Freedom From Education: Decolonial Study for Abolishing the Prison-University Complex
Against the romanticizing of education, Leftists should recognize alternative regimes of study, as practiced in prison organizing and indigenous peoples’ movements, and participate with them toward dismantling the intertwined regimes of education and carcerality.
Against Academic Alibis: The Best Education is the Struggle – George Ciccariello-Maher
Drawing on his experiences in the “cauldron of resistance” of Oakland, CA, George Ciccariello-Maher speaks on the relations between organizing in universities and struggles against police and prisons. Against academics’ use of alibis, such as ‘changing the world by teaching,’ to legitimize anything they do as a contribution to radical movements, he calls for academics to more clearly distinguish between their jobs and their political work.
Reanimating histories of struggle as weapons against neoliberalism – An Interview with Don Kingsbury
Reflecting on the building occupations at UC Santa Cruz in 2009-2010 and cross-pollination between student and worker struggles, Don Kingsbury highlights the need to excavate and reanimate histories of radical movements. Under the conditions of academic precarity, and against the neoliberal privatization of the general intellect, Don calls for turning communities of necessity into communities of resistance.
MOOCs: Education’s “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” Moment
Bloated corpses and institutional limits - An interview with Mark Paschal
Teaching and organizing in the ruins of universities: an interview with Alison Hearn
Mapping shared imaginaries for anticapitalist movements: an interview with Tim Stallmann of Counter-Cartographies Collective
Tim shares his experiences of militant research with university workers and students, making disOrientation Guides, and the importance of starting from your own position for building solidarity. Reflecting on the Queen Mary Counter/mapping project and community-based cartography, he discusses the challenges of map-making collectively, as well as the benefits of the process for building a plane of commonality for struggles. Against the individualizing and recuperative functions of academia, he shares some thoughts on how we can better traverse the tensions our movements face across the boundaries of universities and communities.