘working’ only when I do these things. Books that I read are, more often than not, related to what I am writing, teaching, or just thinking about. Often, I will read ‘theory’ books at all times of day (a former partner once raised the issue of the excess of Marx on the bedside table), but the same can apply to science fiction (or any fiction, for that matter). Films I watch will make it into courses. Even time spent on Twitter occasionally yields important insights, including links to articles, events, or just generic mood of a certain category of people.

I am hardly exceptional in this sense. Most academics work much more than the contracted hours. Estimates vary from 45 to as much as 100 hours/week; regardless of what is a ‘realistic’ assessment, the majority of academics report not being able to finish their expected workload within a 37.5-40hr working week. Working on weekends is ‘industry standard’; there is even a dangerous overwork ethic. Yet increasingly, academics have begun to unite around the unsustainability of the system in which we are increasingly feeling overwhelmed, underpaid, and with mental and other health issues on the rise. This is why rising workloads are one of the key elements of the current wave of UCU strikes. It also led to coining of a parallel hashtag: #ExhaustionRebellion. It seems like the culture is slowly beginning to shift.

From Thursday onwards, I will be on ASOS. I look forward to it: being precarious makes not working sometimes almost as exhausting as working. Yet, the problem with the ethic of overwork is not only that is is unsustainable, or that is directly harmful to the health and well-being of individuals, institutions, and the environment. It is also that it is remarkably resilient: and it is resilient precisely because it relies on some of the things academics value the most.

Marx’s theory of value* tells us that the origins of exploitation in industrial capitalism lie in the fact workers do not have ownership over means of production; thus, they are forced to sell their labour. Those who own means of production, on the other hand, are driven by the need to keep capital flowing, for which they need profit. Thus, they are naturally inclined to pay their workers as little as possible, as long as that is sufficient to actually keep them working. For most universities, a steady supply of newly minted graduate students, coupled with seemingly unpalatable working conditions in most other branches of employment, means they are well positioned to drive wages further down (in the UK, 17.5% in real terms since 2009).

This, however, is where the usefulness of classical Marxist theory stops. It is immediately obvious that many of the conditions the late 19^th-century industrial capitalism no longer apply. To begin with, most academics own the most important means of production: their minds. Of course, many academics use and require relatively expensive equipment, or work in teams where skills are relatively distributed. Yet, even in the most collective of research teams and the most collaborative of labs, the one ingredient that is absolutely necessary is precisely human thoughts. In social sciences and humanities, this is even more the case: while a lot of the work we do is in libraries, or in seminars, or through conversations, ultimately – what we know and do rests within us**.

Neither, for that matter, can academics simply written off as unwitting victims of ‘false consciousness’. Even if the majority could have conceivably been unaware of the direction or speed of the transformation of the sector in the 1990s or in the early 2000s, after the last year’s industrial action this is certainly no longer the case. Nor is this true only of those who are certainly disproportionately affected by its dual face of exploitation and precarity: even academics on secure contracts and in senior positions are increasingly viewing changes to the sector as harmful not only to their younger colleagues, but to themselves. If nothing else, what USS strikes achieved was to help the critique of neoliberalism, marketization and precarity migrate from the pages of left-leaning political periodicals and critical theory seminars into mainstream media discourse. Knowing that current conditions of knowledge production are exploitative, however, does not necessarily translate into knowing what to do about them.

This is why contemporary academic knowledge production is better characterized as extractive or rentier capitalism. Employers, in most cases, do not own – certainly not exclusively – the means of production of knowledge. What they do instead is provide the setting or platform through which knowledge can be valorized, certified, and exchanged; and charge a hefty rent in the process (this is one part of what tuition fees are about). This ‘platform’ can include anything from degrees to learning spaces; from labs and equipment to email servers and libraries. It can also be adjusted, improved, fitted to suit the interests of users (or consumers – in this case, students); this is what endless investment in buildings is about.

The cunning of extractive capitalism lies in the fact that it does not, in fact, require workers to do very much. You are a resource: in industrial capitalism, your body is a resource; in cognitive capitalism, your mind is a resource too. In extractive capitalism, it gets even better: there is almost nothing you do, a single aspect of your thoughts, feelings, or actions, that the university cannot turn into profit. Reading Marxist theory on the side? It will make it into your courses. Interested in politics? Your awareness of social inequalities will be reflected in your teaching philosophy. Involved in community action? It will be listed in your online profile under ‘public engagement and impact’. It gets better still: even your critique of extractive, neoliberal conditions of knowledge production can be used to generate value for your employer – just make sure it is published in the appropriate journals, and before the REF deadline.

This is the secret to the remarkable resilience of extractive capitalism. It feeds on exactly what academics love most: on the desire to know more, to explore, to learn. This is, possibly, one of the most basic human needs past the point of food, shelter, and warmth. The fact that the system is designed to make access to all of the latter dependent on being exploited for the former speaks, I think, volumes (it also makes The Matrix look like less of a metaphor and more of an early blueprint, with technology just waiting to catch up). This makes ‘working to contract’ quite tricky: even if you pack up and leave your office at 16.38 on the dot, Monday to Friday, your employer will still be monetizing your labour. You are probably, even if unwittingly, helping them do so.

What, then, are we to do? It would be obviously easy to end with a vague call a las barricadas, conveniently positioned so as to boost one’s political cred. Not infrequently, my own work’s been read in this way: as if it ‘reminds academics of the necessity of activism’ or (worse) ‘invites to concrete action’ (bleurgh). Nothing could be farther from the truth: I absolutely disagree with the idea that critical analysis somehow magically transmigrates into political action. (In fact, why we are prone to mistaking one for the other is one of the key topics of my work, but this is an ASOS post, so I will not be writing about it). In other words, what you will do – tomorrow, on (or off?) the picket line, in a bit over a week, in the polling booth, in the next few months, when you are asked to join that and that committee or to a review a junior colleague’s tenure/promotion folder – is your problem and yours alone. What this post is about, however, is what to do when you’re on ASOS.

