The Para-Academic Handbook

Description

Frustrated by the lack of opportunities to research, create learning experiences or make a basic living within the university on our own terms, para-academics don't seek out alternative careers in the face of an evaporated future; we just continue to do what we've always done: write, research, learn, think and facilitate that process for others. As the para-academic community grows, there is a real need to build supportive networks, share knowledge, ideas and strategies that can allow these types of interventions to become sustainable and flourish. There is a very real need to create spaces of solace, action and creativity.

Para-academics mimic academic practices so they are liberated from the confines of the university. Our work, and our lives, reflect how the idea of a university as a place for knowledge production, discussion and learning, has become distorted by neo-liberal market forces.

We create alternative, genuinely open access, learning-thinking-making-acting spaces on the internet, in publications, in exhibitions, discussion groups or through other mediums that seem appropriate to the situation. We don’t sit back and worry about our career developments paths. We write for the love of it; we think because we have to; we do it because we care.

Foreword: We Are All Para-Academics Now Gary Rolfe

Para-academia: Reclaiming What Has Been Devastated Deborah Withers & Alex Wardrop

A Procrastination Alex Wardrop

Notes on the Prefix Alexander M. Kokoli

Spaces of Possibility: Pedagogy and Politics in a Changing Institution Lena Wånggren & Maja Milatovic

Interview with Joyce Canaan Joyce Canaan & Deborah Withers

A Pedagogics of Unlearning Éamonn Dunne & Michael O’Rourke

Emboldened and Unterrified: In/ Outside and – In Spite Of – The Neoliberal Academy Christian Garland

A Lesson from Warwick The Provisional University

Beyond the Defence of the Public University: Building a New Schole Kelvin Mason & Mark Purcell

Decentring Knowledge Production – Reflections on Learning Spaces In and Alongside Academic Institutions Laura Sterry

Edge, Empowerment and Sustainability: Para-Academic Practice as Applied Permaculture Design Tom Henfrey

Higher Degree (Un) Consciousness: A Frierean Approach to Post-Graduate Study Emma Durden, Eliza Govender and Sertanya Reddy

Crowdfunding of Academic Books: A Case Study Oliver Leistert & Theo Röhle

Para-Academic Publishing As Public-Making Paul Boshears

An Activist-Academic’s Reflections on Para-Academia Louise Livesey

No More Stitch Ups! Media, Research Justice and Fat Activist Community Knowledge Charlotte Cooper

Simultaneous Life and Death in Every Moment Georgina Huntley

On the Academy's Point of Exteriority/ DUST Manifesto Fintan Neylan

The Pros and Cons of Para-Academia: A Personal UK Perspective Tony Keen

Reflections of an Incidental Maverick Paul Hurley

Otherwise Engaged B.J. Epstein

Marginal Inquiries; Precarity, Parergons and Situated Knowledges Margaret Mayhew

Epicurean Rain Eileen Joy

Resources

Sujets

• Critical Theory
• EDUCATION
• Precarity
• Pedagogy
• Adult education
• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 17 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781910849279
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

