Saturday, February 9, 2008

CFP: University Spaces, Academic Bodies: New Approaches to the Corporate University

April 4th, 2008
New York University
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Program in American Studies

Neoliberal and corporatist logics are increasingly reconfiguring bodies in and around universities. The work of “diversifying” the academy imposes a disproportionate burden of labor on faculty, students, and staff marked by multiple forms of difference; the pressures of professionalization anticipate and authorize narrow standards of bodily capacity; and precarious modes of transnational expansion involving institutions of higher learning fortify and retrace imperial circuits of acquisition in land, bodies, and knowledge. This calls for a critical account of how neoliberal processes dismantle and rearticulate various sites of the university as well as the contours of bodies allowed to function within it. Our conference will thus engage debates surrounding embodiment within the university as it pertains to the overlapping structures of access, difference, and power. We especially invite papers that address embodiment with primary attention to the historical complexities of sexuality, race, nation, gender, labor, and ability.

As conference organizers, we conceive of the body/university relationship as materially and historically contingent; that is, universities are not simply places where bodies live, labor, die and haunt, but they are also mobile, shifting sites where the substantive body intersects with, is reconfigured by, and defies various histories of regulation. Thus we ask: How are access and ability, marginal bodies and minority status, disciplinary boundaries and hierarchies of authority, produced and policed by academic institutions? How are bodies (dis)placed in relation to remote learning programs, high tech and virtual classrooms, campus security/surveillance, and other reorganizations of higher learning spaces? How are individual and collective bodies affected by the proliferation of global campuses and transnational academic networks? We envision our conference as a platform for academics, students, staff, and faculty to engage in a multidisciplinary discussion that builds on existing debate surrounding the corporate university by placing embodiment at its center.

In an effort to foster new conversations, we encourage not only formal academic presentations but also creative, multimedia, and unconventional modes of address that query or challenge the limits of standard academic discourse.

Possible topics of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:
- Corporeality, difference, and labor practices in and against the university
- Strikes, labor organization, cultures of protest
- Campus security, surveillance, and violence
- Migration, empire, and learning
- Bureaucratization, rational institutions, recruitment, professionalization
- Access, excess, process, praxis
- Disciplinarity and departmentalization
- Advertising space, corporate presence on campus
- Alternative mappings of academic spaces

Please send abstracts of no longer than 250 words to EmbodimentConference@gmail.com by Friday, March 7th, 2008. Visit our website www.EmbodimentConference.blogspot.com for additional details and updates.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Professors and Other Aging Institutions

An aggravated Columbia undergrad yesterday used the arrival of a new LGBT programs director as an opporunity to attack full-time faculty as well as African American and Women's Studies programs in a Spectator op-ed piece.

Claiming that sexual, gender and racial identities are "the greatest modern fabrication," Nellie Bowles berates "a whole generation of academics" who squandered the economic boom of the 1990s by quibbling and categorizing rather than rethinking social issues: "As experts, not revolutionaries (though they masquerade as such), they have more of a stake in the status quo than anyone, for their place as expert is threatened by change." Bowles seems to advocate the replacement of full-time faculty (whose studies have kept them "safe from reality") with instructors who have "real world" experience. Her lament that "we ought not have allowed professors so much power" chimes nicely with the trend toward casualization of the academic labor force.

Bowles follows up her critique of full-time faculty with an assualt on gender and ethnic studies programs: "How can we take power away from race, from the words black and white, and destroy their ability to divide people, when classes on race are separated from the rest of 'non-racial' academic departments? The separation of these departments hinders intellectual debate, institutionalizes a philosophy we need to destroy." While first calling on the "second-wave feminists" of the women-only Barnard College to replace their shoulder pads with "unisex skinny jeans," she then problematically commands Columbia to "strip Barnard."

Bowles has re-worked a social constructionist critique of race, gender, and sexuality into an assualt on the "liberal folly" of "political correctness." Her vision of a powerful administration that can "strip" Women's Studies, "integrate" Ethnic Studies, and hobble the academic decision making of professors demonstrates the inerconnectedness of threats to ethnic studies and fair labor practices in the corporate university.

Phoenix University

In response to the New York Times' exposé of the for-profit Phoneix University, the president of the legally troubled institution has attacked the Times' piece as "symptomatic of an elitist bias against nontraditional higher education."

Call For Papers

Humanities or Human Resources? The Future of Ethnic Studies and Labor in the Corporate University
New York University
April 13, 2007

As corporate models of management and decision-making take hold of more and more colleges and universities, a growing number of students, faculty and staff are facing threats to ethnic studies programs, assaults on the integrity of academic decision-making, and the casualization of the university labor force. This conference will engage the debates surrounding what has been termed the corporate university, especially those debates that address questions of race, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, and class.

We conceive of the corporate/university relationship as multi-directional; that is, the corporate/neoliberal university is not simply where corporate values and cultures end up in an otherwise autonomous academy. Instead, the corporate/university relationship has effects in multiple public and private spaces, and on different individuals, ideas, and communities. How do struggles over departmentalization, bureaucratization, downsizing, access, and equity relate to the university’s location in global networks of capital accumulation and production? In what ways can a critical intervention in those processes enact a resistance that does not follow corporate valuations of people as “human resources”? We envision this conference to be a platform for academics, faculty, students, and staff to begin these conversations in the hopes that we can generate imaginative practices and take them back to our home institutions for further use and engagement.

We welcome proposals for papers or panels that focus on the issues surrounding the corporate university. Please send a 300-word abstract, 250-word biographical statement and contact information to corporate.conference@gmail.com by March 5, 2007. Notifications will be made by March 15.

Paper topics might include, but are not limited to:

• the policing of Middle Eastern studies and other area studies programs
• disability and ability issues on campus
• faculty hiring policies; student admissions
• top-down and bottom-up curricular changes
• living wage and staff/adjunct/teaching assistant unionization campaigns and institutional responses
• trends in Ethnic Studies, Gender/Sexuality Studies, and American Studies
• university-neighborhood relations; real estate