Mrinalini Greedharry

Our zine-making workshop is back!

As regular readers of the blog and listserv members will know, we had to re-schedule our spring zine-making workshop to July 10th, 2024. The workshop will take place at the University of Westminster Cavendish campus from 1-4 pm.

You can now book your tickets to the workshop at https://buytickets.at/studentpartnershipuow/1223825

In the ongoing atmosphere of redundancies, restructuring, and cuts in higher education, it is more important than ever that we continue to come together and craft our vision of the university we want. Our theme for the afternoon is the creative destruction of the university. You can read more about how we came to be thinking about this in our previous post.

The workshop will be facilitated by Dr Annapurna Menon (she/her), who joined the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield in September 2022. Her doctoral research focused on the coloniality of postcolonial nation-states, specifically studying the Indian nation-state’s exercise of power in Indian-administered Jammu & Kashmir. She has also published on topics relating to Hindutva, right-wing politics, decolonial theory militarisation and gender; activism and pedagogy as an activist tool. She enjoys learning with and from students, colleagues and friends, and believes that critical engagement in all academic and activist spaces is very important right now.

Tethered to the Grid and Rendered Intelligible: CPG Annual Lecture with Caitlin Heppner

We cordially invite you to attend this year’s annual lecture, which will be delivered by Caitlin Heppner (University of Ottawa). The lecture begins at 4 pm on June 6th, 2024.

Tickets for attending in person or via live-streaming are available to book now at: https://buytickets.at/studentpartnershipuow/1231625

Tethered to the Grid and Rendered Intelligible

Algorithmic processes are increasingly tasked with normative evaluation within state infrastructure, answering questions like: who is a criminal, where crime is likely to occur, and which family homes are safe? In answering these questions, algorithms classify and constrain subjects through the co-creation of kinds of people. This algorithmic creativity tends to bury both social construction and moral evaluation under the guise of natural classification: a cataloguing of so-called natural properties legitimized by the authority of “The Algorithm.”

In the spirit of Michel Foucault, my work aims to unveil the role of power in the algorithmic construction and control of people. I examine three algorithmic systems to demonstrate how the veiling of social and contingent classifications tricks us into believing that these kinds are natural, and therefore so too is the ordering of these kinds. The algorithmic political order is portrayed as simply the natural order of things: there can be no other way. This is the threat of the algorithmic state. By automating normative evaluation—the identification of who might be a criminal or a terrorist, of where dangerous neighbourhoods are, or of what makes a good home—we are denied the possibility of thinking and doing otherwise.

About our speaker

Caitlin Heppner is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Ottawa in Canada and a researcher at the Canadian Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Ethical Design Lab. Her co-authored in-development work includes a “Critical Research into Tech” toolkit for navigating the risks of critiquing Big Tech, a bioethics framework for the public testing of AI, and a series of storytelling modules for ethically conscientious design. This applied work is motivated by the skeptical intuition that nothing should be done simply because it has always been done.

How to find the lecture: The lecture will be held at the University of Westminster, Marylebone Campus. Full travel and access information can be found at: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/visit-us/marylebone

Spring Critical Pedagogies Workshop – Sign up!

Tickets are now available for our spring zine-making workshop at https://buytickets.at/studentpartnershipuow/1223825

We invite you to join us on May 8th, from 1-4 pm at the University of Westminster’s Cavendish campus, for an afternoon of thinking, playing, and making zines together. Our theme for the afternoon is the creative destruction of the university. You can read more about how we came to be thinking about this in our previous post.

If you aren’t already subscribed to our email list, now is also a good time to sign up for early announcements about our workshops, annual lectures, and reading group meetings. You can sign up for these at: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CPG&A=1

Through the fire: working and dreaming in the colonial university

Wide Sargasso Sea begins with a fire that burns down the plantation the protagonist Antoinette and her family have profited from, and it ends just before she herself is about to set a fire that will burn down her husband’s English estate. It’s an interesting structure for a novel that is, in many ways, about enduring colonialism, rather than destroying it. Rhys’ protagonist, a white Creole heiress, is buffeted about by patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism, and the only actions available to her seem to be destructive ones, either destroying herself or destroying the structures that scaffold her life. The genius of Rhys’ novel is to finally turn fire into a creative act.

In the spirit of Antoinette, and creative destructionists everywhere, we’ve been reflecting on how often our more recent discussions in the reading group seem to turn to burning down the system, rather than enduring, reforming, or transforming it. There’s an important difference in tone and tactics between all these ways of responding to the colonial university, and over the years, the reading group has certainly tended more towards transformation than anything else. But is it possible to transform fundamentally colonial logics and practices? Can we achieve this as individual educator-researchers in our daily work? Do we need more collective praxis, imaginary, and theory to build the anti-colonial university? These are not new questions in critical pedagogy, unfortunately. However, the persistence of those questions reflects the fact that many of us continue to experience labour in higher education as demoralizing and even unethical, forcing our training and commitments as feminist, anti-racist, and queer scholars into constant battles with the coloniality of the university.

We would like to invite you to join us for a spring (early May) zine making workshop on the theme of creative destruction of the university. If you have never made a zine before, fear not, information and gentle guidance will be available! While we organize the workshop and firm up the details, we’d like to invite you to begin to contemplate the theme of creative destruction, gather your daydreams of fire, and notice anything that shows you the shape of the university you really want to work in.

If you would like to know more about when and where you can sign up for the workshop, you can register on our listserv here: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CPG&A=1