This is a collaborative blog post leading up to the panel Undisciplining: thinking knowledge production without the university at The Sociological Review’s annual conference Undisciplining: conversations from the edges, Newcastle, Gateshead, 18-21 June 2018.
Introduction
Jana Bacevic
If it is true that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is still easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of universities. In fact, most critics of contemporary knowledge capitalism assert that The University needs to be rescued, saved, or defended in the face of the neoliberal behemoth. Forms of imagination that hope to bring about the end of capitalism all-too-easily assume that whatever will come after the end of capitalism will see the university preserved or, better still, resurrected in a form that is often eerily reminiscent of the (myth of) the ivory tower: isolated, independent, self-sufficient, and, of course, accessible only to a minority. While rightfully identifying important challenges associated with the political and economic transformation of knowledge production, then, they often fail to challenge the assumptions about the institution strongly ingrained in the imaginaries of Western modernity – The University.
“If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is still easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of universities.”
Our panel starts from the assumption that effective resistance to forms of exploitation and inequality perpetuated, in part, via institutions of knowledge production requires us to theoretically ‘disassemble’ the university both as an ideal-type and as a spatially and temporally situated assemblage of material and immaterial forces. In other words: in order to understand the ways in which modes and systems of knowledge production interact with social and political structures, we need to be able to think about knowledge production without the university.
This theoretical experiment (contradiction intended) requires probing concepts such as education, publishing, or community organising, and imagine what they would look like in practice absent the university. Obviously, this requires us to dismantle our own tools and concepts in order to undo the classed, raced, and gendered intellectual histories of critical thinking that are already informed by the university. Obviously, we can never fully succeed; but we believe it’s worth trying. We invite you to join us in this effort.
Below we’ll be publishing short reflections from panel participants on different aspects of knowledge production, including learning, writing/publishing, organising, and funding. You are welcome to comment, ask questions, or offer to write your own blog in response – we’ll be happy to publish it here!
The workshop takes place on 20th June 2018, 14-15.30, Meeting Room on Level 3. Please note it’s important to pre-register as organisers need to know the numbers of attendants – you can do that here. We look forward to seeing you.
How can we confront organizational issues related to working outside/on the boundaries of universities?
Sinéad D’Silva
25 May 2018
I will present an example of practice from the Global South, with the hope to reflect on potential improvement in the Global North, challenging the notion that the university is the only space in which knowledge can be produced and engaged with. For this blog post, however, I wish to focus on the situation in the UK and begin the discussion about potential issues that may arise as we begin to think of working outside the university. In some ways these are critiques of current attempts to go beyond institutional confines. I pose some questions to think through in terms of practicalities.
The first question that could be asked is: who are the experts when we move out of the university to produce knowledge? This question is perhaps an epistemological one in which we need to re-think the idea of ‘an expert’ and arguably its audience. On the one hand there are ‘public lectures’, many of which are carried out within the confines of the institutional buildings and predominantly attended by university students and academic staff – I am yet to see support and other staff attend these. On the other hand there are events like Pint of Science, made to interest the common folk who obviously hang out at the pub. In both instances, and the spectrum in between, the all-knowing university folk organise and present these opportunities for the public to engage with the self-proclaimed brilliant work taking place at the university. There are also some assumptions regarding who actually attends these events, and a stereotyping of the ways in which those outside of the university live (and produce knowledge), maintaining a sense of university exceptionalism.
This leads on to a second question regarding inclusion, and the potential for elitism to thrive at such events. How does EVERYONE become part of knowledge production? During the USS strikes earlier this year, many university Unions put together Teach Outs with events ranging from talks, discussions, film screening, poetry-reading, walks, language classes, health and fitness sessions – you name it! However I observed a severe shortcoming as I handed out information leaflets and Teach Outs on the picket line. Here is where I will call out my own faults – these leaflets did not reach non-university-going people. Furthermore, what seemed to have been forgotten – and from my Twitter feed it seems to have been the case in a number of other universities – was to physically move beyond the immediate vicinity of the university buildings. This implies that we were catering to the same people who already are included in such events were they to take place on campus. As has been seen in recent days, and known to be the case earlier, universities in the UK are often isolating and exclusionary places for students from working class backgrounds, as well as for BME staff and students alike. Failure to actively engage with excluded sections of society only serves to reproduce these problems. One might offer a simple (rather obvious) suggestion that local community centres could actively be engaged with for such activities.