T HE P ARA -A CADEMIC H ANDBOOK

THE PARA-ACADEMIC HANDBOOK:
A TOOLKIT FOR MAKING-LEARNING-CREATING-ACTING
© Individual authors, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0
This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
Cover photo Arise by Rachael House 2013
www.rachaelhouse.com
Cover design by Graeme Maguire/Eva Megias
www.graememaguire.com
Typeset by Eva Megias www.evamegias.com
epub ISBN-13: 978-1-9108492-7-9
ISBN-10: 0956450753
First published in 2014 by HammerOn Press
Bristol, England
http://www.hammeronpress.net
HammerOn Press is an imprint of Intellect
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
www.intellectbooks.com
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank all the contributors, Gary Rolfe, Isabelle Stengers, Ruth Barcan, Sam Thomas, Ika Willis, Rob Crowe, Eva Megias, Rachael House, Sue Tate, Hannah Austin, Graeme Maguire, Maud Perrier, Natalie Brown, Genevieve Lively and all those who support para-academic movements of knowledge making, learning, creating, thinking and acting.
C ONTENTS
WE ARE ALL PARA-ACADEMICS NOW
Gary Rolfe
RECLAIMING WHAT HAS BEEN DEVASTATED
Deborah Withers & Alex Wardrop
A PROCRASTINATION
Alex Wardrop
NOTES ON THE PREFIX
Alexandra M. Kokoli
SPACES OF POSSIBILITY: PEDAGOGY AND POLITICS IN A CHANGING INSTITUTION
Lena Wånggren and Maja Milatovic
INTERVIEW WITH JOYCE CANAAN
A PEDAGOGICS OF UNLEARNING
Éamonn Dunne & Michael O’Rourke
EMBOLDENED AND UNTERRIFIED
Christian Garland
A LESSON FROM WARWICK
The Provisional University
BEYOND THE DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY
Kelvin Mason & Mark Purcell
DECENTRING KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
Laura Sterry
EDGE, EMPOWERMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY
Tom Henfrey
HIGHER DEGREE (UN)CONSCIOUSNESS
Emma Durden, Eliza Govender and Sertanya Reddy
CROWDFUNDING OF ACADEMIC BOOKS
Oliver Leistert & Theo Röhle
PARA- ACADEMIC PUBLISHING AS PUBLIC-MAKING
Paul Boshears
AN ACTIVIST-ACADEMIC’S REFLECTIONS
Louise Livesey
NO MORE STITCH-UPS!
Dr Charlotte Cooper
SIMULTANEOUS LIFE AND DEATH
Georgina Huntley
ON THE ACADEMY’S POINT OF EXTERIORITY
Fintan Neylan
THE PROS AND CONS OF PARA-ACADEMIA
Tony Keen
REFLECTIONS OF AN INCIDENTAL MAVERICK
Paul Hurley
OTHERWISE ENGAGED
B.J. Epstein
MARGINAL INQUIRIES
Margaret Mayhew
EPICUREAN RAIN
Eileen A. Joy
RESOURCES
WE ARE ALL PARA-ACADEMICS NOW
Gary Rolfe
I have recently been struggling to find a word to describe the growing movement of resistance towards the ever more corporate mission of the university. I toyed at first with calling this emerging body of people, ideas and practices the Subversity in recognition of its largely subterranean nature. But it is no longer an underground movement; the resistance may not be immediately apparent, it may not advertise itself overtly, but it is there, unseen in plain sight, functioning side-by-side with the corporate mission. I finally settled on the Paraversity , which I described as a subversive, virtual community of dissensus that exists alongside and in parallel to the corporate university. 1 Had I thought of it at the time, I might well have also coined the term ‘para-academics’ for those individuals who work across and against the corporate agenda of what Bill Readings called the ruined university, 2 whose mission is, as far as I can see, the generation and sale of information (the so-called research agenda) and the exchange of student fees for degree certificates (the teaching agenda). However, it seems that I have been beaten to it by The Para-Academic Handbook.
The corporate university is not going away, but neither is the paraversity; in fact, I would go so far as to say that we are all para-academics now. Of course, when I use the word ‘we’, I do so with certain qualifications. Firstly, the ‘we’ I refer to is those who are likely to read this book and others like it: we dissenters; we who feel disenfranchised by what our universities have become; we who simply cannot passively go along with the doxa, the general consensus of what a university is nowadays for. And, in any case, to ask what a university is for is completely to miss the point. As Michael Oakeshott put it, ‘A university is not a machine for achieving a particular purpose or producing a particular result; it is a manner of human activity’. 3 This at least should give us hope. We must resist at all costs the idea of the university as a machine: a university should not be defined by what it produces (information, graduates) but by what we (para-) academics do and by how we relate and respond to one another. We (that is, we para-academics) must resist becoming cogs in a corporate machine; to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, we are each of us separate and independent ‘little machines’ whose operations are defined by our connections to one another. 4 I repeat: not cogs but individual machines, and machines that are defined not by what we produce but by how we produce it; by process rather than product; quality rather than quantity. As I said, this should give us hope. If the university is, as Oakeshott suggests, ‘a manner of human activity’, then we can change the university by changing how we think and behave as its constituent parts.
Which brings me to the second qualification on my use of the word ‘we’. Bill Readings warns that the university is in danger of becoming ‘an autonomous collective subject who is authorised to say “we” and to terrorise those who do not, or cannot, speak in that “we”’. 5
I suspect that some academics and others who are reading these words will, like me, have already felt the terror of the collective ‘we’. The we to which I refer, then, is not the ‘we’ of consensus, of compromise in the name of getting on (in both senses of the term), but describes what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a plurality of singularities, or what Readings refers to as a community of dissensus. 6
Dissensus is not dissent, it is not the opposite of consent, but a special case of it. The practice of dissensus is a commitment to thinking alongside and in parallel to one another with no pressure to reach agreement; indeed, the purpose of thinking in parallel is to keep discussion and debate open and alive precisely by avoiding coming to agreement. A community of dissensus is a community of thinkers committed to formulating questions rather than providing answers and to keeping those questions alive, active and productive for as long as possible. A community of dissensus is a community of researchers, scholars and students (that is, of para-academics) committed to asking questions of one another, to listening and respecting each other’s views and ideas, and to describing, explaining and advocating their own ideas with no expectations or obligations to agree. A community of dissensus is a community that consents not to be bound by consensus.
The para-doxical (that is, parallel to the doxa, to received opinion) space in which we para-academics operate should not be thought of as either inside or outside of the orthodoxical university. In fact, it would be misleading to think of the paraversity as existing in space at all. As academics, we all of course occupy a physical space within the university; we are each, to some extent, tethered to a discipline, a department, a curriculum, a course. However, to the extent that we are also para-academics, we are also individual little machines, free to roam physically, intellectually and emotionally. Universities organise and understand themselves as linear, unidirectional tree-like hierarchies in which we are leaves attached to twigs, attached to branches, attached to a central trunk. In contrast, the paraversity takes the form of a rhizome, an underground, tangled root structure in which, as Deleuze and Guattari tell us, any point can be connected to anything other, and must be . 7 It is the duty of the little para-academic machine, then, to connect with anything other , to plug in, to become entangled with as many people and projects as possible.
This multiplicity of singularities which makes up the paraversity is reflected in the content of this Para-Academic Handbook . These are mostly singular visions and singular projects. That is not to say that they are undertaken in isolation from what is going on around them; indeed, many of them are delightfully tangled and woven into the tissue of the orthodoxical university. However, they make no concessions to the doxa and no compromises in the face of the terror of the collective ‘we’. You do not need to have read this handbook to know this to be true; you need only look at the contents page which will also, I am sure, suggest to you that what you are holding is not only a hand book, but also a head book and a heart book.
We , the plurality of singularities reading this book, the we who reject the doxa in favour of the para-doxa, who think, create and scheme together in parallel without the need or desire to converge, who resist the terror of the collective and the pressure to be productive; we are all para-academics .
Notes
1 Rolfe, Gary (2013) The University in Dissent . London: Routledge.
2 Readings, Bill (1996) The University in Ruins . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
3 Oakeshott, Michael (2001) The Voice of Liberal Learning . Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 106.
4 Deleuze, Gilles and Guatarri, Felix (1989) A Thousand Plateaus . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 4.
5 Readings, The University in Ruins , 188.
6 Nancy, Jean