pictures from the feature in the sunday times about our ongoing industrial action at the university of nottingham
adam searle
@admsrl.bsky.social
617 followers 428 following 118 posts
cultural and historical geographer interested in ecology, technology, and 'the future' Assistant Professor, University of Nottingham Member and co-founder, @digicologies.bsky.social
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[This first image is of the letter describing the event taking place.]
Dear Colleagues,
It has been incredibly difficult to think about our research ideas or projects as we are faced with intensified institutional precarity. For many of us, last week was a harsh confrontation with the limits imposed on us by the neoliberal academy and its implications for how we perceive and value academic life. To paraphrase Wendy Brown, structural neoliberalisation and the economisation of our ideas (abstracted as citations, publications, grant capture, etc.) confines much of our work. After Hannah Arendt (1958), we could call this mere academic life. What is constrained and ultimately eliminated through neoliberal rationality is good academic life: “the cultivation and expression of distinctly human capacities for ethical and political freedom, creativity, unbounded reflection, or invention” (Brown, 2015: 43). How could it be otherwise? What opportunities for imagining a better future for academic work might we encounter?](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:gizj5jtohclgqlx3omaq6aix/bafkreiac3luxbd6g45ub6naj47efh3svwjr2uf6h45oh6quiwwmn5zcrh4)
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[This second image is of a rally for jobs at the University of Nottingham with the banner "WE are the University."]
We invite you to an open workshop that seeks to reclaim joy in critical inquiry as a necessarily collective endeavour. This will take place at 1pm on the Tuesday 26 May, during our Marking and Assessment Boycott, in the A39 lecture theatre at the Clive Granger building. We invite informal presentations that last up to 10 minutes from colleagues across the social sciences, arts, and humanities. This will be an opportunity to present a “work in progress,” or perhaps more aptly, a “work never progressed,” that could be developed in this session against the tide of constraints within economised academic life.
This is a difficult time for us all, and it feels pertinent to take a moment to celebrate our collective work and passions. We hope that this event could also be a space to collaborate and help one another, and a needed reminder that within our anger at systemic failures there is always, necessarily, a hope for a better future of academic work!!
If you’d like to speak, please email adam.searle@nottingham.ac.uk with the subject line “Work in Progress,” any ideas welcome and no need to prepare an abstract, slides, or title or anything. This is informal by design, and we’re asking for your name just to manage time accordingly and to make sure everyone has the space to talk.
In Solidarity,
Adam and Nick
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:gizj5jtohclgqlx3omaq6aix/bafkreigbmxf63vpfv3jzwktqiqfmtpglxdupptmvgpuxcamagcqw7yazoi)