Therefore, I want to propose a collective reclaiming of the life of the mind. Too much of our collective capacity – for thinking, for listening, for learning, for teaching – is currently absorbed by institutions that turn it, willy-nilly, into capital. We need to re-learn to draw boundaries. We need thinking, learning, and caring to become independent of process that turns them into profit. There are many ways to do it – and many have been tried before: workers and cooperative universities; social science centres; summer schools; and, last but not least, our own teach-outs and picket line pedagogy. But even when these are not happening, we need to seriously rethink how we use the one resource that universities cannot replace: our own thoughts.

So from Thursday next week, I am going to be reclaiming my own. I will do the things I usually do – read; research; write; teach and supervise students; plan and attend meetings; analyse data; attend seminars; and so on – until 4.40. After that, however, my mind is mine – and mine alone.

*Rest assured that the students I teach get treated to a much more sophisticated version of the labour theory of value (Soc1), together with variations and critiques of Marxism (Soc2), as well as ontological assumptions of heterodox vs. ‘neoclassical’ economics (Econ8). If you are an academic bro, please resist the urge to try to ‘explain’ any of these as you will both waste my time and not like the result. Meanwhile, I strongly encourage you to read the *academic* work I have published on these questions over the past decade, which you can find under Publications.

**This is one of the reasons why some of the most interesting debates about knowledge production today concern ownership, copyright, or legal access. I do not have time to enter into these debates in this post; for a relatively recent take, see here.

Knowing neoliberalism

Blog, higher education, Philosophy of social science, Politics, social theory, Uncategorized

(This is a companion/’explainer’ piece to my article, ‘Knowing Neoliberalism‘, published in July 2019 in Social Epistemology. While it does include a few excerpts from the article, if using it, please cite and refer to the original publication. The very end of this post explains why).

What does it mean to ‘know’ neoliberalism?

What does it mean to know something from within that something? This question formed the starting point of my (recently defended) PhD thesis. ‘Knowing neoliberalism’ summarizes some of its key points. In this sense, the main argument of the article is epistemological — that is, it is concerned with the conditions (and possibilities, and limitations) of (human) knowledge — in particular when produced and mediated through (social) institutions and networks (which, as some of us would argue, is always). More specifically, it is interested in a special case of that knowledge — that is, what happens when we produce knowledge about the conditions of the production of our own knowledge (in this sense, it’s not ‘about universities’ any more than, say, Bourdieu’s work was ‘about universities’ and it’s not ‘on education’ any more than Latour’s was on geology or mining. Sorry to disappoint).

The question itself, of course, is not new – it appears, in various guises, throughout the history of Western philosophy, particularly in the second half of the 20^th century with the rise (and institutionalisation) of different forms of theory that earned the epithet ‘critical’ (including the eponymous work of philosophers associated with the Frankfurt School, but also other branches of Marxism, feminism, postcolonial studies, and so on). My own theoretical ‘entry points’ came from a longer engagement with Bourdieu’s work on sociological reflexivity and Boltanski’s work on critique, mediated through Arendt’s analysis of the dichotomy between thinking and acting and De Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity; a bit more about that here. However, the critique of neoliberalism that originated in universities in the UK and the US in the last two decades – including intellectual interventions I analysed in the thesis – lends itself as a particularly interesting case to explore this question.

Why study the critique of neoliberalism?

Critique of neoliberalism in the academia is an enormously productive genre. The number of books, journal articles, special issues, not to mention ‘grey’ academic literature such as reviews or blogs (in the ‘Anglosphere’ alone) has grown exponentially since mid-2000s. Originating in anthropological studies of ‘audit culture’, the genre now includes at least one dedicated book series (Palgrave’s ‘Critical University Studies’, which I’ve mentioned in this book review), as well as people dedicated to establishing ‘critical university studies‘ as a field of its own (for the avoidance of doubt, I do not associate my work within this strand, and while I find the delineation of academic ‘fields’ interesting as a sociological phenomenon, I have serious doubts about the value and validity of field proliferation — which I’ve shared in many amicable discussions with colleagues in the network). At the start of my research, I referred to this as the paradox of the proliferation of critique and relative absence of resistance; the article, in part, tries to explain this paradox through the examination of what happens if and when we frame neoliberalism as an object of knowledge — or, in formal terms, epistemic object.
This genre of critique is, and has been, highly influential: the tropes of the ‘death’ of the university or the ‘assault’ on the academia are regularly reproduced in and through intellectual interventions (both within and outside of the university ‘proper’), including far beyond academic neoliberalism’s ‘native’ context (Australia, UK, US, New Zealand). Authors who present this kind of critique, while most frequently coming from (or being employed at) Anglophone universities in the ‘Global North’, are often invited to speak to audiences in the ‘Global South’. Some of this, obviously, has to do with the lasting influence of colonial networks and hierarchies of ‘global’ knowledge production, and, in particular, with the durability of ‘White’ theory. But it illustrates the broader point that the production of critique needs to be studied from the same perspective as the production of any sort of knowledge – rather than as, somehow, exempt from it. My work takes Boltanski’s critique of ‘critical sociology’ as a starting point, but extends it towards a different epistemic position:

Boltanski primarily took issue with what he believed was the unjustified reduction of critical properties of ‘lay actors’ in Bourdieu’s critical sociology. However, I start from the assumption that professional producers of knowledge are not immune to the epistemic biases to which they suspect their research subjects to be susceptible…what happens when we take forms and techniques of sociological knowledge – including those we label ‘critical’ and ‘reflexive’ – to be part and parcel of, rather than opposed to or in any way separate from, the same social factors that we assume are shaping epistemic dispositions of our research subjects? In this sense, recognising that forms of knowledge produced in and through academic structures, even if and when they address issues of exploitation and social (in)justice, are not necessarily devoid of power relations and epistemic biases, seems a necessary step in situating epistemology in present-day debates about neoliberalism. (KN, p. 4)

This, at the same time, is what most of the sources I analysed in my thesis have in common: by and large, they locate sources of power – including neoliberal power – always outside of their own scope of influence. As I’ve pointed out in my earlier work, this means ‘universities’ – which, in practice, often means ‘us’, academics – are almost always portrayed as being on the receiving end of these changes. Not only is this profoundly unsociological – literally every single take on human agency in the past 50-odd years, from Foucault through to Latour and from Giddens through to Archer – recognizes ‘we’ (including as epistemic agents) have some degree of influence over what happens; it is also profoundly unpolitical, as it outsources agency to variously conceived ‘others’ (as I’ve agued here) while avoiding the tricky elements of own participation in the process. This is not to repeat the tired dichotomy of complicity vs. resistance, which is another not particularly innovative reading of the problem. What the article asks, instead, is: What kind of ‘purpose’ does systematic avoidance of questions of ambiguity and ambivalence serve?

