Special Seminar:

Stream D: “Free Education, Comparatively”

Over two sessions, this panel asks how to think and learn otherwise than through the contemporary university's financial structures and its myriad forms of unfreedom. More than ten years down the line from the global financial crisis's exacerbations of educational violence, the panel seeks to analyze carefully and comparatively the contemporary university as a form of unfreedom and likewise what exit would be--where, when, how, for what, and for whom. The panel hopes to advance from models of preserving state- and corporate-funded education to explore what it means not to expect such support. What changes in social relations and the notion of education itself have occurred and what would be helpful? What resources exist, materially and in thought, for a comparatively free education, including that of independent scholarship? How can scholars discuss not only the pragmatics of their various state and national situations but the enabling concepts and conditions for work amid ongoing violence?

Moderator: Rei Terada, UC, Irvine. ACLA Vice-President 2021

Panelists:

Day 1 (6/16)

Lenora Hanso, Department of English, New York University.

“Education–Not Free, but Housed.”

Brian Whitener, University of South Alabama.

“Life Beyond the University: Hemispheric Struggles in Social Reproduction.”

Christina Chalmers, New York University.

“Orphans of Politics: Free Education, (Dis)inheritance, Potentiality.

Andy Hines, Swarthmore College.

“Higher Education Against Class Reproduction and Capital Accumulation: The Case of the Jefferson School of Social Science.”

Day 2 (6/17)

Sara-Maria Sorentino and Harriet Malinowitz, The University of Alabama.

“Institutional Imaginations”Rei Terada, UC, Irvine.

“What is Independent Scholarship?”

Paige Andersson, DePauw University.

“From Landgrants to Agrarian Commons.”