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here is a name for those under-and precariously employed, but actively Tworking, academics in today’s society: the para-academic. As the para-academic community grows there is a real need to build supportive networks, share knowledge, ideas and strategies that can allow these interventions to not only become sustainable, but also to fl ourish. THE PARA-ACADEMIC HANDBOOK: A TOOLKIT FOR MAKING-LEARNING- CREATING-ACTING is a contribution to this open-ended and ongoing struggle. ALEX WARDROP and DEBORAH WITHERS are thrown in/out rebels born of an impossible situation. They think, write, learn and act in public. “Academia is dying, and in the process compulsively crushes the desires for learning, creating, teaching, cooperating it claimed to foster. It is a relevant and important political gesture to invent a name, para-academics, for those who refuse to be crushed, who do not sadly dream about a return to the past, when the ‘worthy ones’ were identifi ed and separated from the fl ock, but inhabit interstices, inside, outside and in-between, activists and bridge-builders where separation prevailed. It is claiming they are alive, not just surviving, and are part of the fragile creation of a collective future worth living.” ISABELLE STENGERS, author of COSMOPOLITICS “This important new book is simultaneously a critique, a lament and a re-envisaging. It is a compelling portrait of the new topographies of higher education and a testament to the power, inventiveness and resilience of those who work within, across and beyond its new spaces.” RUTH BARCAN, author of ACADEMIC LIFE AND LABOUR: HOPE AND OTHER CHOICES “This is a hugely important book for anyone who feels (as I often do) alienated or marginalised by corporate academic life. It not only gives a voice to a growing constituency of para-academics; it also articulates a series of alternative visions for the future of the university, driven not from the centre but from the margins, the borderlands, the places where the interesting stuff happens.” GARY ROLFE, author of THE UNIVERSITY IN DISSENT HAMMERON PRESS WWW.HAMMERON.NET THE PARA-ACADEMIC HANDBOOK THE PARA-ACADEMIC HANDBOOK: THE PARA-ACADEMIC HANDBOOK A TOOLKIT FOR MAKING-LEARNING-CREATING-ACTING © Individual authors, 2014 A TOOLKIT FOR MAKING- http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 LEARNING-CREATING-ACTING This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. edited by Alex Wardrop & Deborah Withers For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. First published in 2014 by HammerOn Press Bristol, England http://www.hammeronpress.net ISBN-13: 978-0-9564507-5-3 HammerOn Press ISBN-10: 0956450753 Cover photo Arise by Rachael House 2013 www.rachaelhouse.com Cover design by Graeme Maguire/ Eva Megias www.graememaguire.com Typeset by Eva Megias www.evamegias.com A CKNOWLEDGEMEN T S C ON T EN T S We would like to thank all the contributors, Gary Rolfe, Isabelle 1 WE ARE ALL PARA-ACADEMICS NOW Stengers, Ruth Barcan, Sam Thomas, Ika Willis, Rob Crowe, Eva Megias, Gary Rolfe Rachael House, Sue Tate, Hannah Austin, Graeme Maguire, Maud 6 RECLAIMING WHAT HAS BEEN DEVASTATED Perrier, Natalie Brown, Genevieve Lively and all those who support Deborah Withers & Alex Wardrop para-academic movements of knowledge making, learning, creating, 14 A PROCRASTINATION thinking and acting. Alex Wardrop 20 NOTES ON THE PREFIX Alexandra M. Kokoli 31 SPACES OF POSSIBILITY: PEDAGOGY AND POLITICS IN A CHANGING INSTITUTION Lena Wånggren and Maja Milatovic 39 INTERVIEW WITH JOYCE CANAAN 61 A PEDAGOGICS OF UNLEARNING Éamonn Dunne & Michael O’Rourke 71 EMBOLDENED AND UNTERRIFIED Christian Garland 81 A LESSON FROM WARWICK The Provisional University 87 BEYOND THE DEFENCE OF THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY Kelvin Mason & Mark Purcell 107 DECENTRING KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION Laura Sterry 121 EDGE, EMPOWERMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY Tom Henfrey 140 HIGHER DEGREE (UN)CONSCIOUSNESS Emma Durden,Eliza Govender and Sertanya Reddy 164 CROWDFUNDING OF ACADEMIC BOOKS Oliver Leistert & Theo Röhle 175 PARA-ACADEMIC PUBLISHING AS PUBLIC-MAKING Paul Boshears 189 AN ACTIVIST-ACADEMIC’S REFLECTIONS Louise Livesey 206 NO MORE STITCH-UPS! Dr Charlotte Cooper 232 SIMULTANEOUS LIFE AND DEATH Georgina Huntley 237 ON THE ACADEMY’S POINT OF EXTERIORITY Fintan Neylan 243 THE PROS AND CONS OF PARA-ACADEMIA Tony Keen 250 REFLECTIONS OF AN INCIDENTAL MAVERICK Paul Hurley 256 OTHERWISE ENGAGED B.J. Epstein 263 MARGINAL INQUIRIES Margaret Mayhew 291 EPICUREAN RAIN Eileen A. Joy 301 RESOURCES WE ARE ALL PARA-ACADEMICS NOW Gary Rolfe I have recently been struggling