"State Reason/University Thought" Conference
Department: Comparative Literature
Date and Time: November 3, 2017 | 8:30 AM-9:00 PMEvent Location: HG 1030
Event Details
Hosted by University and State, a UC Irvine Humanities Commons Research.
http://sites.uci.edu/universityandstate/fall-2017-conference/
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“State Reason/University Thought” Conference
November 2nd-3rd, 2017University of California, Irvine -- HG 1030
Conference Schedule:
Thursday, November 2nd8:00am Breakfast
8:30am Introduction
9:00am - 10:40am Conditions of Professional Control
Yao Pei (UC Irvine)
Elizabeth Collingwood-Selby (UMCE Chile)
Annie McClanahan (UC Irvine)
10:50am - 12:30pm Violence | Misinterpretation
Rachel Corbman (Stonybrook)
Jacques Lezra (UC Riverside)
Alicia Cox (UC Irvine)
12:40pm - 1:40pm Lunch
1:50pm - 3:30pm Presentations and Populisms
John McCumber (UCLA)
David Pan (UC Irvine)
Erin Graff Zivin (USC)
3:40pm - 5:20pm Problematizing Racial Liberalism and Multiculturalism
Sarah Fong (USC)
Tria Andrews (UC Riverside)
Nic Ramos (Brown)
5:30pm - 7:10pm Figuring the Administration of Power
Willy Thayer (UMCE Chile)
Erin Trapp (UMN)
Dylan Rodriguez (UC Riverside)
7:20pm - 9:00pm Dinner
Friday, November 3rd
8:30am Breakfast
9:00am Introduction
9:30am - 11:10am Ideology, Incorporation, Imperfection
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard (UC Irvine)
Jaime Rodriguez Matos (CSU Fresno)
Chris Finley (USC)
11:20am - 1:00pm Genres of Administration
Joan Lubin (U Penn)
Chris Malcolm (UC Irvine)
Jennifer Doyle (UC Riverside)
1:10pm - 2:10 pm Lunch
2:20pm - 4:00pm Management and Movement
Vineeta Singh (UC San Diego)
Pankhuri Dasgupta (JNU New Delhi)
Nick Mitchell (UCSC)
4:10pm - 5:50pm Horizons of Higher Yield Education
Lenora Hanson (NYU)
Curtis Marez (UC San Diego)
Aaron Alfonso Guerrero (UC Irvine)
6:00pm - 9:00pm Reception
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“State Reason/University Thought” proposes to bring together disparate considerations of the historical and contemporary role of higher education in the reason of state. In distinction from many other contemporary investigations of the university, this event seeks to interrogate the intensity and complexity of the very relation between the university and the state; to ask about the university as a social, psychic and historiographic idea of state consolidation and rationalization.
The impetus for this undertaking comes from two very different contemporary concerns about the university. Currently, on the one hand, on every continent there is the discourse of criticism, increasingly strident and anxious among humanists, of the privatization of the university: an emptying out of what it was, could have been, or still could be, in favor of economic interests; the incursion of market rationality into the fragile autonomy of academic investigation. On the other hand, there is suspicion, formulated in tones ranging from celebratory to paranoiac, that modes of university-thinking may have always worked in service of processes and relations of domination implicated in settler-colonialism, the racializing projects of state and law, the sedimentation and transparency of white male eurocentric subjectivity, and the foreclosure of alternative ways of life—traditional or non-normative—as well as alternative imaginings of the future.
We propose that these discrepant approaches come together in a series of questions about the limits, borders, and modes of demarcation of speaking, writing, and thinking universitarily. When, where, how, and why does the university and its influence begin? Where does it end? And what is at stake in answering these questions with certitude? Central to our aim is to push discussion about the public university—as an institution, as an idea, as a model and symptom of various iterations of the state, and as varied histories of institutions and ideas, spanning geographic and intellectual traditions but never in obvious ways—by emphasizing questions about “thought,” writing, and discourse production. Could it be that disciplinary and systematizing mechanisms serve to reassure us that the order produced by a legitimate monopoly of violence is itself thinkable? To take up such questions requires interrogating the very axis that aligns the university and knowledge/power. Is the university still a privileged site of knowledge production? Was it ever? If so, where, when and for whom? And how is this privilege constituted and maintained? Is the university exemplary of modern institutionality? Could it also be the paragon neoliberal institution? We are particularly eager to reframe debates about the university and the university’s mission in crisis—including calls for the university’s demise—as questions about the psychic costs of the university in relation to state form as a fantasy of social order. How is the very idea of the university produced, reproduced, maintained, repaired, attached to, disavowed, repressed, and racialized?
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Presented by University and State, a UCI Humanities Commons Research Cluster, with sponsorship from UCHRI, UCI Humanities Commons, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Department of Comparative Literature, UCI Critical Theory, Department of European Languages and Studies, School of the Humanities, and Department of English.
http://sites.uci.edu/universityandstate/