Tag Archives: higher education

‘The future of the profession: A research afternoon on university political economy’ 

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‘The future of the profession: A research afternoon on university political economy’

18 June 2015, 1:00-4:00pm, Business and Law building 1103

This seminar aims to be a lively discussion about university political economy through a reflection on its contemporary conditions and a reading of Jacques Derrida’s ‘The future of the profession or the university without condition (thanks to the “Humanities”, what could take place tomorrow)’ (1998).

It is free and open to all, but places are limited. Please register your interest with Sarah Amsler.

RiCES public seminar: Unpacking the ‘transnational associations of capitals’ in global higher education

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Unpacking the ‘transnational associations of capitals’ in global higher education: rankings and the subsumption of academic labour under academic publishing capital

Krystian Szadkowski, Adam Mickiewicz University

3 June | 12:30–2:00pm | Minerva Building 3202

This presentation explores the concept of ‘transnational association of capitals’ in the context of higher education (Hall, 2014; Ball, 2012). The focus will be on the conditions and consequences of the expansion of merchant capital (or capital involved in circulation), limited to large and quasi-monopolistic academic publishers. The claim behind this talk is that in order to grasp the specificity of the process of subsumption of academic labour under academic publishing capital, it is not enough to focus exclusively on proprietary relations (i.e. expropriation, enclosures, primitive accumulation, alienation). Such an analysis, although providing extremely rich material, has its limitations: capital may opt out from the private property form and ownership, but will never give up domination. The tool of capitalist domination and control, in all sectors of production, even immaterial and biopolitical, is measure. For this reason, this presentation will focus on the functionality of the capitalist mechanisms of establishing measures for the expansion of academic publishers’ capital based on the subsumption of global academic labour.

Krystian Szadkowski (1986), is an assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and a researcher at the UNESCO Chair for Institutional Research and Higher Education Policy of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. His research interests cover Marxian political economy, autonomist Marxism and transformation of higher education systems in Europe. In 2014 he defended his PhD thesis entitled Towards the University as an Institution of the Common. Philosophical Foundations of the Critical Higher Education Studies [in Polish]. Recently, he co-edited a collected volume Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity (MayFly 2014). He is also an editor-in-chief of peer-reviewed journal Praktyka Teoretyczna/Theoretical Practice.