The Really Open University (Leeds)

Here at the University of Leeds (UK) a new group called ‘The Really Open University’ has been set up.  The ROU aims to help resist the planned £35 million of cuts (in a record turnout the lecturers union, UCU, recently voted to strike), but also to inject a more general critique of the neoliberal university and link to wider social struggles.  Part of this will include the establishment of a ‘really open university’.

This is from the group’s website:

“Our struggle is not simply a defensive one. We do not wish to preserve the university as it is, an elite and insular institution that reproduces the inequalities found throughout our current society. We don’t care about theories of governance, corporate strategies, we don’t care for teaching or learning how to control our imaginations! The university is bankrupt: we must work to transform education, to open it up, give people the right to study what they want to study, and teach what they want to teach, restore the value of the idea and the quest for understanding. We must create a university which bases itself on entirely different values: we call this the ‘Really Open University’. How do we build this institution? Through the occupation of the spaces where we work, play and consume and the reappropriation of this time and space for our own ends. Imagine working to produce what we need, to learn so as to enrich our lives, to wake up looking forward to Monday. Imagine a world on our own terms”.

The first issue of the ROU newsletter ‘The Sausage Factory’ is available on the website:

http://www.reallyopenuniversity.org/

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For an overview of education-related protests worldwide in 2009, go here.

Reartikulacija: New Issues Online Now

IN DECEMBER 2009 THREE NEW NUMBERS OF REARTIKULACIJA WERE ISSUED

THE LAW OF CAPITAL: HISTORIES OF OPPRESSION

The starting point of Reartikulacija no. 7, no. 8, and no. 9 is the analysis of the present state of things in relation to the historical role of capital in (de)regulating all social political, labour, epistemological, and life processes. A permanent state of exception is being developed to reshape society; making it sterile, incapable of thinking alternatively, i.e. transforming it into a politically dead society. Fear of losing jobs and houses, fear of migrants, of diversity, of the crisis, etc., has started to function as the basic regulator of life. Therefore, Reartikulacija no. 7, no. 8, and no. 9 want to show that capital’s upgrading strategies call for its firm and consequent denigration, criticism and degradation. Reartikulacija no. 7, no. 8, and no. 9 present a new structure of producing interdisciplinary radical-critical discourses. Although every number is meant to function independently, they are in fact all connected through the international project The Law of Capital: Histories of Oppression. We define the latter as an International Research Project with Exhibition and Symposium that comprises the publishing of the 3 issues of Reartikulacija. It is through the conceptual base of the project that the collaboration of the exposed radical critical discourse of each issue starts to take place, thus unveiling not just the problematic side of capitalist exploitation, but also exposing all the strategies and modes of production by way of which capital has been subjugating people, territories, discourses, etc. The project The Law of Capital: Histories of Oppression is a critical intervention in the structure of contemporary capitalist societies, aiming to shed light on social inequalities, contemporary forms of colonization, commodification, marginalization of various sexual and ethnic groups, and general exploitation by capital, which has been faced by the major part of the worlds population for centuries. The project puts focus on the development of a discursive/intervention platform between art, theory, philosophy and activism, in order to fight racism, homophobic normalities, exploitation, expropriation and coloniality. A crucial point is being presented in the framework of the project, namely the De-linking from Capital and the Colonial Matrix of Power, that through its double role (as a supplement and a symposium), further connects the issues no. 7, no. 8, and no. 9 together into an intervention marked by its uniformed multilayered intermediality. In this issue, only the texts included in the supplement De-linking from Capital and the Colonial Matrix of Power are translated into Slovene, since the precarious situation by which we are restricted persists, and does not allow us to provide additional funds for the basic fees (small, almost symbolic, but still important) for our faithful translators and language editors. Nevertheless, we will continue to publish Reartikulacija, regardless of the precarious situation, since we are clearly convinced that only through the constant production of radical-critical discourse are we able to detect new as well as old forms of oppression, and most importantly, that we can propose some changes in the end. Certainly, this is what it is all about, and maybe the general time is favorable to such ideas, as there are more and more of those who have enough regarding all the these necro-governmentality procedures imposed on our studies, actions and lives. We can unite our forces. This is our power, and the three issues of Reartikulacija testify this clearly.
—Marina Gržinić and Sebastjan Leban, Editors of the journal Reartikulacija

From the Occupation at the University of Sussex

http://defendsussex.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/occupation-statement-1/

Occupation Statement 1

We have occupied the top floor of Bramber House, University of Sussex, Brighton. There are 106 of us.

The decision to occupy has been taken after weeks of concerted campaigning during which the university management have repeatedly failed to take away the threat of compulsory redundancies and course cuts.

We recognise that an attack on education workers is an attack on us.

The room we have occupied is not a lecture theatre but a conference centre. As such, we are not disrupting the education of our fellow students; rather, we are disrupting a key part of management’s strategy to run the university as a profitable business.

They’re occupying everywhere in waves across California, New York, Greece, Croatia, Germany and Austria and elsewhere – and not only in the universities. We send greetings of solidarity and cheerful grins to all those occupation movements and everyone else fighting the pay cuts, cuts in services and jobs which will multiply everywhere as bosses and states try and pull out of the crisis.

But we are the crisis.

Profitability mean nothing against the livelihoods destroyed, lost homes, austerity measures, green or otherwise. We just heard we’ve increased ‘operational costs’ – they’d set out the building for a meeting and now they’ll have to do it again.

We’ll show them “operational costs.“

Occupy again and again and again.

NO CUTS ANYWHERE.

THE UNIVERSITY IS A FACTORY. STRIKE. OCCUPY.

–All the occupiers of the 8th of February.

_______________________________________________

We gratefully acknowledge receipt of this news from the edufactory mailing list:
edufactory@listcultures.org
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/edufactory_listcultures.org

For an overview of education-related protests worldwide in 2009, go here.