What does it aim to achieve?

The objective of the article is not, by the way, to say that the existing forms of critique (including other contributions to the special issue) are ‘bad’ or that they can somehow be ‘improved’. Least of all is it to say that if we just ‘corrected’ our theoretical (epistemological, conceptual) lens we would finally be able to ‘defeat neoliberalism’. The article, in fact, argues the very opposite: that as long as we assume that ‘knowing’ neoliberalism will somehow translate into ‘doing away’ with neoliberalism we remain committed to the (epistemologically and sociologically very limited) assumption that knowledge automatically translates into action.

(…) [the] politically soothing, yet epistemically limited assumption that knowledge automatically translates into action…not only omit(s) to engage with precisely the political, economic, and social elements of the production of knowledge elaborated above, [but] eschews questions of ambiguity and ambivalence generated by these contradictions…examples such as doctors who smoke, environmentalists who fly around the world, and critics of academic capitalism who nonetheless participate in the ‘academic rat race’ (Berliner 2016) remind us that knowledge of the negative effects of specific forms of behaviour is not sufficient to make them go away (KN, p. 10)

(If it did, there would be no critics of neoliberalism who exploit their junior colleagues, critics of sexism who nonetheless reproduce gendered stereotypes and dichotomies, or critics of academic hierarchy who evaluate other people on the basis of their future ‘networking’ potential. And yet, here we are).

What is it about?

The article approaches ‘neoliberalism’ from several angles:

Ontological: What is neoliberalism? It is quite common to see neoliberalism as an epistemic project. Yet, does the fact that neoliberalism changes the nature of the production of knowledge and even what counts as knowledge – and, eventually, becomes itself a subject of knowledge – give us grounds to infer that the way to ‘deal’ with neoliberalism is to frame it as an object (of knowledge)? Is the way to ‘destroy’ neoliberalism to ‘know it’ better? Does treating neoliberalism as an ideology – that is, as something that masses can be ‘enlightened’ about – translate into the possibility to wield political power against it?

(Plot spoiler: my answer to the above questions is no).

Epistemological: What does this mean for ways we can go about knowing neoliberalism (or, for that matter, any element of ‘the social’)? My work, which is predominantly in social theory and sociology of knowledge (no, I don’t work ‘on education’ and my research is not ‘about universities’), in many ways overlaps substantially with social epistemology – the study of the way social factors (regardless of how we conceive of them) shape the capacity to make knowledge claims. In this context, I am particularly interested in how they influence reflexivity, as the capacity to make knowledge claims about our own knowledge – including knowledge of ‘the social’. Enter neoliberalism.

What kind of epistemic position are we occupying when we produce an account of the neoliberal conditions of knowledge production in academia? Is one acting more like the ‘epistemic exemplar’ (Cruickshank 2010) of a ‘sociologist’, or a ‘lay subject’ engaged in practice? What does this tell us about the way in which we are able to conceive of the conditions of the production of our own knowledge about those conditions? (KN, p. 4)

(Yes, I know this is a bit ‘meta’, but that’s how I like it).

Sociological: How do specific conditions of our own production of knowledge about neoliberalism influence this? As a sociologist of knowledge, I am particularly interested in relations of power and privilege reproduced through institutions of knowledge production. As my work on the ‘moral economy’ of Open Access with Chris Muellerleile argued, the production of any type of knowledge cannot be analysed as external to its conditions, including when the knowledge aims to be about those conditions.

‘Knowing neoliberalism’ extends this line of argument by claiming we need to engage seriously with the political economy of critique. It offers some of the places we could look for such clues: for instance, the political economy of publishing. The same goes for networks of power and privilege: whose knowledge is seen as ‘translateable’ and ‘citeable’, and whose can be treated as an empirical illustration:

Neoliberalism offers an overarching diagnostic that can be applied to a variety of geographical and political contexts, on different scales. Whose knowledge is seen as central and ‘translatable’ in these networks is not independent from inequalities rooted in colonial exploitation, maintaining a ‘knowledge hierarchy’ between the Global North and the Global South…these forms of interaction reproduce what Connell (2007, 2014) has dubbed ‘metropolitan science’: sites and knowledge producers in the ‘periphery’ are framed as sources of ‘empirical’, ‘embodied’, and ‘lived’ resistance, while the production of theory, by and large, remains the work of intellectuals (still predominantly White and male) situated in prestigious univer- sities in the UK and the US. (KN, p. 9)

This, incidentally, is the only part of the article that deals with ‘higher education’. It is very short.

Political: What does this mean for different sorts of political agency (and actorhood) that can (and do) take place in neoliberalism? What happens when we assume that (more) knowledge leads to (more) action? (apart from a slew of often well-intended but misconceived policies, some of which I’ve analysed in my book, ‘From Class to Identity’). The article argues that affecting a cognitive slippage between two parts of Marx’s Eleventh Thesis – that is, assuming that interpreting the world will itself lead to changing it – is the thing that contributes to the ‘paradox’ of the overproduction of critique. In other words, we become more and more invested in ‘knowing’ neoliberalism – e.g. producing books and articles – and less invested in doing something about it. This, obviously, is neither a zero-sum game (and it shouldn’t be) nor an old-fashioned call on academics to drop laptops and start mounting barricades; rather, it is a reminder that acting as if there were an automatic link between knowledge of neoliberalism and resistance to neoliberalism tends to leave the latter in its place.

(Actually, maybe it is a call to start mounting barricades, just in case).

