Education Reading Group

Michaelmas 2018, Education and Activism Reading Group

If you’ve ever tried to make change in a university, you’ll have heard the terms that structure this reading group a lot. Words like marketisation, decolonisation, the “student movement”, and free education are part of a student activist lexicon that crops up all the time in organising meetings and speeches at rallies.

The point of terms like these is to tie together thoughts into a concept; to package up a litany of causes, consequences, and analyses into a neat package, something we can love or hate, fight for or resist.

That process is risky; we can forget to look at the complexity of what those terms communicate, and in doing so we can forget to explain what we’re doing, and also to have the productive disagreements that enable us to do it better. This reading group aims to create one space among many for those conversations in the sincere hope that it will facilitate more considered practice.

Some of these topics are topics of study within the academic institutions of the university, and most are not. I’ve written this reading list as someone who didn’t study any of these things formally; hopefully everything on it will make sense whatever your relation to those academic institutions. The conversations we have in this group will not be academic ones. They will be about how we use these concepts here and now in our organising. They will be practical and maybe even tactical.

Readings