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undercommons

This tag is associated with 3 posts

FCJ-228 University, Universitas

By ⋅ December 20, 2019 ⋅ Post a comment

Erin Manning SenseLab, Concordia University, Canada It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightment. (Moten and Harney, 2009: 145) Nothing About Us Without Us! (Charlton, 2000) Universities have a long history. The mantra of the universitas – ‘the whole, the universe, the world’ – has moved thinkers across the centuries: the university of al-Qarawiyyin, in Fez, Morocco, was founded in 859 followed by Al-Azhar University, in Cairo, Egypt, in 972. The first in Europe, the University of Bologna (the oldest university still in existence), opened its doors in 1088. In 1636, Harvard University became the first university in the United States. In The History of American Higher Education, Roger Geiger (2014) demonstrates how in the context of the United States, universities have evolved over ten or eleven generations from the religious college with […]

FCJ-224 Design Thinking, Design Activism, Design Study

By ⋅ March 16, 2019 ⋅ Post a comment

Maria Hynes The Australian National University, Australia But we won’t stand corrected. Moreover, incorrect as we are there’s nothing wrong with us. (Harney and Moten, 2013: 20) In their consideration of the contribution of academic labour to what they call the ‘social reproduction of conquest denial’, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten isolate a number of factors. They examine modes of intellectual practice that deny: the ‘incessant and irreversible intellectuality’ that was already there; political practices that, claiming to engage in just redistribution, wish to think away the division of private and public and, with it, the unpayable debts at the heart of the social; and forms of criticality that deny the underlabour that makes the social being of critical academics possible. To these characteristic forms of labour practiced in the university they oppose a somewhat idiosyncratic sense of ‘study’: ‘study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and […]

FCJ-223 Fugitively, Approximately

By ⋅ March 16, 2019 ⋅ Post a comment

Erin Manning SenseLab, Concordia University, Canada Two phrases haunt my thinking. The first comes from Fred Moten: all black life is neurodiverse life. It might also have been black life is always neurodiverse life. The second is approximation of proximity. The feeling is that the ambiguity of memory in the first has a connection to the approximation of the second. Moten’s words, written in a manuscript review before the publication of The Minor Gesture in 2016 felt vitally important when I received them. But The Minor Gesture was already too close to completion to fully carry the force of the proposition, and so, while I did signal it in the book, I decided to make Moten’s words the fugitive force of the thinking to follow. I say fugitive force both to carry forward Moten and Harney’s concept of fugitivity, and to emphasize that this is how work comes into itself: […]

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