"State Reason/University Thought" Conference

Department: English

Date and Time: November 2, 2017 - November 3, 2017 | 8:00 AM-10:00 PM

Event Location: HG 1030

Event Details


“State Reason/University Thought” Conference

November 2nd-3rd, 2017

University of California, Irvine -- HG 1030

Website: https://universitystateconference.blogspot.mx

Conference Schedule:

Thursday, November 2nd

8:00am  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)

Roderick Ferguson (UIC)

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

Original CFP:

“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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