Education and Activism 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.
Events | |
---|---|
Marketisation | 14th October |
The “Student Movement” | 28th October |
Decolonisation | 11th Novemeber |
Free Education? | 25th November |
Readings
Marketisation - 14th October | *12 Pints Press, “Spotlight on Marketisation” in 2018 Disorientation Guide, p25 https://issuu.com/12pintspress/docs/web_issuu_final
*Ahmed, Sara, “Against Students” https://feministkilljoys.com/2015/06/25/against-students/ McGettigan, Andrew, “Introduction: Privatisation - The Plan and the Gamble” in The Great University Gamble: Money Markets and the Future of Higher Education. https://andrewmcgettigan.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/mcgettigan_t02659_00_pre_22-01-2013.pdf Finlayson, Lorna. “Healthy University Champions” https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/07/27/lorna-finlayson/healthy-university-champions/ |
The “Student Movement” - 28th October | Myers, Matt, “”2: Millbank” in Student Revolt OR http://novaramedia.com/2017/11/14/interview-with-matt-myers/
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel & Cohn-Bendit, Gabriel, “Students and Society” in Obsolete Communism: The Left Wing Alternative. pp41-48 |
Decolonisation - 11th November | Sisters of Resistance, Left of Brown, and Jenny Rodriguez, "Is Decolonizing the New Black?" https://sistersofresistance.wordpress.com/2018/07/12/is-decolonizing-the-new-black/
Mahmood Mamdani, "The African University" (https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n14/mahmood-mamdani/the-african-university) |
Free Education? - 25th November | Platsky Miller, Josh, “Radical democracy and educational experiments: From Rojava to Rio de Janeiro” http:// Horgan, Amelia “Beyond Tuition Fees: Democratising Higher Education” https:// |