Moral: Is there an ethically correct or more just way of ‘knowing’ neoliberalism? Does answering these questions enable us to generate better knowledge? My work – especially the part that engages with the pragmatic sociology of critique – is particularly interested in the moral framing and justification of specific types of knowledge claims. Rather than aiming to provide the ‘true’ way forward, the article asks what kind of ideas of ‘good’ and ‘just’ are invoked/assumed through critique? What kind of moral stance does ‘gnossification’ entail? To steal the title of this conference, when does explaining become ‘explaining away’ – and, in particular, what is the relationship between ‘knowing’ something and framing our own moral responsibility in relation to something?

The full answer to the last question, unfortunately, will take more than one publication. The partial answer the article hints at is that, while having a ‘correct’ way of ‘knowing’ neoliberalism will not ‘do away’ with neoliberalism, we can and should invest in more just and ethical ways of ‘knowing’ altogether. It shouldn’t warrant reminding that the evidence of wide-spread sexual harrassment in the academia, not to mention deeply entrenched casual sexism, racism, ableism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia, all suggest ‘we’ (as academics) are not as morally impeccable as we like to think we are. Thing is, no-one is. The article hopes to have made a small contribution towards giving us the tools to understand why, and how, this is the case.

I hope you enjoy the article!

——————————————————-

P.S. One of the rather straightforward implications of the article is that we need to come to terms with multiple reasons for why we do the work we do. Correspondingly, I thought I’d share a few that inspired me to do this ‘companion’ post. When I first started writing/blogging/Tweeting about the ‘paradox’ of neoliberalism and critique in 2015, this line of inquiry wasn’t very popular: most accounts smoothly reproduced the ‘evil neoliberalism vs. poor us little academics’ narrative. This has also been the case with most people I’ve met in workshops, conferences, and other contexts I have participated in (I went to quite a few as part of my fieldwork).

In the past few years, however, more analyses seem to converge with mine on quite a few analytical and theoretical points. My initial surprise at the fact that they seem not to directly engage with any of these arguments — in fact, were occasionally very happy to recite them back at me, without acknowledgement, attribution or citation — was somewhat clarified through reading the work on gendered citation practices. At the same time, it provided a very handy illustration for exactly the type of paradox described here: namely, while most academics are quick to decry the precarity and ‘awful’ culture of exploitation in the academia, almost as many are equally quick to ‘cite up’ or act strategically in ways that reproduce precisely these inequalities.

The other ‘handy’ way of appropriating the work of other people is to reduce the scope of their arguments, ideally representing it as an empirical illustration that has limited purchase in a specific domain (‘higher education’, ‘gender’, ‘religion’), while hijacking the broader theoretical point for yourself (I have heard a number of other people — most often, obviously, women and people of colour — describe a very similar thing happening to them).

This post is thus a way of clarifying exactly what the argument of the article is, in, I hope, language that is simple enough even if you’re not keen on social ontology, social epistemology, social theory, or, actually, anything social (couldn’t blame you).

PPS. In the meantime, I’ve also started writing an article on how precisely these forms of ‘epistemic positioning’ are used to limit and constrain the knowledge claims of ‘others’ (women, minorities) etc. in the academia: if you have any examples you would like to share, I’m keen to hear them!

Existing while female

Blog, Philosophy of social science, Politics, social theory, Uncategorized

Space

The most threatening spectacle to the patriarchy is a woman staring into space.

I do not mean in the metaphorical sense, as in a woman doing astronomy or astrophysics (or maths or philosophy), though all of these help, too. Just plainly sitting, looking into some vague mid-point of the horizon, for stretches of time.

I perform this little ‘experiment’ at least once per week (more often, if possible; I like staring into space). I wholly recommend it. There are a few simple rules:

You can look at the passers-by (a.k.a. ‘people-watching’), but try to avoid eye contact longer than a few seconds: people should not feel that they are particular objects of attention.
If you are sitting in a café, or a restaurant, you can have a drink, ideally a tea or coffee. That’s not saying you shouldn’t enjoy your Martini cocktails or glasses of Chardonnay, but images of women cradling tall glasses of alcoholic drink of choice have been very succesfully appropriated by both capitalism and patriarchy, for distinct though compatible purposes.
Don’t look at your phone. If you must check the time or messages it’s fine, but don’t start staring at it, texting, or browsing.
Don’t read (a book, a magazine, a newspaper). If you have a particularly interesting or important thought feel free to scribble it down, but don’t bury your gaze behind a notebook, book, or a laptop.

Try doing this for an hour.

What this ‘experiment’ achieves is that it renders visible the simple fact of existing. As a woman. Even worse, it renders visible the process of thinking. Simultaneously inhabiting an inner space (thinking) and public space (sitting), while doing little else to justify your existence.

NOT thinking-while-minding-children, as in ‘oh isn’t it admirrrrable that she manages being both an academic and a mom’.

NOT any other form of ‘thinking on our feet’ that, as Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret (and Virginia Woolf) noted, was the constitutive condition for most thinking done by women throughout history.

The important thing is to claim space to think, unapologetically and in public.

Depending on place and context, this usually produces at least one of the following reactions:

Waiting staff, especially if male, will become increasingly attentive, repeatedly inquiring whether (a) I am alright (b) everything was alright (c) I would like anything else (yes, even if they are not trying to get you to leave, and yes, I have sat in the same place with friends, and this didn’t happen)
Men will try to catch my eye
Random strangers will start repeatedly glancing and sometimes staring in my direction.

I don’t think my experience in this regard is particularly exceptional. Yes, there are many places where women couldn’t even dream of sitting alone in public without risking things much worse than uncomfortable stares (I don’t advise attempting this experiment in such places). Yes, there are places where staring into a book/laptop/phone, ideally with headphones on, is the only way to avoid being approached, chatted up, or harassed by men. Yet, even in wealthy, white, urban, middle-class, ‘liberal’ contexts, women who display signs of being afflicted by ‘the life of the mind’ are still somehow suspect. For what this signals is that it is, actually, possible for women to have an inner life not defined by relation to men, if not particular men, then at least in the abstract.

