De Londres a Viena, de Roma a Paris, ou de Atenas a Madrid, tem vindo a emergir uma nova Europa. A Europa dos estudantes e dos precários, dos cidadãos e dos imigrantes, de todas as multitudes que lutam pelas suas vidas e pelos seus futuros nas frentes da batalha da crise. Lutam para reapropiar-se dos seus direitos e da riqueza que produzem todos os dias. Revoltam-se contra as medidas de austeridade que exploram o seu presente e roubam o seu futuro. Expressam a sua fúria contra a arrogância do poder.
Após o consenso colectivo alcançado nas reuniões «Bolonha Burns» em Viena, Londres, Paris e Bolonha no ano passado, assim como do encontro «Commoninversity» celebrado em Barcelona, a Edu-Factory (Fábrica Escolar) e a Autonomous Education Network unem-se para convocar uma reunião europeia de todos os que participam nesta luta comum com o objective de se crier uma poderosa rede europeia das lutes dentro e for a das universidades. Pretende-se criar um espaço transnacional para discutir e desenvolver a nossa capacidade política colectiva a fim de dar luta aos ataques contra a universidade e o bem-estar social, e contribuir para a construção de um novo futuro para todos.
É chegado o momento para nos levantarmos em conjunto, e de forma colectiva e singular, recuperar as nossas vidas e construer uma nova Europa, baseada nos direitos e no acesso. Chegou o momento de reivindicar o que é nosso: o comum .
As once was the factory, so now is the university. We start with this plain and apparently unproblematic statement, not to affirm but to interrogate it. We want to radically rethink this assertion by means of both theory and politics. It is from here that the edu-factory project begins. Edu-factory has been running for two years. The project began as a transnational mailing-list for discussion of transformations to the university, the production of knowledge and forms of conflict. About 500 militants, students and researchers have participated. Rejecting the notion that networks necessarily institute horizontal and spontaneous relations, we proceed with the view that networks must be organized if they are to operate as political spaces. The model has involved two temporally circumscribed and thematically identified rounds of discussion: the first on conflicts in the production of knowledge and the second on hierarchisation of the market for education and the construction of autonomous institutions. After each round of discussion, the list closes to await a new opening in a successive cycle. In this way, edu-factory moves from an extensive to an intensive mode of organizing networks.
Not surprisingly the edu-factory process has not been without tensions and conflicts. The opening and closing of the list in particular has led to debates with participants and onlookers regarding the openness and the ownership of networks. Despite these tussles, the project has assumed a life that beyond the list. Not only a website but also participation in and organisation of events in three different continents (Europe, Australia, and North America) have become part of edu-factory. Materials from the list have been collected and translated for a book publication in Italian: L’università globale: Il nuovo mercato del sapere (Roma: Manifestolibri, 2008). This volume became a central reference point in the ‘anomalous wave’ movement of students, researchers, parents and teachers that swept Italy in late 2008. Autonomedia Books will publish an English version of the text in early 2009.
Edu-factory is now at a critical turning point where the question of its political application becomes paramount. A central interest is the transnational linking of variously existing autonomous edu-initiatives, but this brings up problems and politics of translation, scale and resources. Has edu-factory lived beyond its life as a list? Or must its continued organisation involve the reinvention of the list and its modulation with other forms of practice and action?
After the last edu-factory round, we proposed the project of a global autonomous university. We do not want to enter the education market. On the contrary, our aim is to open a process of conflict in the knowledge production system and its mechanisms of hierarchisation. From this standpoint, the global autonomous university is not simply an alternative university but a process to build up a transnational organized network of research, education and knowledge production, based on experiments and experiences that already exist across the globe.
We now wish to propose another step in the process of the construction of edu-factory as an organized network, as well as in the evolution of the global autonomous university: a transnational journal. We choose this medium for two reasons. First because it will give continuity to the analysis on university transformations and knowledge production carried on in edu-factory. Second because it offers a stable platform of connection among the critical research projects, auto-education experiments, and struggles that connect to the project. In this framework, we want to re-open the list, in order to make it a collective place of debate, self-evaluation, and development for the journal.
Toward a Global Autonomous University
Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory
The Edu-factory Collective
What was once the factory is now the university.
We started off with this apparently straightforward affirmation, not in order to assume it but to question it; to open it, radically rethinking it, towards theoretical and political research. The Edu-factory project took off from here….Edu-factory is, above all, a partisan standpoint on the crisis of the university…. The state university is in ruins, the mass university is in ruins, and the university as a privileged place of national culture — just like the concept of national culture itself — is in ruins.
We’re not suffering from nostalgia. Quite the contrary, we vindicate the university’s destruction. In fact, the crisis of the university was determined by social movements in the first place. This is what makes us not merely immune to tears for the past but enemies of such a nostalgic disposition.
University corporatization and the rise of a global university…are not unilateral impositions or developments completely contained by capitalist rationality. Rather they are the result — absolutely temporary and thus reversible — of a formidable cycle of struggles. The problem is to transform the field of tension delineated by the processes analyzed in this book into specific forms of resistance and the organization of escape routes.
This is Edu-factory’s starting point and objective, its style and its method.
Contents
Introduction: All Power to Self-Education!
Edu-factory Collective
Production of Knowledge in the Global University
The Rise of the Global University, Andrew Ross
Eurocentrism, the University, and Multiple Sites of Knowledge Production, Amit Basole
Global Assemblages vs. Universalism, Aihwa Ong
Management of Knowledge vs. Production of Knowledge , Sunil Sahasrabudhey
Short–Circuiting the Production of Knowledge ,Nirmal Puwar & Sanjay Sharma
Conditions of Interdisciplinarity, Randy Martin
Hierarchies in the Market for Education
Lean and Very Mean: Restructuring the University in South Africa, Franco Barchiesi
Governmentality and Commodification: The Keys to Yanqui Academic Hierarchy, Toby Miller
The Social Production of Hierarchy and What We Can Do About It: Notes from Asia, Xiang Biao
Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor ,Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson
The Pedagogy of Debt, Jeffrey Williams
Management’s Control Panel, Marc Bousquet
Cognitive Labor: Conflicts and Translations
Report from the Greek Student Movement, Dionisis
Practices of Radical Cartography
Counter Cartographies Collective
Online Education, Contingent Faculty and Open Source Unionism, Eileen Schell
Cognitive Capitalism and Models for the Regulation of Wage Relations, Carlo Vercellone
Notes on the Edu–factory and Cognitive Capitalism George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici
Translation, Biopolitics and Colonial Difference ,Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon
The Production of the Common and the Global Autonomous University
A Hierarchy of Networks? Ned Rossiter
The University and the Undercommons ,Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
Neoliberalism against the Commons, Jason Read
The Autonomous University and the Production of the Commons, James Arvanitakis
From a Liberal Arts Student, Erik Forman
Conflicts in the Production of Knowledge, Universidad Experimental
The Global Autonomous University, Vidya Ashram
On the Institution of the Common ,Toni Negri and Judith Revel
The Corporate University and the Financial Crisis, What Is Going On? ,Christopher Newfield & edu-factory Collective
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