Critical Studies Research Group

Open discussion tomorrow  | 13.00-14.00, 102 room Pavilion Parade.
This is an event organised within the Student Engagement week.

This presentation stems from the mistrust and alienation that surrounds Engagement Week 2014 organised by Brighton University Student Union. The underlying thesis (or, better said, intuition) of this presentation is that the university, as an institution that is not just complicit but also instrumental in the implementation of a neoliberal rationality, has not only discouraged self-organisation but also has criminalised protest. In this context, I will argue, our bureaucratic Student Union has not “engaged” in the current struggles that take place within the university, but rather has been more interested in policing academic institutions with the objective of securing what is seems to be the most precious asset: student experience. Such concept, ambiguous as it is, is surrounded by a another terms, some of which excel in ambiguity as well (concepts such as student satisfaction or, my favourite, student engagement), to the extent that one wonders whether “student experience” could be considered as the effect of university management discourse. Where does the Student Union stands on the current political-economical landscape? Why do we need an engagement week in which, for example, commit ourselves to good causes? Isn’t the struggle over an autonomous university a good cause enough for the increasingly precarious mass of students? or is the university so enmeshed in and captured by contemporary capitalism that it is not worth reacting, as André Gorz argued in 1970? And what’s more, can the university, as the collective Edu-factory asked, be create place for a community of “struggle and exodus, for the political composition of differences in a space-time of class, just as the factory was for the working class”?

Please note that this will not be a paper about my work. This presentation is aimed at offering a space of reflection for the University’s postgraduate community (who’s being constantly reminded through unimail that we need a postgrad leader) with regard to the current state of affairs at our institution and, more concretely, the role NUS and especially our Student Union plays in it. It is also meant to build up for the “Protest and the University of Brighton” symposium that will take place in May.
Everyone welcome!

Protest and the University of Brighton

One Day Symposium

Critical Studies Research Group
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics

Saturday 10th May 2014

The Critical Studies Research Group (CSRG) and the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) are organising a one day symposium on the topic of ‘Protest and the University of Brighton’. The symposium aims to offer a history of protest at the University of Brighton; a counter-narrative identifying Brighton as a political university (as opposed to its typical identification as ‘non-political’, contra University of Sussex’s ‘politicalness’); and a theoretical account of protest in higher education more generally.

To this end we are accepting abstracts for presentations that respond to these aims. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• the relationship between the University and the wider community;
• the Students’ Union and its relationship to protest;
• trade union protest at the University;
• privatisation at the University;
• the lived experience of academic life;
• the revolutionary past of the University;
• the ethics of disruptive protest;
• protest in education;
• protest as education;
• the function of occupation;
• the governance of the University;
• The ‘Prevent Strategy’, the University and the United Kingdom Borders Agency.

While we encourage papers that respond directly to the context of the University of Brighton, abstracts will also be accepted which deal with issues of privatisation, activism and the criminalisation of protest in other institutional contexts. In this way a key aim of the conference is to make visible the links between the struggles occurring within higher education, and the struggles surrounding immigration and asylum rights, anti-austerity protest, state racism, and other forms of resistance to “social abjection” (Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects).

The conference fee will be £20 waged, free for unwaged / students.

Abstracts of no more than two hundred words should be sent to Tim Huzar: t.huzar@brighton.ac.uk. The deadline for abstracts is Friday 28th February.

The CSRG was founded in 2011 by postgraduate students in the School of Humanities, University of Brighton, with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of critical ideas and practices in light of the socio-political struggles we face today. The challenges that interdisciplinarity might pose are counteracted by our shared interest in the role and scope of critical thought and practice in the context of contemporary capitalism.

CAPPE was founded in 2005, with the aim of bringing together philosophy both with other disciplines and with the wider public. It intervenes in the public arena on the basis of a commitment to rigour, clarity and criticism and to extend the practice of philosophy beyond its narrowly academic boundaries.

Call for Papers

Ontologies of Conflict

3rd Critical Studies Research Group International Conference

School of Humanities, University of Brighton

16-17th June 2014

In recent times there has been a renewed interest in extending the understanding of conflict in both its scope and its effects; this has brought to the fore questions surrounding the relationship between conflict and ontologies. Conflict can now be understood as encompassing a broad range of phenomena, from its traditional preserve of violent confrontation, to structural or systemic violences, to the ‘private’ as well as the ‘public’, and to cultural and social antagonisms. Rather than simply a negative notion, positive valences of conflict have been embraced, whether from the neoliberal logic of competition or from the post-structural valorisation of ‘dissensus’. At the same time conflict’s traditional setting – war – has undergone a transformation, the forces of globalisation prioritising time over space, catalysing rapid technological change, and resulting in a shift in the strategies of war and in the relationship between the embodied human and the new technologies of injuring.

As our understanding of conflict broadens and deepens, and the new forms of war we wage (or are exposed to) alter dominant understandings of violence and bodily destruction, what effect does this have on the nature of selfhood and the worlds in which we live? In what ways has ontology itself become a target and site of violence, state or otherwise? Can conflict be universalised, or can it only be understood in its particular relationships to gender, race, class, sexuality and disability? In what ways are our understandings of conflict framed by underpinning ontologies? When we conceptualise a world mired in violence, what ontologies do we presuppose? What ethics can we draw from an analysis of conflict? Who is the privileged ‘we’ capable of explaining the topic of ‘conflict’, one of whose effects, it could be argued, is the very interruption and deconstruction of explanatory frameworks?

Topics for discussion and presentation might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Structural violence and the transformation of the self/world.

• Language and conflict: is language itself inherently, inexorably, violent?

• The relationship between the global and the local in conflict.

• Past, present and future paradigms underpinning the logic of conflicts.

• Ontology in time and space: contexts and scenarios for an ontology of conflict.

• Empathy, technology and the politics of (dis)embodied violence.

• Conflict and/as the political.

• Memory, narrative and the transformation of conflict.

• Conflict and the (re)construction of selves.

• The politics of life and Violence

The conference is interdisciplinary in its scope, and is particularly (but not exclusively) aimed at postgraduate colleagues working in philosophy, political theory, history, law, sociology, war and peace studies, memory studies, gender studies, international relations, cultural studies and geography.

The conference fee will be £60 (waged), £20 (unwaged / student).

Abstracts of no more than two hundred words should be sent to Tim Huzar: t.huzar@brighton.ac.uk. The deadline for abstracts is Friday 2dn of May.

The Critical Studies Research Group (CSRG) was founded in 2011 by postgraduate students in the School of Humanities, University of Brighton, with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of critical ideas and practices in light of the socio-political struggles we face today. The challenges that interdisciplinarity might pose are counteracted by our shared interest in the role and scope of critical thought and practice in the context of contemporary capitalism.

For more information on the CSRG, please visit: brightoncsrg.noblogs.org.