Finally, when we have confronted these aspects, and perhaps something we should have thought of to begin with, how might such initiatives be sustained to ensure longevity? For example, it is often the case that at the end of a community-based research project, said community is long forgotten. Therefore, it is important to think of such initiatives beyond the confines of the hegemonic, neoliberal university and its structures when considering how knowledge can be produced outside. Such an initiative must achieve collective ownership, which need not exclude the university. That is, the university can still play a role in knowledge production beyond its existence, through, for example, the exploitation of resources within it (books, equipment, spaces and so on). Furthermore this needs to be sustained over generations, which cannot be done unless it becomes part of community social practice. The power of universities need to be broken down. However, as we negotiate this change, it also raises the awkward question about financing knowledge production outside the university, to which I have no answers.
“The power of universities needs to be broken down.”
Through these questions I have attempted to argue for thinking of knowledge production outside or beyond the university to be meaningful and non-hegemonic, inclusive and geographically accessible, and in a sense cross-generational. These can greatly complement the empowerment of communities often facing gentrification as universities continue to grow and studentify their associated geographies.
Undisciplining
Cesar Guzman-Concha
28 May 2018
We all feel uncomfortable with the current state of affairs in the university system, yet most of us attempt to accommodate ourselves to this state of affairs. We are in academia.edu and researchgate.net, to amplify the reach of our publications. We announce our latest published article in Facebook and Twitter, in the hope that that will amplify the reach of our publications among our colleagues. We have set up our Google scholar accounts, so we can demonstrate the real impact of our publications while showing to our current and future employers that we comply with the productivity benchmark. And we fantasize with winning a huge ERC or ECRC grant. But in so doing, we end up legitimizing and naturalizing a defined set of policies, the paradigm of the performance-based university.
Universities are the only job destination that most of us are willing to accept. Through our postgraduate education we have been trained to search the rewards that the university offers: reputation, status, middle class positions, secured jobs. This put many academics in a position of vulnerability: we are too willing to accept changes or conditions that make harder our insertion and progression in the academic career, because we are not willing to give up.
We are taught that to progress in our careers we must demonstrate merit or achievements. The culture of meritocracy is at the base of the modern university. But patronage, nepotism and parochialism are too often an insidious presence in recruitment and promotion. Groups such as women, migrants, blacks and persons from lower income backgrounds suffer marginalization in the academia. Budget cuts, originated in the 2008 financial crisis, created the perfect storm that justifies a radical marketization of the university. One of the main consequences is that innovation and creativity are undermined.
“Universities are the only job destination that most of us are willing to accept.”
Therefore, the main problem is the ecosystem in which universities are embedded. If we want to imagine new communities of knowledge, we must set them up in a new ecosystem, not governed by the same incentives, rewards and penalizations of the performance-based university. We should expand the space of knowledge creation and innovation beyond the borders of universities and explore new modes of organizing.
How to break with these logics? To think of alternatives beyond the university we have to find new models of funding, management, publication and dissemination of research and creation. Only an ecosystem that articulates at least these four components can offer a sustainable non-university system.
One might think that management is the least important component, as it seems that all depends on adequate funding. While funding is indeed very important, the organization of truly collaborative, horizontal, democratic and non-for-profit spaces of research and creation is a pre-condition to make these alternatives spaces attractive to the public. Why a potential benefactor should bother to make a financial contribution to such an endeavour? What is new in these spaces, that differentiates them from foundations and think-tanks? I suggest that the organizational form to be adopted should incorporate the aforementioned principles, as many experiences of the collaborative economy (for example, cooperatives) have already done.
Alternative sources of funding that can be explored include donations, crowdfunding and patronage (as in the Italian Renaissance), but avoiding being bought out by a single sponsor. Central to the new spaces are the collaborations with other actors of the third-sector, including foundations and think-tanks, as well as social movements organizations. The formation of networks of knowledge creation should thus become a central goal.
