zine – Critical Pedagogies Project

Building our critical community

Thank you to all of you who have spent time this year building the critical pedagogies project with us. We know the demands that the colonial capitalist university makes on your time and are so heartened by the fact that you push back by spending time with us!

Special thanks go to Caitlin Heppner, who gave this year’s annual lecture ‘Tethered to the grid and rendered intelligible’. If you missed Caitlin’s lecture, you can now listen to it through the website here. Remember that you can always catch up on past lectures, whether as a teaching or research resource, by listening to the online archive.

Thank you also to Annapurna Menon, who led us through a critical, joyous, and restorative afternoon of zine-making last week. Annapurna’s workshop brought our year to a hopeful and energetic end.

Over the summer Dale, Jennifer, and Mrinalini will be planning next year’s readings, lectures, and workshops. If you would like to suggest topics or readings for the reading group, speakers for the annual lecture, or facilitators for the summer workshop, please do let us know in the comments. Our aim is to educate ourselves about critical practices that help us build a different kind of university than the one we have now. If you know of practices, thinkers, texts, podcasts, art, or anything else you think we should be reflecting on, please do share!

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.

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