Relations

‘Is it possible to not be in relation to white men?’, asks Sara Ahmed, in a brilliant essay on intellectual genealogies and institutional racism. The short answer is yes, of course, but not as long as men are in charge of drawing the family tree. Philosophy is a clear example. Two of my favourite philosophers, De Beauvoir and Arendt, are routinely positioned in relation to, respectively, Sartre and Heidegger (and, in Arendt’s case, to a lesser degree, Jaspers). While, in the case of De Beauvoir, this could be, to a degree, justified – after all, they were intellectual and writing partners for most of Sartre’s life – the narrative is hardly balanced: it is always Simone who is seen in relation to Jean-Paul, not the other way round*.

In a bit of an ironic twist, De Beauvoir’s argument in the Second Sex that a woman exists only in relation to a man seems to have been adopted as a stylistic prescription for narrating intellectual history (I recently downloaded an episode of In Our Time on De Beauvoir only to discover, in frustration, that it repeats exactly this pattern). Another example is the philosopher GEM Anscombe, whose work is almost uniquely described in terms of her interpretation of Wittgenstein (she was also married to the philosopher Peter Geach, which doesn’t help). A great deal of Anscombe’s writing does not deal with Wittgenstein, but that is, somehow, passed over, at least in non-specialist circles. What also gets passed over is that, in any intellectual partnership or friendship, ideas flow in both directions. In this case, the honesty and generosity of women’s acknowledgments (and occasional overstatements) of intellectual debt tends to be taken for evidence of incompleteness of female thinking; as if there couldn’t, possibly, be a thought in their ‘pretty heads’ that had not been placed there by a man.

Anscombe, incidentally, had a predilection for staring at things in public. Here’s an excerpt from the Introduction to the Vol. 2 of her collected philosophical papers, Metaphysics and the philosophy of mind:

“The other central philosophical topic which I got hooked on without realising it was philosophy, was perception (…) For years I would spend time in cafés, for instance, staring at objects saying to myself: ‘I see a packet. But what do I really see? How can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow expanse?’” (1981: viii).

But Wittgenstein, sure.

Nature

Nature abhors a vacuum, if by ‘nature’ we mean the rationalisation of patriarchy, and if by ‘vacuum’ we mean the horrifying prospect of women occupied by their own interiority, irrespectively of how mundane or elevated its contents. In Jane Austen’s novels, young women are regularly reminded that they should seem usefully occupied – embroidering, reading (but not too much, and ideally out loud, for everyone’s enjoyment), playing an instrument, singing – whenever young gentlemen came for a visit. The underlying message is that, of course, young gentlemen are not going to want to marry ‘idle’ women. The only justification for women’s existence, of course, is their value as (future) wives, and thus their reproductive capital: everything else – including forms of internal life that do not serve this purpose – is worthless.

Clearly, one should expect things to improve once women are no longer reduced to men’s property, or the function of wives and mothers. Clearly, they haven’t. In Motherhood, Sheila Heti offers a brilliant diagnosis of how the very question of having children bears down differently on women:

It suddenly seemed like a huge conspiracy to keep women in their thirties—when you finally have some brains and some skills and experience—from doing anything useful with them at all. It is hard to when such a large portion of your mind, at any given time, is preoccupied with the possibility—a question that didn’t seem to preoccupy the drunken men at all (2018: 98).

Rebecca Solnit points out the same problem in The Mother of All Questions: no matter what a woman does, she is still evaluated in relation to her performance as a reproductive engine. One of the messages of the insidious ‘lean-in’ kind of feminism is that it’s OK to not be a wife and a mother, as long as you are remarkably successful, as a businesswoman, a political leader, or an author. Obviously, ‘ideally’, both. This keeps women stressed, overworked, and so predictably willing to tolerate absolutely horrendous working conditions (hello, academia) and partnerships. Men can be mediocre and still successful (again, hello, academia); women, in order to succeed, have to be outstanding. Worse, they have to keep proving their oustandingness; ‘pure’ existence is never enough.

To refuse this – to refuse to justify one’s existence through a retrospective or prospective contribution to either particular men (wife of, mother of, daughter of), their institutions (corporation, family, country), or the vaguely defined ‘humankind’ (which, more often than not, is an extrapolation of these categories) – is thus to challenge the washed-out but seemingly undying assumption that a woman is somehow less-worthy version of a man. It is to subvert the myth that shaped and constrained so many, from Austen’s characters to Woolf’s Shakespeare’s sister: that to exist a woman has to be useful; that inhabiting an interiority is to be performed in secret (which meant away from the eyes of the patriarchy); that, ultimately, women’s existence needs to be justified. If not by providing sex, childbearing, and domestic labour, then at least indirectly, by consuming stuff and services that rely on underpaid (including domestic) labour of other women, from fashion to IPhones and from babysitting to nail salons. Sometimes, if necessary, also by writing Big Books: but only so they could be used by men who see in them the reflection of their own (imagined) glory.

Death

Heti recounts another story, about her maternal grandmother, Magda, imprisoned in a concentration camp during WWII. One day, Nazi soldiers came to the women’s barracks and asked for volunteers to help with cooking, cleaning and scrubbing in the officers’ kitchen. Magda stepped forward; as Heti writes, ‘they all did’. Magda was not selected; she was lucky, as it soon transpired that those women were not taken to the kitchen, but rather raped by the officers and then killed.

I lingered over the sentence ‘they all did’ for a long time. What would it mean for more women to not volunteer? To not accept endlessly proving one’s own usefulness, in cover letters, job interviews, student feedback forms? To simply exist, in space?

I think I’ll just sit and think about it for a while.

(The photo is by the British photographer Hannah Starkey, who has a particular penchant for capturing women inhabiting their own interiority. Thank you to my partner who first introduced me to her work, the slight irony being that he interrupted me in precisely one such moment of contemplation to tell me this).

*I used to make a point of asking the students taking Social Theory to change ‘Sartre’s partner Simone de Beauvoir’ in their essays to ‘de Beauvoir’s partner Jean-Paul Sartre’ and see if it begins to read differently.

Area Y: The Necropolitics of Post-Socialism

Blog, climate change, social theory, Sociological fiction, Uncategorized

This summer, I spent almost a month in Serbia and Montenegro (yes, these are two different countries, despite the New York Times still refusing to acknowledge this). This is about seven times as long as I normally would. The two principal reasons are that my mother, who lives in Belgrade, is ill, and that I was planning to get a bit of time to quietly sit and write my thesis on the Adriatic coast of Montenegro. How the latter turned out in light of the knowledge of the former I leave to imagination (tl;dr: not well). It did, however, give me ample time to reflect on the post-socialist condition, which I haven’t done in a while, and to get outside Belgrade, to which I normally confine my brief visits.