Delinking, decamping, deprofessionalising
Sarah Amsler
13 June 2018
I would like to begin by saying that I do not think everyone who studies and works in universities and who wishes to change them suffers from a crisis of imagination. Many people already do learn differently and struggle more to imagine what learning feels like with or within the university than without it. The harder thing to imagine for people who work for and study in universities in this wage-dependent society is constructing a different relationship between institutional and functionalist knowledge-making, on the one hand, and living and livelihood, on the other. What looks like a crisis of imagination is entangled with a crisis of social reproduction – and it cannot be confronted using the tools of academic knowledge production alone.
Here, ideas of ‘unlearning’ and ‘undisciplining’ and related others such as ‘delinking’ and epistemic disobedience can help. The concept of delinking was introduced by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano in the early 1990s as a radical mode of critique that integrates epistemic with institutional resistance to hegemonic structures of power. It is necessary, he wrote, to ‘liberate the production of knowledge, reflection, and communication from the pitfalls of European rationality/modernity’, including the instrumentalization of knowledge to maintain power that is ‘organized as inequality, discrimination, exploitation, and as domination’. I don’t think we need to throw our minds into imagining the end of the university as much as we need to throw our hearts into hastening the end of this situation – and we can do so from within as well as beyond the institution’s walls.
The epistemic activity of measuring research ‘impact’, for example, is a site of struggle within institutions. Riyad Shahjahan and Anne Wagner have just written a wonderful paper that shows how the quest for ontological security through hegemonic constructions of scholarly impact in universities produces colonizing subjectivities, socially damaging divisions, overly linear perceptions of time and ignorance about ways of knowing that open onto alternative ways of being in this already very wounded world. He then calls in the notion of Śūnyatā, from Japanese and Chinese epistemologies, to illustrate how understanding reality through a different ‘onto-epistemic grammar’ – in this case, as an infinitely interrelated universe of fundamentally unified beings – not only requires other ways of thinking about the relationship between knowledge and social change but denaturalises the desire to ‘have’ or demonstrate ‘impact’ itself. We can imagine the end of producing this aspect of producing knowledge in this way, and therefore imagine a limit on capitalist rationality and its institutional architecture in this form of life. These new horizons appear together because they are not separate.
Such action is complemented by the delinking from hegemonic logics that happens when we produce and validate knowledge, for reasons and with others that do not belong to, serve or need and obtain permission from the dominant knowledge institutions that credential and employ. Here we can work on ‘shifting the geography of reason’. While this idea signals ‘an attempt to displace the Eurocentric monopoly over reason…and to relocate reason in a different physical space’, it also allows us to map collective higher learning in a distributed way. The UK has a rich history of self-organized, independent, community-based and activist education at all levels from supplementary schooling to adult and workers’ education, and in a multitude of forms including hedge teaching, anarchist education, experimental communities and free universities. Informal practices of higher education, learning and inquiry exist today, although most are not recognised as part of the central nervous system of higher education (except as epistemically subordinate status as subjects for ‘knowledge exchange’ or objects of inquiry). Rather than seeking such incorporation, however, I think one of today’s challenges is to disidentify with the university’s corporate forms in order to expand space for the appearance and visibility of the ‘heterogeneous totalities’ of knowledge that already flourish beyond the academy on their own terms.
Invoking Quijano again, if the decolonial alternative is ‘the destruction of the coloniality of world power’, then we need epistemological and embodied grounds for an alternative rationality that recognises ‘other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding, and, consequently, other economies’, with special interest in those that have been denied recognition as knowledge. This provides opportunities to re-educate not only the desire for institutional recognition, but for the epistemic privilege that accrues to the educated expert. It demands that institutionalised scholars who are accustomed to ‘continuing professional development’ deprofessionalise. It is possible to imagine becoming epistemically and economically disobedient in this way, and in the process to educate radical change. Here again, the relocation of the university and the reconstruction of our relationship with capital are two faces of a single move.
Delinking from the modern corporate university epistemically, affectively and institutionally does not constitute systemic change on its own; [but] organised movements for radical change will only be possible when collective knowledge production and learning are decoupled from this hegemonic form.
