::fibreculture:: Fwd: Call for Papers: TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies -- Out of the Ruins: The University to Come

Andrew Murphie a.murphie at unsw.edu.au
Mon Mar 14 05:04:41 CET 2011 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bob Hanke <bhanke at yorku.ca>
Date: 13 March 2011 04:46
Subject: Call for Papers: TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies -- Out
of the Ruins: The University to Come
To: a.murphie at unsw.edu.au


 Hi Andrew,

Would you kindly circulate this new TOPIA CFP with attached PDF to
Fibreculture listserv?

thanks,

Bob Hanke

____ snip

*                      TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
                                              *CALL FOR PAPERS
                                               Out of the Ruins: The
University to Come


Guest Editors
                               Bob Hanke (York University) and Alison Hearn
(University of Western Ontario)

                                                                        *TOPIA
*27, Fall 2012

This special issue of *TOPIA* seeks contributions (articles, offerings,
review essays and book reviews) that reflect on the contemporary university
and its discontents. Fifteen years after the publication of Bill Readings’
seminal book *The University in Ruins* and in the wake of the UK
government’s new austerity budget, Nick Couldry and Angela McRobbie proclaim
the death of the English university. In Italy students demonstrating against
the Bologna Process protect themselves from police with giant books. On the
heels of severe budget cuts and increasing privatization in the California
state system, protesting students occupy university buildings, while in
British Columbia and Quebec hundreds of students gather for rallies against
spiraling student debt and increasing corporate influence on campus.
Everywhere university systems are being eviscerated by neoliberal logics
asserting themselves even in the face of economic recession. After decades
of chronic under-funding and restructuring, public universities have ceded
the university’s public role in a democracy and embraced “academic
capitalism” as a “moral” obligation. Acting as venture capitalists, they
pressure academics to transfer and mobilize knowledge and encourage research
partnerships with private interests; acting as real estate developers, they
take over neighbourhoods with callous disregard for established communities;
acting as military contractors, they produce telecommunications software and
light armoured vehicles for foreign governments; acting as brand managers,
they open branch plant campuses around the world and compete for foreign
students who can be charged exorbitant fees for access to a “first world”
education. With tuition fees and student debt on the rise, academic labour
is tiered, cheapened and divided against itself; two-thirds of classes in
U.S. colleges and universities are taught by faculty employed on insecure,
non tenure-track contracts. The casualization of academic labour and a plea
for sustainable academic livelihoods were at the core of the longest strike
in English Canadian university history. As collegiality, academic freedom,
and self-governance recede from view, the university remains a terrain of
adaptation and struggle.

We will need all the conceptual tools that cultural studies can muster to
analyze the changing university as the foundation for our academic callings
and scholarly practices. In addition to external influences such as
globalization, technoscience, corporatization, mediatization, and higher
education policy, internal managerial initiatives, bureaucratization,
deprofessionalization, structural complicity between administration and
faculty, and intellectual subjectivities must also be analyzed. All of us,
no matter what our political position, must take the time to reflect on the
broad questions raised by these changes. Is the site of the university worth
struggling over or re-imagining? Can the neoliberal university be set
against itself? Is it time for reform or exodus? What other practices of
knowledge production, interpretations, modes of organization, and
assemblages are possible? This special issue is designed to reflect upon,
analyze and strategize about the past, present and future of the university.

In addition to these matters of concern, possible topics to further dialogue
and enable further study include but are not limited to:

   - analyzing and assessing the crisis of the public university
   - implementing globalizations: theory, rhetoric and historical experience

   - continuity and transformation in national academic cultures
   - the position and role of the arts, humanities and social sciences
   - university leaders and university making
   - managerial theory/practice, academic ethics, and the symbolism of
   university finance
   -  university-private sector intermediaries and initiatives; “innovation”
   and “creativity” as alibis for academic capitalism; knowledge “transfer” and
   “mobilization”
   -  marketing, media relations and the promotional condition of the
   university
   -  space, time, speed and rhythm in the network university
   -  the professor-entrepreneur, research practice, and the imperative to
   produce
   -  academic labour, tenure, stratification and precarity
   -  faculty governance, unions and institutional democracy
   -  the indebted, student-worker and the decline of academic study
   -  scholarly disciplines and territories, infrastructure, information
   practices, communication and publishing
   -  the scholarly community of money: grant agencies, writing, committees
   and adjudication
   -  media/cultural production and critical/radical pedagogy
   -  the development of knowledge cultures and the expansion of the commons

   -  the university in relation to nearby communities and wider social
   movements
   -  resistance, common and counter-knowledge, alternative educational
   formations
   -  remaking the public university in Canada and in other national
   contexts


Submissions

To view the author guidelines, see
http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/about/submissions#authorGuidelines.
To submit papers (with titles, abstracts and keywords) and supplementary
media files online, you need to register and login to the *TOPIA *website at
http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/user/register.

The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2012. Peer review and
notification of acceptance will be completed by May 15, 2012. Final
manuscripts accepted for publication will be due July 5, 2012. Comments and
queries can be sent to Bob Hanke bhanke at yorku.ca or Alison Hearn
ahearn2 at uwo.ca.

For more information about *TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies*,
visit www.yorku.ca/topia

  http://bhanke.apps01.yorku.ca/
Department(s) of Communication Studies, Humanities, Political Science
Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies
York University



-- 

"A traveller, who has lost his way, should not ask, Where am I? What he
really wants to know is, Where are the other places" - Alfred North
Whitehead

Andrew Murphie - Associate Professor
School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales,
Sydney, Australia, 2052
Editor - The Fibreculture Journal http://fibreculturejournal.org/>
web: http://www.andrewmurphie.org/  http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/

fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: a.murphie at unsw.edu.au
room 311H, Webster Building
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