Reworking the University: Visions, Strategies, Demands Call for Ideas
April 24-26, 2009, University of Minnesota,
Location: Nolte Hall room 140 (Sat. pm in Nicholson 155)
The current “financial meltdown” has exacerbated the ongoing crises within the university, resulting in even greater budget cuts, tuition hikes, hiring freezes, layoffs, and institutional reorganizations. This conference creates a space for collectively re-evaluating the university-in-crisis and for thinking about how to turn the crisis into an opportunity to produce political alternatives. Last year’s conference, “Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value” (link), emerged from the 2007 AFSCME strike to challenge the supposed inevitability of the neoliberal university. As a continuation of this project, “Reworking the University” seeks to draw together academics, students, artists, and activists, to share and produce political visions, strategies and demands for building an alternative university in common.
There will be panels, roundtables, workshops, film screenings, and an art instillation on topics including: organizing contingent faculty, the creation and promotion of radical intellectual collectives, the New School occupations, Teachers Against Occupation, the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute, and strategies for teaching about the university and for teaching working-class students. See the full program here: http://reworkingtheu.org/program.html
Breakfast and lunch will be provided, and there will be receptions on Friday and Saturday nights. The conference will be in Nolte Hall, room #140 on Friday, April 24th and the morning of Saturday, April 25th, then move to Nicholson Hall, room #155 for Saturday afternoon, and return to Nolte for Sunday, April 26th.
For more information please email: comradmn@gmail.com
Click here for the conference's initial Call for Ideas
Organized by the Committee on Revolutionizing AcaDemia (ComRAD): Morgan Adamson, Noah Ebner, Elizabeth Johnson, Isaac Kamola, Stephen Koskela, Eli Meyerhoff, Amy Pason, Sofi Shank, Matt Stoddard