Doing higher learning differently demands ‘border work’ across a plurality of different sites and forms of knowledge production. While delinking from the modern corporate university epistemically, affectively and institutionally does not constitute systemic change on its own, organised movements for radical change will only be possible when collective knowledge production and learning are decoupled from this hegemonic form. Once released, we can focus on visioning liberating knowledges as part of a humanising and sustainable form of life, rather than worrying over the future of the university and its associated employments. I’m with Richard: ‘at issue is how we find co-operative mechanisms for dissolving knowledge production that has been enclosed inside institutions into the fabric of society, in order to enable communities to widen their own spheres of autonomy.‘ Let’s work on this.
Writing our way out of neoliberalism? For an ecology of publishing
Jana Bacevic
16 June 2018
What kind of writing and publishing practices might support knowledge that is not embedded in the neoliberal university? I’ve been interested in this question for a long while, in part because it is a really tough one. As academics – and certainly as academics in social sciences and humanities – writing and publishing is, ultimately, what we do. Of course, our work frequently also involves teaching – or, as those with a love for neat terminologies like to call it, ‘knowledge transmission’ – as well as different forms of its communication or presentation, which we (sometimes performatively) refer to as ‘public engagement’. Even those, however, often rely or at least lead to the production of written text of some sort: textbooks, academic blogs. This is no surprise: modern Western academic tradition is highly reliant on the written word. Obviously, in this sense, questions and problems of writing/publishing and its relationship with knowledge practices are both older and much broader than the contemporary economy of knowledge production, which we tend to refer to as neoliberal. They may also last beyond it, if, indeed, we can imagine the end of neoliberalism. However, precisely for this reason, it makes sense to think about how we might reconstruct writing and publishing practices in ways that weaken, rather than contribute to the reproduction of neoliberal practices of knowledge production.
Even forms of knowledge production that explicitly seek to disrupt neoliberal modes often rely on implicit assumptions that feed into the logic of evaluation and competition.
The difficulty with thinking outside of the current framework becomes apparent when we try thinking of the form these practices could take. While there are many publications not directly contributing to the publishing industry – blogs, zines, open-access, collaborative, non-paywalled articles all come to mind – they all too easily become embedded in the same dynamic. As a result, they are either eschewed because ‘they do not count’, or else they are made to count (become countable) by being reinserted in the processes of valorisation via the proxy of ‘impact’. As I’ve argued in this article (written with my former colleague from the UNIKE (Universities in the knowledge economy) project, economic geographer Chris Muellerleile), even forms of knowledge production that explicitly seek to ‘disrupt’ such modes, such as Open Access or publish first/review later platforms, often rely on – even if implicit – assumptions that can feed into the logic of evaluation and competition. This is not saying that restricting access to scientific publications is in any way desirable. However, we need to accept that opening access (under certain circumstances, for certain parts of the population) does not in and of itself do much to ‘disrupt’ the broader political and economic system in which knowledge is embedded.
Publish or…publish
Unsurprisingly, the hypocrisy of the current system disproportionately affects early career and precarious scholars. ‘Succeeding’ in the academia – i.e. escaping precarity – hinges on publishing in recognised formats and outlets: this means, almost exclusively, peer-reviewed journal in one’s discipline, and books. The process is itself costly and risky. Turnover times can be ridiculously long: a chapter for an edited volume I wrote in July 2015 has finally been published last month, presumably because other – more senior, obviously – contributors took much longer. The chapter deals with a case from 2014, which makes the three-year lag between its accepted version and publication problematic for all sorts of reasons. On the other hand, even when good and relatively timely, the process of peer review can be soul-crushing for junior scholars (see: Reviewer No.2). Obviously, if this always resulted in a better final version of the article, we could argue it would make it worthwhile. However, while some peer reviewers offer constructive feedback that really improves the process of publication, this is not always the case. Increasingly, because peer review takes time and effort, it is kicked down the academic ladder, so it becomes a case of who can afford to review – or, equally (if not more) often, who cannot afford to say no a review.
In other words, just like other aspects of academic knowledge production, the reviewing and publishing process is plagued by stark inequalities. ‘Big names’ or star professors can get away with only perfunctory – if any – peer review; a series of clear cases of plagiarism or self-plagiarism, not to mention a string of recent books with bombastic titles that read like barely-edited transcripts of undergraduate seminars (there are plenty around), are a testament to this. Just in case, many of these ‘Trump academics‘ keep their own journals or book series as a side hustle, where the degree of familiarity with the editorial board is often the easiest path to publication.