The way in which perverse necro/bio-politics of post-socialism obtain in my mother’s illness, in the landscape, and in the socio-material, fits almost too perfectly into what has been for years the dominant style of writing about places that used to be behind the Iron Curtain (or, in the case of Yugoslavia, on its borders). Social theory’s favourite ruins – the ruins of socialism – are repeatedly re-valorised through being dusted off and resurrected, as yet another alter-world to provide the mirror image to the here and the now (the here and the now, obviously, being capitalism). During the Cold War, the Left had its alter-image in the Soviet Union; now, the antidote to neoliberalism is provided not through the actual ruins of real socialism – that would be a tad too much to handle – but through the re-invention of the potential of socialism to provide, in a tellingly polysemic title of MoMA’s recently-opened exhibition on architecture in Yugoslavia, concrete utopias.

Don’t get me wrong: I would love to see the exhibition, and I am sure that it offers much to learn, especially for those who did not have the dubious privilege of having grown up on both sides of socialism. It’s not the absence of nuance that makes me nauseous in encounters with socialist nostalgia: a lot of it, as a form of cultural production, is made by well-meaning people and, in some cases, incredibly well-researched. It’s that resurrecting hipsterified golems of post-socialism serves little purpose other than to underline their ontological status as a source of comparison for the West, cannon-fodder for imaginaries of the world so bereft of hope that it would rather replay its past dreams than face the potential waking nightmare of its future.

It’s precisely this process that leaves them unable to die, much like the ghosts/apparitions/copies in Lem’s (and Tarkovsky’s) Solaris, and in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. In VanderMeer’s books, members of the eleventh expedition (or, rather, their copies) who return to the ‘real world’ after exposure to the Area X develop cancer and die pretty quickly. Life in post-socialism is very much this: shadows or copies of former people confusedly going about their daily business, or revisiting the places that once made sense to them, which, sometimes, they have to purchase as repackaged ‘post-socialism’; in this sense, the parable of Roadside Picnic/Stalker as the perennial museum of post-communism is really prophetic.

The necropolitical profile of these parts of former Yugoslavia, in fact, is pretty unexceptional. For years, research has shown that rapid privatisation increases mortality, even controlled for other factors. Obviously, the state still feigns perfunctory care for the elderly, but healthcare is cumbersome, inefficient and, in most cases, barely palliative. Smoking and heavy drinking are de rigueur: in winter, Belgrade cafés and pubs turn into proper smokehouses. Speaking of that, vegetarianism is still often, if benevolently, ridiculed. Fossil fuel extraction is ubiquitous. According to this report from 2014, Serbia had the second highest rate of premature deaths due to air pollution in Europe. That’s not even getting closer to the Thing That Can’t Be Talked About – the environmental effects of the NATO intervention in 1999.

An apt illustration comes as I travel to Western Serbia to give a talk at the anthropology seminar at Petnica Science Centre, where I used to work between 2000 and 2008. Petnica is a unique institution that developed in the 1980s and 1990s as part science camp, part extracurricular interdisciplinary research institute, where electronics researchers would share tables in the canteen with geologists, and physicists would talk (arguably, not always agreeing) to anthropologists. Founded in part by the Young Researchers of Serbia (then Yugoslavia), a forward-looking environmental exploration and protection group, the place used to float its green credentials. Today, it is funded by the state – and fully branded by the Oil Industry of Serbia. The latter is Serbian only in its name, having become a subsidiary of the Russian fossil fuel giant Gazpromneft. What could arguably be dubbed Serbia’s future research elite, thus, is raised in view of full acceptance of the ubiquity of fossil fuels not only for providing energy, but, literally, for running the facilities they need to work.

These researchers can still consider themselves lucky. The other part of Serbian economy that is actually working are factories, or rather production facilities, of multinational companies. In these companies, workers are given 12-hour shifts, banned from unionising, and, as a series of relatively recent reports revealed, issued with adult diapers so as to render toilet breaks unnecessary.

As Elizabeth Povinelli argued, following Achille Mbembe, geontopower – the production of life and nonlife, and the creation of the distinction between them, including what is allowed to live and what is allowed to die – is the primary mode of exercise of power in late liberalism. Less frequently examined way of sustaining the late liberal order is the production of semi-dependent semi-peripheries. Precisely because they are not the world’s slums, and because they are not former colonies, they receive comparatively little attention. Instead, they are mined for resources (human and inhuman). That the interaction between the two regularly produces outcomes guaranteed to deplete the first is of little relevance. The reserves, unlike those of fossil fuels, are almost endless.

Serbian government does its share in ensuring that the supply of cheap labour force never runs out, by launching endless campaigns to stimulate reproduction. It seems to be working: babies are increasingly the ‘it’ accessory in cafés and bars. Officially, stimulating the birth rate is to offset the ‘cost’ of pensions, which IMF insists should not increase. Unofficially, of course, the easiest way to adjust for this is to make sure pensioners are left behind. Much like the current hype about its legacy, the necropolitics of post-socialism operates primarily through foregrounding its Instagrammable elements, and hiding the ugly, non-productive ones.

Much like in VanderMeer’s Area X, knowledge that the border is advancing could be a mixed blessing: as Danowski and Viveiros de Castro argued in a different context, end of the world comes more easily to those for whom the world has already ended, more than once. Not unlike what Scranton argued in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene – this, perhaps, rather than sanitised dreams of a utopian future, is one thing worth resurrecting from post-socialism.

Writing our way out of neoliberalism? For an ecology of publishing

Blog, climate change, Conference presentations, higher education, Uncategorized

[This blog post is written in preparation for the panel Thinking knowledge production without the university that I am organising at the Sociological Review’s conference Undisciplining: conversations from the edges, Newcastle, Gateshead, 18-21 June 2018. Reflections from other participants are here. I am planning to expand on this part during and after the conference, so questions and comments welcome!]

