Governing Academic Life Conference at the London School of Economics and British Library 25 & 26th June 2014 Deadline for Abstracts: 31st March 2014 Website Details June 25, 2014 is the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault. Governing Academic Life marks this anniversary by providing an occasion for academics to reflect on our present situation through our reflections on Foucault’s legacy. The focus of the conference, therefore, will be on the form of governmentality that now constitutes our identities and regulates our practices as researchers and teachers. However the event will also create a space for encounters between governmentality scholars and critics of the neoliberal academy whose critiques have different intellectual roots – especially Frankfurt school critical theory, critical political economy, feminism, Bourdieuian analyses of habitus, capital and field, and autonomist Marxism. Proposals for papers and panels are welcome until March 15, 2014. Please refer to the guidelines below. Background and context: The impetus for this event is the set of changes currently sweeping across UK higher education, which include cuts in direct public funding, new financing arrangements that are calculated to bring private equity into the sector and foster competition between providers, the likely emergence of new corporate structures for HEI’s which will open the sector to commercial providers, the separation of elite from mass higher education and the globalization of ‘trade’ in HE services; but also (and relatedly) the continuing development of instruments for rendering student-teacher interactions visible and comparable, and for calculating and governing the impact, influence and value of academic research. Governmentality research is featuring strongly in the debates around some of this. Yet though largely ‘diagnostic’ in nature, it is increasingly being enlisted as groundwork for the radical critiques and alternatives offered by autonomist Marxist theorists of cognitive capitalism and immaterial labour. Meanwhile, critical theorists who idealise a public sphere of rational-critical debate (with ‘the idea of the university’ at its heart) are struggling to re-define what makes the university (a) public and to re-think the terms of its engagement with the wider economy and society in less radical ways – often without problematising the forms of (Foucaultian) government, or of complicity with capitalism’s logic of accumulation, that are necessarily involved with these reconstructions. This conference aims to bring together leading contemporary scholars and activists who draw on one or more of these traditions for a series of mutually challenging discussions. In general, the conference will be oriented by the concern to think critically about the conditions of possibility of the academy today – where ‘conditions of possibility’ could mean governmental assemblages of one kind or another, capitalist production relations, the forces defining how different capitals (economic, social, cultural, symbolic) register within the academic field, or quasi-transcendental presuppositions of communication. Participants will ideally aim to explore how we might think across these usually distinct ways of both conceiving what the university is and contesting what it has become. Specific foci of debate may include: The idea of the university: ruined or redeemable? Social criticism in the age of the normalized academic Beyond public v. private? Dimensions of corporatisation The role(s) of (contract, competition, corporate, financial, intellectual property) law in constructing the market university The government of academic freedom: constituting competition as a way of life Markets, measurement and managerialism: rankings and ratings, rights and royalties, accounting and audit, metrics … and alt.metrics? Academic career-ism and casualization; discipline and de-professionalisation The conditions for the persistence in the university sector of relations of domination organised in particular around gender and ethnicity Critical political economy and varieties of communicative capitalism Entrepreneurial universities and enterprising academic subjects: personal branding as ‘technology of the self’? What is an author, now? The future of academic authorship and the academic book The potentials and pitfalls of ‘openness’ and ‘commons-ism’ in scholarly communication The ‘technicity’ of academic forms of life: the potentials and pathologies of living with/in digitised work environments The student as consumer – or as producer? The rise of para-academic ‘outstitutions’ beyond the university’s (pay)walls Other strategies for resisting the neoliberal academy Envisioning and enacting alternative futures for the university Additional ideas for panels and themes are welcome. Proposal submission procedure: Proposals should be submitted as e-mail attachments to [email protected] or [email protected], or in hard copy form by mail to one of the conference coordinators (addresses below). The deadline for receipt of proposals is March 15, 2014. Proposals for papers must include the working title of the proposed paper (which should be suitable for presentation in 20 minutes) together with the author’s name, affiliation, full contact information (including address, phone, fax and email), and a brief (500 words maximum) abstract or outline. Submissions are welcome from graduate students as well as from more established scholars. Proposals for panels (of up to 4 speakers) must include the information indicated above for all papers that are expected to be part of the panel, together with an overview of the panel theme (max 300 words) and an indication of each proposed panellist’s willingness to participate. Timetable: Proposals will be reviewed by the conference co-ordinators, and notice of acceptance will be given by April 15 2014. Registration: A registration fee of £100 will be payable to cover costs. A limited number of places will be available at a concessionary rate for graduate students, adjuncts and scholars without an institutional affiliation. Please indicate if you wish to be considered for one of these places when sending your proposal. Conference coordinators: Anne Barron Associate Professor (Reader) Law Department London School of Economics and Political Science Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE UKTel +44 20 7955 7267 email: [email protected] lse.ac.uk/collections/law/staff/anne-barron.htm
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 20:05:36 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015