Abstract
In recent decades, a critical turn to infrastructure across the humanities and social sciences has taken place at the same time as the infrastructures of emancipatory knowledge production have been steadily annexed, disciplined, and dismantled.
In response to this paradox, this workshop asks: how do we reorganise our knowledge infrastructures in the service of collective liberation? How can we know in disobedient ways that are empowering, not overwhelming?
As the enclosure of academic research intensifies, what should we urgently fight for and try to salvage? Where is the future of radical knowledge production?
This workshop understands infrastructures as subtending arrangements that make some ways of knowing possible while foreclosing others.
It counts university buildings as infrastructures, but it also includes libraries and unions, as well as the lived relations mediated through these institutions, from diminishing research time and precarious labour contracts to overflowing inboxes and managerial reward systems.
It sets out to challenge the confusion of value with price that has utterly transformed knowledge production, and to share insurgent practices of knowing from both inside and beyond university spaces.
In the spirit of its inquiry, the workshop adopts an experimental knowledge-making format. Rather than panel presentations, a booklet of position papers will be circulated in advance of the workshop (from 2 June onwards) and used to underpin themed and participatory discussion. A full programme is listed below.
The day will begin with a plenary talk by Professor Gargi Bhattacharyya and conclude with a collaborative session led by visual artist Giada Peterle, in which participants will co-produce a zine that reimagines the infrastructures of radical knowledge production.
The workshop is free and all are welcome to attend. Please register to receive the booklet of position papers ahead of the event. Knowing Infrastructures is hosted by the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network and supported with HEIF/KE funding.
Workshop programme
9.30-9.50 Coffee and Registration
9.50-10.00 Welcome and Introduction
10.00-11.00 Plenary Talk
Gargi Bhattacharyya, What if Infrastructure is the New Party? Learning to Build Towards Liberation
11.00-12.30 Panel 1: University Limits
M.H.R., Defunding Knowledge: The Corporate University, Far-Right Politics, and the Crisis of Academic Infrastructure
Jason Goldfarb, Nothing Left? Professional Class Politics and the University
Caroline Watkinson & Alan Chandler, Doing Architecture as Crime: The Architecture of ‘Discipline’ and the Neo-Liberal HEI
Ernesto Priego, Teaching Against the Grain: Reclaiming Uncertainty in Assessment and Learning
Emma Crowley, Reading on the Picket Line
12.30-13.30 Lunch & Practical Activity
Raphi Tayvah, Rooting Pedagogy: Embodied Learning with Time
13.30-14.30 Panel 2: Reimagining Research
Diya Gupta, Knowledge Production Outside the University: Artistic Practice as Research
Rupert Allan, Mapping Climate Memory: Climate Justice, Indigenous Counter-Mapping, and OpenSource Empowerment
Raj Hazzard, Peer Research: Crafting Pain into Power
Vrinda Chopra, What am ‘I’ Made For? Placing the Intimate Voice in the (Neo)Liberal Academy
14.30-14.45 Tea and Coffee
14.45-15.45 Panel 3: Utopia and Repair
Zara Dinnen, Repair Work in the University
Erdem Avsar, Putting the Utopian Desire Back in the University
Milena Metalkova-Markova, A Library Building as a Sustainable Education Statement
Giuseppe Grieco, The University and the Humanities: Infrastructures for Planetary Thinking
15.45-16.00 Tea and Coffee
16.00-18.00 Collaboration and Co-Production Activity
Giada Peterle, Graphic Methods for Knowing Infrastructures
18.00-18.15 Concluding Remarks
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