Full day of workshops and presentations

View optional workshop readings

Schedule (tentative)

10 am-12 pm session: Workshop and Presentation | CHASS INTS 1113

• David Lloyd (UCR) introduces workshop
• Anne Fosburg (UCSC): “The Violence of Improvement: Settler Colonialism and the Land-Grant University”

12.15–1.45 pm: Lecture | Hybrid: CHASS INTS 1109

• Nick Mitchell (UCSC): "Unwaged War: The Third World Strike as an Occasion for Theory."
• Lunch provided for in-person attendees
• Webinar link for hybrid access: https://ucr.zoom.us/j/96838868490 

2 pm - 4 pm: Workshop and Presentations | CHASS INTS 1113

• Rei Terada (UCI) and John Gillespie (UCI), on institutional resistance to modes of critical thinking and contesting the boundaries of the institution

4.00-5.00 pm: Reception | CHASS INTS 1109

About this event

Everyone in the university, students and faculty alike, is impacted by the ongoing transformation of the university from its ideal, shaped in the 19th century, as a putatively “liberal” institution guaranteeing the right to free and critical inquiry and seeking to shape a critical citizenry, into an instrument dedicated to the vocational training of a well-disciplined and flexible labor-force for neoliberal ends. Likewise, the culture of the university is profoundly affected by its continuing institutional resistance to desegregation and efforts to contain any movement to its decolonization, both at the level of its demographic composition, which it sanitizes with the rhetoric of “diversity” or “inclusion”, and at the level of the formation of what passes for “knowledge”, which it contains within traditional disciplinary departments and constrains by limiting the resources of interdisciplinary formations like Black Study or Critical Ethnic Studies that seek to challenge the very foundations of the university as a site of knowledge production. Equally, the management culture of the university, an “audit culture” with its growing emphasis on “assessment and evaluation”, technologization, outcomes measurement, corporate budgetary models, intrudes more and more on the daily activity that should be the core of the university’s work, teaching and research.

The aim of the workshop is to create a space for faculty and graduate students to consider the forces that are impacting the current “crisis of the university”, their genealogy and their effects, whether in terms of the differentially increasing work load on faculty and on staff, the increasing casualization of academic labor, the containment of anti-racist and democratizing projects on campus, the intensifying debt and labor burdens on students, or the underfunding of departments, faculty research, and graduate study, among many other issues. But hopefully this will also be an occasion to map out the spaces still available to us on and off campus to further our intellectual and political agendas, to engage with student and social movements, and to plan collectively for surviving and thriving together.

Nick Mitchell (Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz), author of Discipline and Surplus: Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Dawn of Neoliberalism and The University, in Theory: Essays on Institutional Knowledge.

Rei Terada (Department of Comparative Literature, UC Irvine), author of recent articles on race and the history of philosophy and the forthcoming Metaracial Logic: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity.

Anne Fosberg, Graduate Student, Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

John Gillespie, Graduate Student, Comparative Literature, UC Irvine

Organized by David Lloyd (Department of English, UC Riverside), author of Culture and the State and Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics.

Learn more at ideasandsociety.ucr.edu/arts-humanities/

Sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society through a grant from the University of California Office of the President Multi-campus Research Programs and Initiative Funding and the UCR Department of English.

Cosponsored by Departments of Black Study, Comparative Literature & Languages, Holstein Family and Community Chair, Religious Studies, Theatre, Film, and Digital Production, Dance, Hispanic Studies, English, Speculative Fiction and the Cultures of Science, Media and Cultural Studies, and History

Image Credit: Associated Press