What kind of writing and publishing practices might support knowledge that is not embedded in the neoliberal university? I’ve been interested in this question for a long while, in part because it is a really tough one. As academics – and certainly as academics in social sciences and humanities – writing and publishing is, ultimately, what we do. Of course, our work frequently also involves teaching – or, as those with a love for neat terminologies like to call it, ‘knowledge transmission’ – as well as different forms of its communication or presentation, which we (sometimes performatively) refer to as ‘public engagement’. Even those, however, often rely or at least lead to the production of written text of some sort: textbooks, academic blogs. This is no surprise: modern Western academic tradition is highly reliant on the written word. Obviously, in this sense, questions and problems of writing/publishing and its relationship with knowledge practices are both older and much broader than the contemporary economy of knowledge production, which we tend to refer to as neoliberal. They may also last beyond it, if, indeed, we can imagine the end of neoliberalism. However, precisely for this reason, it makes sense to think about how we might reconstruct writing and publishing practices in ways that weaken, rather than contribute to the reproduction of neoliberal practices of knowledge production.

The difficulty with thinking outside of the current framework becomes apparent when we try thinking of the form these practices could take. While there are many publications not directly contributing to the publishing industry – blogs, zines, open-access, collaborative, non-paywalled articles all come to mind – they all too easily become embedded in the same dynamic. As a result, they are either eschewed because ‘they do not count’, or else they are made to count (become countable) by being reinserted in the processes of valorisation via the proxy of ‘impact’. As I’ve argued in this article (written with my former colleague from the UNIKE (Universities in the knowledge economy) project, economic geographer Chris Muellerleile), even forms of knowledge production that explicitly seek to ‘disrupt’ such modes, such as Open Access or publish first/review later platforms, often rely on – even if implicit – assumptions that can feed into the logic of evaluation and competition. This is not saying that restricting access to scientific publications is in any way desirable. However, we need to accept that opening access (under certaincircumstances, for certain parts of the population) does not in and of itself do much to ‘disrupt’ the broader political and economic system in which knowledge is embedded.

Publish or…publish

Unsurprisingly, the hypocrisy of the current system disproportionately affects early career and precarious scholars. ‘Succeeding’ in the academia – i.e. escaping precarity – hinges on publishing in recognised formats and outlets: this means, almost exclusively, peer-reviewed journal in one’s discipline, and books. The process is itself costly and risky. Turnover times can be ridiculously long: a chapter for an edited volume I wrote in July 2015 has finally been published last month, presumably because other – more senior, obviously – contributors took much longer. The chapter deals with a case from 2014, which makes the three-year lag between its accepted version and publication problematic for all sorts of reasons. On the other hand, even when good and relatively timely, the process of peer review can be soul-crushing for junior scholars (see: Reviewer No.2). Obviously, if this always resulted in a better final version of the article, we could argue it would make it worthwhile. However, while some peer reviewers offer constructive feedback that really improves the process of publication, this is not always the case. Increasingly, because peer review takes time and effort, it is kicked down the academic ladder, so it becomes a case of who can afford to review – or, equally (if not more) often, who cannot afford to say no a review.

In other words, just like other aspects of academic knowledge production, the reviewing and publishing process is plagued by stark inequalities. ‘Big names’ or star professors can get away with only perfunctory – if any – peer review; a series of clear cases of plagiarism or self-plagiarism, not to mention a string of recent books with bombastic titles that read like barely-edited transcripts of undergraduate seminars (there are plenty around), are a testament to this. Just in case, many of these ‘Trump academics‘ keep their own journals or book series as a side hustle, where the degree of familiarity with the editorial board is often the easiest path to publication.

What does this all lead to? The net result is the proliferation of academic publications of all sorts, what some scholars have dubbed the shift from an economy of scarcity to that of abundance. However, it’s not that more is necessarily better: while it’s difficult (if not entirely useless) to speak of scholarly publications in universal terms, as the frequently (mis-)cited piece of research argued, most academic articles are read and cited by very few people. It’s quite common for academics to complain they can’t keep up with the scholarly production in their field, even when narrowed down to a very tight disciplinary specialism. Some of this, obviously, has to do with the changing structure of academic labour, in particular the increasing load of administration and the endless rounds of research evaluation and grant application writing, which syphons aways time for reading. But some of this has to do with the simple fact that there is so much more of published stuff around: scholars compete with each other in terms of who’s going to get more ‘out there’, and sooner. As a result, people rarely take the time to read others’ work carefully, especially if it is outside of their narrow specialism or discipline. Substituting this with sycophantic shout-outs via Twitter or book reviews, which are often thinly veiled self-serving praise that reveals more about the reviewer’s career plans, than about the actual publication being reviewed.

For an ecology of knowledge production

So, how is it possible to work against all this? Given that the purpose of this panel was to start thinking about actual solutions, rather than repeat tired complaints about the nature of knowledge production in the neoliberal academia, I am going to put forward two concrete proposals: one is on the level of conceptual – not to say ‘behavioural’ -change; the other on the level of institutions, or organisations. The first is a commitment to, simply, publish less. Much like in environmental pollution where solutions such as recycling, ‘natural’ materials, and free and ethical trading are a way less effective way to minimise CO2 emissions than just reducing consumption (and production), in writing and publishing we could move towards the progressive divestment from the idea that the goal is to produce as much as possible, and put it ‘out there’ as quickly as possible. To be clear, this isn’t a thinly-veiled plea for ‘slow’ scholarship. Some disciplines or topics clearly call for quicker turnover – one can think of analyses in current affairs, environmental or political science. On the other hand, some topics or disciplines require time, especially when there is value in observing how trends develop over a period of time. Recognising the divergent temporal cycles of knowledge production not only supports the dignity of the academic profession, but also recognises knowledge production happens outside of academia, and should not – need not – necessarily be dependent on being recognised or rewarded within it. As long as the system rewards output, the rate of output will tend to increase: in this sense, competition can be seen not necessarily as an outcome as much as a byproduct of our desire to ‘populate’ the world with the fruits of our labour. Publishing less, in this sense, is not that much a performative act as the first step in divesting from the incessant drive of competitive logic that permeates both the academia and the world ‘outside’ of it.