to find a word to describe the growing movement of resistance towards the ever more corporate mission of the university. I toyed at first with calling this emerging body of people, ideas and practices the Subversity in recognition of its largely subterranean nature. But it is no longer an underground movement; the resistance may not be immediately apparent, it may not advertise itself overtly, but it is there, unseen in plain sight, functioning side-by-side with the corporate mission. I finally settled on the Paraversity, which I described as a subversive, virtual community of dissensus that exists alongside and in parallel to the corporate university.1 Had I thought of it at the time, I might well have also coined the term ‘para-academics’ for those individuals who work across and against the corporate agenda of what Bill Readings called the ruined university,2 whose mission is, as far as I can see, the generation and sale of information (the so-called research agenda) and the exchange of student fees for degree certificates (the teaching agenda). However, it seems that I have been beaten to it by The Para-Academic Handbook. The corporate university is not going away, but neither is the paraversity; in fact, I would go so far as to say that we are all para-academics now. Of course, when I use the word ‘we’, I do so with certain qualifications. Firstly, the ‘we’ I refer to is those who are likely to read this book and others like it: we dissenters; we who feel disenfranchised by what our 1 2 the para-academic handbook WE ARE ALL PARA-ACADEMICS NOW 3 universities have become; we who simply cannot passively go along with A community of dissensus is a community of thinkers committed to the doxa, the general consensus of what a university is nowadays for. formulating questions rather than providing answers and to keeping And, in any case, to ask what a university is for is completely to miss those questions alive, active and productive for as long as possible. the point. As Michael Oakeshott put it, ‘A university is not a machine A community of dissensus is a community of researchers, scholars and for achieving a particular purpose or producing a particular result; it is students (that is, of para-academics) committed to asking questions of a manner of human activity’.3 This at least should give us hope. We must one another, to listening and respecting each other’s views and ideas, resist at all costs the idea of the university as a machine: a university and to describing, explaining and advocating their own ideas with no should not be defined by what it produces (information, graduates) but expectations or obligations to agree. A community of dissensus is a by what we (para-) academics do and by how we relate and respond to community that consents not to be bound by consensus. one another. We (that is, we para-academics) must resist becoming cogs The para-doxical (that is, parallel to the doxa, to received opinion) in a corporate machine; to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, we are space in which we para-academics operate should not be thought of each of us separate and independent ‘little machines’ whose operations as either inside or outside of the orthodoxical university. In fact, it are defined by our connections to one another.4 I repeat: not cogs but would be misleading to think of the paraversity as existing in space individual machines, and machines that are defined not by what we at all. As academics, we all of course occupy a physical space within produce but by how we produce it; by process rather than product; the university; we are each, to some extent, tethered to a discipline, quality rather than quantity. As I said, this should give us hope. If the a department, a curriculum, a course. However, to the extent that we university is, as Oakeshott suggests, ‘a manner of human activity’, then are also para-academics, we are also individual little machines, free to we can change the university by changing how we think and behave as roam physically, intellectually and emotionally. Universities organise and its constituent parts. understand themselves as linear, unidirectional tree-like hierarchies in Which brings me to the second qualification on my use of the word which we are leaves attached to twigs, attached to branches, attached to a ‘we’. Bill Readings warns that the university is in danger of becoming central trunk. In contrast, the paraversity takes the form of a rhizome, an ‘an autonomous collective subject who is authorised to say “we” and to underground, tangled root structure in which, as Deleuze and Guattari terrorise those who do not, or cannot, speak in that “we”’.

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