I thoroughly agree with this comment from Francois Ewald in an interview on November 3rd in Los Angeles Review of books I have the feeling that we are living through a much more radical transformation at the moment than in May 1968 or even after the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin …
The Least Important Things: Dr Who At Fifty, An Essay By Taylor Parkes on The Quietus in November 21st, 2013 A really excellent article about Doctor Who and its history which I thoroughly agree with. I have cited a few of Taylor’s observations that I find particularly salient and added my own rants in to …
Louise Katz, Feeding Greedy Corpses: the rhetorical power of Corpspeak and Zombilingo in higher education, and suggested countermagics to foil the intentions of the living dead, Borderlands, 15 (1), 2016 Full PDF available Some very interesting ideas in this article. According to Richard Kearney, the imagination also owns an ethical role: it is through everyday …
Yancey Orr, Raymond Orr, The Death of Socrates Managerialism, metrics and bureaucratisation in universities, Australian Universities Review, vol. 58, no. 2 September 2016 Abstract Neoliberalism exults the ability of unregulated markets to optimise human relations. Yet, as David Graeber has recently illustrated, it is paradoxically built on rigorous systems of rules, metrics and managers. The …
Alison Mountz et al. For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2015, 14(4), 1235 – 1259 Abstract The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects …
Originally posted on Academic Irregularities:
Corporate culture has no place in academia says Olof Hallonsten in his report for Nature on the medical scandal at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. This involved allegations of fraud against Paolo Macchiarini which may have resulted in patient deaths . It appears that university leaders chose to overturn established…
A number of interesting articles on current conditions in the university have been published. To keep a record of these and to disseminate them to others I will be posting the titles and abstracts on this blog. Academic freedom is currently under threat – not just in the countries one would expect it to be …
Life of Pi was showing on television last night and I decided it was finally time to catch up with it. Unfortunately, the ‘twist’ in the ending left me with the unpleasant impression of having been led up the garden path and having had my time wasted by a monumental shaggy dog, or as Peter …
Just adding a few notes to yesterday’s post… Foucault mentions Freud, of course, as one the inheritors of the ideas of Epictetus and Cassian, but we could also include St Ignatius Loyola in this lineage with the intricate structures and practices he constructed around the ‘discernment of spirits’. ‘Discernment’ is the term retained from this …
Between these poles of training in thought and training in reality, melete and gymnasia, there are a whole series of intermediate possibilities. Epictetus provides the best example of the middle ground between these poles. He wants to watch perpetually over representations, a technique which culminates in Freud. There are two metaphors important from his point …
Refracted Input 