One way is to, simply, publish less.

Publishers play a very important role in this ecology of knowledge production. Much has been made of the so-called ‘predatory’ journals and publishers, clearly seeking even a marginal profit: the less often mentioned flipside is that almost all publishing is to some degree ‘predatory’, in the sense in which editors seek out authors whose work they believe can sell – that is, sell for a profit that goes to the publisher, and sometimes the editors, while authors can, at best, hope for an occasional drip from royalties (unless, again, they are star/Trump academics, in which case they can aspire to hefty book advances). Given the way in which the imperative to publish is ingrained in the dynamics of academic career progression – and, one might argue, in the academic psyche – it is no surprise that multiple publishing platforms, often of dubious quality, thrive in this landscape.

Instead of this, we could aim for a combination of publishing cooperatives – perhaps embedded in professional societies – and a small number of established journals, which could serve as platforms or hubs for a variety of formats, from blogs to full-blown monographs. These journals would have an established, publicly known, and well-funded board of reviewers and editors. Combined, these principles could enable publishing to serve multiple purposes, communities and formats, without the need to reproduce a harmful hierarchy embedded in competitive market-oriented models. It seems to me that the Sociological Review, which is organising this conference, could be going towards this model. Another journal with multiple formats and an online forum is the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. I am sure there are others that could serve as blueprints for this new ecology of knowledge production; perhaps, together, we can start thinking how to build it.

Life or business as usual? Lessons of the USS strike

Blog, higher education, history, Politics, Uncategorized

[Shortened version of this blog post was published on Times Higher Education blog on 14 March under the title ‘USS strike: picket line debates will reenergise scholarship’].

Until recently, Professor Marenbon writes, university strikes in Cambridge were a hardly noticeable affair. Life, he says, went on as usual. The ongoing industrial action that UCU members are engaging in at UK’s universities has changed all that. Dons, rarely concerned with the affairs of the lesser mortals, seem to be up in arms. They are picketing, almost every day, in the wind and the snow; marching; shouting slogans. For Heaven’s sake, some are even dancing. Cambridge, as pointed out on Twitter, has not seen such upheaval ever since we considered awarding Derrida an honorary degree.

This is possibly the best thing that has happened to UK higher education, at least since the end of the 1990s. Not that there’s much competition: this period, after all, brought us the introduction, then removal of tuition fee caps; abolishment of maintenance grants; REF and TEF; and as crowning (though short-lived) glory, appointment of Toby Young to the Office for Students. Yet, for most of this period, academics’ opposition to these reforms conformed to ‘civilised’ ways of protest: writing a book, giving a lecture, publishing a blog post or an article in Times Higher Education, or, at best, complaining on Twitter. While most would agree that British universities have been under threat for decades, concerted effort to counter these reforms – with a few notable exceptions – remained the provenance of the people Professor Marenbon calls ‘amiable but over-ideological eccentrics’.

This is how we have truly let down our students. Resistance was left to student protests and occupations. Longer-lasting, transgenerational solidarity was all but absent: at the end of the day, professors retreated to their ivory towers, precarious academics engaged in activism on the side of ever-increasing competition and pressure to land a permanent job. Students picked up the tab: not only when it came to tuition fees, used to finance expensive accommodation blocks designed to attract more (tuition-paying) students, but also when it came to the quality of teaching and learning, increasingly delivered by an underpaid, overworked, and precarious labour force.

This is why the charge that teach-outs of dubious quality are replacing lectures comes across as particularly disingenuous. We are told that ‘although students are denied lectures on philosophy, history or mathematics, the union wants them to show up to “teach-outs” on vital topics such as “How UK policy fuels war and repression in the Middle East” and “Neoliberal Capitalism versus Collective Imaginaries”’. Although this is but one snippet of Cambridge UCU’s programme of teach-outs, the choice is illustrative.

The link between history and UK’s foreign policy in the Middle East strikes me as obvious. Students in philosophy, politics or economics could do worse than a seminar on the development of neoliberal ideology (the event was initially scheduled as part of the Cambridge seminar in political thought). As for mathematics – anybody who, over the past weeks, has had to engage with the details of actuarial calculation and projections tied to the USS pension scheme has had more than a crash refresher course: I dare say they learned more than they ever hoped they would.

Teach-outs, in this sense, are not a replacement for education “as usual”. They are a way to begin bridging the infamous divide between “town and gown”, both by being held in more open spaces, and by, for instance, discussing how the university’s lucrative development projects are impacting on the regional economy. They are not meant to make up for the shortcomings of higher education: if anything, they render them more visible.

What the strikes have made clear is that academics’ ‘life as usual’ is vice-chancellors’ business as usual. In other words, it is precisely the attitude of studied depoliticisation that allowed the marketization of higher education to continue. Markets, after all, are presumably ‘apolitical’. Other scholars have expanded considerable effort in showing how this assumption had been used to further policies whose results we are now seeing, among other places, in the reform of the pensions system. Rather than repeat their arguments, I would like to end with the words of another philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who understood well the ambiguous relationship between the academia and politics:

‘Very unwelcome truths have emerged from the universities, and very unwelcome judgments have been handed down from the bench time and again; and these institutions, like other refuges of truth, have remained exposed to all the dangers arising from social and political power. Yet the chances for truth to prevail in public are, of course, greatly improved by the mere existence of such places and by the organization of independent, supposedly disinterested scholars associated with them.

This authentically political significance of the Academe is today easily overlooked because of the prominence of its professional schools and the evolution of its natural science divisions, where, unexpectedly, pure research has yielded so many decisive results that have proved vital to the country at large. No one can possibly gainsay the social and technical usefulness of the universities, but this importance is not political. The historical sciences and the humanities, which are supposed to find out, stand guard over, and interpret factual truth and human documents, are politically of greater relevance.’

In this sense, teach-outs, and industrial action in general, are a way to for us to recognise our responsibility to protect the university from the undue incursion of political power, while acknowledging that such responsibility is in itself political. At this moment in history, I can think of no service to scholarship greater than that.

Category: Uncategorized

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Writing our way out of neoliberalism? For an ecology of publishing

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