Session Information
04 SES 05 A, Students’ Voices and Decision-Making
Paper Session
Contribution
In recent years (2006-2011) we are observing an enormous wave of resistance at university campuses all over the world. Ondo anomala in Italy, instances of campus occupation in California, protests in Puerto Rico or recent mass demonstrations of students and trade unions against budget cuts in Great Britain. All of these protests share a set of common features: fighting back the privatization mechanisms inside the higher education systems, connecting with the wide range of different social and urban struggles and, to a certain degree, use of occupation and self-education method as a way to achieve their aims.
University in cognitive capitalism theories is said to be located on the very same structural position as once was factory (Edu-factory 2009). It can be seen, on the one hand, as a main area of productivity and creativity, on the second, as privileged site of anticapitalist resistance. Is there any possibility to democratize it and put the whole structure to work but for the different purposes, producing different types of subjectivities and knowledge, sharing the common space in manner similar to reclaiming the right to the city (Harvey 2008) or recapturing democracy (Purcell 2008)?
This question came clearly to the light during two, longstanding occupations of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb in 2009. The main aim of this paper is to offer a political and philosophical analysis of educational resistance as an urban struggle against broadly understood neoliberalization and privatization of the knowledge production systems. It addresses the situation of coalitional community (including students, artists, citizens), constructed in post-communist Zagreb in response to gradual commodification of common spaces: university and city. The focus is on urban spaces of hope (Harvey 2000), “temporary autonomous zone” understood as urban areas of instability, heterogeneity and cultural negotiations, implemented with regard to both physical and non-physical forms of urbanity as an example of spatial justice (Soja 2010). In the first part of the text, it explores, reflecting on works of Lefebvre, Marcuse, Rancière and Freire, a complex relationship between the right to the city concepts and projects of autonomous education in reference to newly neoliberalized Zagreb. It examines the role of students, artists and citizens themselves in “regaining university” process, connected with radical programs of self-education, equity, politicization (Rancière 1999) of educational, public space and experiments with direct democracy. In the second part, the focus is on Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s concept of multitude (2005, 2009), interpreted in terms of cognitive capitalism and creative sabotage (Pasquinelli 2008). It asks whether they might provide, in Zagreb’s case, a remedy for knowledge privatization and lead to successful and inclusive urban regeneration.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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