What does this all lead to? The net result is the proliferation of academic publications of all sorts, what some scholars have dubbed the shift from an economy of scarcity to that of abundance. However, it’s not that more is necessarily better: while it’s difficult (if not entirely useless) to speak of scholarly publications in universal terms, as the frequently (mis-)cited piece of research argued, most academic articles are read and cited by very few people. It’s quite common for academics to complain they can’t keep up with the scholarly production in their field, even when narrowed down to a very tight disciplinary specialism. Some of this, obviously, has to do with the changing structure of academic labour, in particular the increasing load of administration and the endless rounds of research evaluation and grant application writing, which syphons aways time for reading. But some of this has to do with the simple fact that there is so much more of published stuff around: scholars compete with each other in terms of who’s going to get more ‘out there’, and sooner. As a result, people rarely take the time to read others’ work carefully, especially if it is outside of their narrow specialism or discipline. Substituting this with sycophantic shout-outs via Twitter or book reviews, which are often thinly veiled self-serving praise that reveals more about the reviewer’s career plans, than about the actual publication being reviewed.
For an ecology of knowledge production
So, how is it possible to work against all this? Given that the purpose of this panel was to start thinking about actual solutions, rather than repeat tired complaints about the nature of knowledge production in the neoliberal academia, I am going to put forward two concrete proposals: one is on the level of conceptual – not to say ‘behavioural’ -change; the other on the level of institutions, or organisations. The first is a commitment to, simply, publish less. Much like in environmental pollution where solutions such as recycling, ‘natural’ materials, and free and ethical trading are a way less effective way to minimise Co2 emissions than just reducing consumption (and production), in writing and publishing we could move towards the progressive divestment from the idea that the goal is to produce as much as possible, and put it ‘out there’ as quickly as possible. To be clear, this isn’t a thinly-veiled plea for ‘slow’ scholarship. Some disciplines or topics clearly call for quicker turnover – one can think of analyses in current affairs, environmental or political science. On the other hand, some topics or disciplines require time, especially when there is value in observing how trends develop over a period of time. Recognising the divergent temporal cycles of knowledge production not only supports the dignity of the academic profession, but also recognises knowledge production happens outside of academia, and should not – need not – necessarily be dependent on being recognised or rewarded within it. As long as the system rewards output, the rate of output will tend to increase: in this sense, competition can be seen not necessarily as an outcome as much as a byproduct of our desire to ‘populate’ the world with the fruits of our labour. Publishing less, in this sense, is not that much a performative act as the first step in divesting from the incessant drive of competitive logic that permeates both the academia and the world ‘outside’ of it.
One way is to, simply, publish less.
Publishers play a very important role in this ecology of knowledge production. Much has been made of the so-called ‘predatory’ journals and publishers, clearly seeking even a marginal profit: the less often mentioned flipside is that almost all publishing is to some degree ‘predatory’, in the sense in which editors seek out authors whose work they believe can sell – that is, sell for a profit that goes to the publisher, and sometimes the editors, while authors can, at best, hope for an occasional drip from royalties (unless, again, they are star/Trump academics, in which case they can aspire to hefty book advances). Given the way in which the imperative to publish is ingrained in the dynamics of academic career progression – and, one might argue, in the academic psyche – it is no surprise that multiple publishing platforms, often of dubious quality, thrive in this landscape.
Instead of this, we could aim for a combination of publishing cooperatives – perhaps embedded in professional societies – and a small number of established journals, which could serve as platforms or hubs for a variety of formats, from blogs to full-blown monographs. These journals would have an established, publicly known, and well-funded board of reviewers and editors. Combined, these principles could enable publishing to serve multiple purposes, communities and formats, without the need to reproduce a harmful hierarchy embedded in competitive market-oriented models. It seems to me that the Sociological Review, which is organising this conference, could be going towards this model. Another journal with multiple formats and an online forum is the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. I am sure there are others that could serve as blueprints for this new ecology of knowledge production; perhaps, together, we can start thinking how to build it.
Knowledge, Power, and Politics (KPP) 
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