Exit StrategiesA Letters & Handshakes event
Celebrating
the launch of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (28) "Out of
the Ruins, the University to Come," edited by Bob Hanke and Alison Hearn
Irfan
Ali (The Academy of the Impossible) | Maria Alejandrina Coates, Rodrigo
Hernandez-Gomez, and Arlan Londoño (Decolonial Aesthetics from the
Americas) | Nick Dyer-Witheford (University of Western Ontario) | Sandra
Jeppesen (Lakehead University) | Justin Langlois (Broken City Lab) |
Maiko Tanaka (The Grand Domestic Revolution)
Sat. April 20, 20133:00-5:00pm
Onsite [at] OCAD U230 Richmond St. West
Toronto, ONFacebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/120010221527156/
Accumulation
by student debt. Precarization of education workers. Dependence on
corporate donations. Emphasis on research commercialization.
Intensification of academic managerialism... Neoliberal transformations
of the university coincide with growing interest in co-research, free
schools, and education-oriented art practice. Bringing together
individuals working within and across educational, activist, and
artistic fields, Exit Strategies assesses some of the fault lines in
universities today—but also links that conversation to a counter-current
of experimentation in research, pedagogy, and institution formation
occurring at the margins of the university system.
As
sites of knowledge production become increasingly enclosed, what new
practices of education are unfolding simultaneously in neighbourhoods,
in homes, and in classrooms?
How is pedagogical possibility enabled and constrained by the setting in which we teach, learn, and research?
Refusing
to romanticize a 'lost' university or idealize 'alternative' practices,
here exit strategies are about evicting neoliberal imperatives from
educational institutions; affirming commitments to radical pedagogy,
basic research, and critical inquiry that continue to animate the
university; constructing autonomous education projects and pursuing
disruptive pedagogies that strive to forefront non-capitalist sociality
and anti-oppression; amplifying transversal relays across diverse sites
for action-oriented research; and sharing insights between those voicing
a critique of the university from within and those inventing new
institutions and pedagogies from without.
Speakers
Irfan Ali is a
writer, educator, and the operations manager of the Academy of the
Impossible. The Academy is an open source social enterprise in west-end
Toronto that opened in December 2011. Ali works primarily with
Impossible Arts, the organization's arts wing, coordinating and leading
writing and art programs for Toronto youth and adults. In just over one
year the Academy has become a hub for workshops, events, and groups that
focus on innovative educational techniques. Impossible Arts runs four
main programs: Toronto Street Writers (a writing group), Sound Poets'
Circle (a hip hop and spoken word workshop), Impossible Words (a
literary salon), and Fright Film Academy (a film workshop). Ali's
background is in commerce and education and he has previously worked
with organizations such as the Children's Aid Society of Toronto,
Pathways to Education - Regent Park, and the Christie-Ossington
Neighbourhood Centre.
Maria
Alejandrina Coates, Rodrigo Hernandez-Gomez, and Arlan Londoño are the
organizers of Decolonial Aesthetics from the Americas, a
multidisciplinary and collaborative symposium for artists and scholars
of the Americas and the Caribbean, featuring performances, artist
presentations, workshops, online components, and papers. In
collaboration with FUSE Magazine, a special issue, to be published in
September 2013, will serve as a reader for this event.
Nick
Dyer-Witheford is Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the Faculty
of Information and Media Studies at University of Western Ontario. He
is author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in
High-Technology Capitalism (University of Illinois, 1999), and
co-author, with Stephen Kline and Greig de Peuter, of Digital Play: The
Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (McGill-Queen's,
2003), and with Greig de Peuter of Games of Empire: Global Capitalism
and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). He
is currently working on a manuscript provisionally titled The Global
Worker and the Digital Front.
Sandra
Jeppesen is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies, and the creator of
the new Media Studies for Social Change program in the
Interdisciplinary Studies Department at Lakehead University in Orillia.
With Holly Nazar, she contributed the essay "Beyond Academic Freedom:
Canadian Neoliberal Universities in the Global Context" to TOPIA (28).
Justin
Langlois is the co-founder and research director of Broken City Lab,
and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and
Social Sciences at the University of Windsor. In the fall, he will join
the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University of Art and
Design.
Maiko
Tanaka collaborates on curatorial projects at the intersections of art,
pedagogy, and collective action. Since 2010 she’s been working on The
Grand Domestic Revolution with Casco (Utrecht) where she co-curated
projects with ASK!, a collective of art workers in affinity with
domestic workers, Our Autonomous Life?, a cooperatively produced sitcom
on the Dutch squatting movement, and Read-in, a nomadic reading group
that goes door to door searching for hosts for their reading sessions.
During her residency at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery she organized
Extra-curricular, an international conference presenting lectures,
workshops and architectures that mobilize radical pedagogical art
practices. Currently Maiko writes a column for FUSE on the political
economies of public programming and serves as a board member of Gendai.
Acknowledgements
Letters &
Handshakes gratefully recognizes support from the Cultural Studies
Program, Wilfrid Laurier University | Onsite [at] OCAD U | TOPIA:
Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies