Event information
The Dissolution of the Universities
Venue – Hybrid. Information on how to attend can be found in the order confirmation email
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About the event
This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.
Host: Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET)
Speaker:
- Richard Hall (Professor of Education and Technology, De Montfort University)
The Dissolution of the Universities
‘I must begin // Begin what? // The only thing in the world that is worth beginning: // The End of the World, no less.’ (Aimé Césaire 1956/1969)
‘Our struggle is not for the University; it is against what the University has become.’ (Mike Neary 2011)
The English University feels very broken. We witness a political economic crisis for institutions that is tightening. Through this, the power of finance capital is a limiting factor shaping the horizon of our intellectual work. Beyond value-for-money, our universities are shaped against culture wars, fetsihised ideas of freedom of speech, and authoritarian responses to student protest in the form of Gaza encampments. It feels like this terrain has been unfolding in ever more negative ways, in spite of the demonstrations, occupations and alternative education projects in the period after 2010, following: the Browne Review; Occupy! and the Bank of Ideas/Tent City University; and the movement of the Squares.
Whilst the energy of these dissipated, a range of recent abolitionist praxis, with a deep, historical lineage, helps us to question how our intellectuality might be released towards a new horizon. Praxis connecting abolition geography, family abolition, communising care, abolition democracy and feminism, and the integration of decolonial and ecological thinking, point towards the liberation of space-time. Or perhaps towards the abolition of the present state of things. This intervention thinks about the place of the University in connecting struggles across social goods that might resolve a new society, and metabolise new social forms. It does so in relation to the (largely) student-led revolts against the settler-colonial University, to develop a key question of radical educator Mike Neary in his work on student-as-producer and pedagogy of excess: how do revolutionary teachers teach? In addressing how we might live in dissolute days like these, this becomes: how and where do revolutionary teachers teach, after Gaza? Our questioning opens out our stories of radical alternatives, as moments for resolving anew.
Bio:
Richard Hall works as a Professor of Education and Technology at De Montfort University. A National Teaching Fellow and an Advance HE Principal Fellow, Richard holds Visiting Professorships at the Universities of South Wales and Sunderland. He is the author of The Alienated Academic (2018, Palgrave Macmillan), The Hopeless University (2021, MayFly Books) and The Dissolution of the Universities (2026, MayFly Books). In previous research, Richard has worked with Muslim students to investigate transitions into the University and also the impact of the student loans system on their student experiences. He has also evaluated institutional approaches to decolonising. Richard was also involved in a range of alternative education projects following the anti-austerity movements after 2010, including the Social Science Centre in Lincoln, UK. He is a Primary School Governor in Leicester, and an independent visitor for a looked-after child.