This paper aims to further a geographical agenda through the concept of postcapitalism. We outline its contours across three terrains of transformation between capitalism and postcapitalism: creating commons against enclosure, socially useful production that counters commodification, and joyful doing that negates alienated work. Secondly, we explore how postcapitalism is mobilised with different inflections through three contemporary debates: community economies, post-work and autonomous perspectives. We then illuminate how one area of social practice (platform cooperatives) resonates with postcapitalist terrains and debates. We conclude by exploring the, as yet unclear and partially formed, social and spatial landscape of postcapitalism.
The autumn of 2010, in the UK, was characterised by a series of protests against the proposed tripling of university tuition fees and the removal of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA). These protests were set within a broader international background of contestation around universities and higher education reforms. This article focuses on the activities of a group, which emerged within this context, called the Really Open University (ROU), and its efforts to engender a reimagining of the university. Specifically, this article argues that the activities of the ROU were attempts to create new, radical imaginaries of the university and were linked to broader efforts to re-conceptualise knowledge production and pedagogy. The central point is that ultimately the ROU's invitation to 'reimagine the university' was a provocation to abolish the university in its capitalist form, through a process of reimagining the university, exodus from the university machine and the creation of a university of the common. Amsler, S 2011 Beyond all reason: spaces of hope in the struggle for England's universities. Representations, 116(1): 62-87. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2011.116.1.62 Amsler, S 2014a 'By ones and twos and tens': pedagogies of possibility for democratising higher education. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 22(2): 275-94.
This article uses student activism to explore the way in which activists are challenging the student as consumer model through a series of experiments that blend pedagogy and protest. Specifically, I suggest that Higher Education is increasingly becoming an arena of the postpolitical, and I argue that one of the ways this student-consumer subjectivity is being (re)produced is through a series of 'depoliticisation machines' operating within the university. This article goes on to claim that in order to counter this, some of those resisting the neoliberalisation of higher education have been creating politicalpedagogical experiments that act as 'repoliticisation machines', and that these experiments countered student-consumer subjectification through the creation of new radical forms of subjectivity. This paper provides an example of this activity through the work of a group called the Really Open University and its experiments at blending, protest, pedagogy and propaganda. 'student-consumer': viewing students as largely cut off and disinterested in the 'project' of the university (Neary & Hagyard, 2010; Provisional University, 2010). A little over six months before the invasion and occupation of Milbank Tower by student protestors, on the 10th March 2010, I had been sitting in a meeting room close to the University of Leeds campus, discussing student criticisms of the proposed increase in fees, corporatisation of higher education and issues effecting academia more broadly. I had coorganised the meeting, as part of a group called the Really Open University (ROU), in order to discuss: 'what a really open university would look like'. This was part of a two stage 'visioning' process into establishing participants' criticisms of the existing education system, and the multitude of positive changes they would make. This event formed part of my PhD research which utilised a form of 'militant ethnography' (see Juris, 2008; Russell 2015 & Halvorsen 2015). I have critically reflected on my experiences attempting to utilise militant ethnography within an academic context extensively elsewhere (see Pusey, 2016a) but I will briefly explain what this meant in practice. I was a co-founder and co-producer of the ROU for the two years it existed (2010-2012) and I was engaged in a diverse range of activities, some more akin to activism than academia, and others more traditionally associated with academia than activism. These activities included everything from painting banners and taking part in demonstrations, through to organising discussion and reading groups, book launches and seminars. Meetings occurred on a regular weekly or twice weekly basis, and I was present at nearly all of them. I discussed proposals, strategies and ideas relating to the activities of the group. I facilitated meetings, or took minutes, and I was part of the collective production of the group's activities and ideas. This article argues that the event described above was one of several interventions organised by the ROU aimed at resisting the student-consu...
This paper examines militant research through the lens of several challenges the author faced when experimenting with it as part of their PhD research. It engages with ongoing debates about the role and complexity of militant methodologies within‐against‐beyond the university. Specifically it suggests that the political economy of the academy is a challenge to militant research through the growing influence of the law of value within increasingly marketised academic contexts. The paper argues that the academic‐recuperation‐machine has the potential to assimilate what it terms the “minor knowledge” created through militant research within its circuits of institutionalisation and commodification, becoming just another output or tool in the toolbox. Relatedly it suggests these challenges do not simply require a reflection on positionality vis‐à‐vis academia/activism, but a collective struggle around academic labour in against‐beyond the university and how militant researcher might remain “in but not of” the neoliberal university.
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